

If, like me, the first Real Telangana TV video you watch is the one about the rising prices of groceries, you will fall in love. On screen is shot after shot of Prime Minister Narendra Modi eating at events abroad, while in the background, the anchor announces morosely, “Unho alag alag mulkon mein phirke alag alag dishon ke maze udate phire. Aate jaa rahein jaate jaa rahein [He has travelled to different places and enjoyed different dishes. He comes. He goes].”When you recover from this, you hear her saying, “Humich haule hai, jo unka matlab nahi samjhe [We were the foolish ones who didn’t understand what he meant],” referring to Modi’s promise of “acche din”, which she says applies only to him. “Pehleich ke dinaa aa gaye toh bhi achha hai [If the old days come only it will be better],” she says. If for some reason you haven’t noticed this so far, you will now realise she’s speaking in Deccani Urdu. Initially you pay attention to how she adds –ich and –aan at the end of certain words, as though this is as important as the news itself. Din becomes dinaa, dal becomes dalaa— it’s like standing in the middle of chudi bazaar in Hyderabad’s Charminar and hearing stray bits of conversation from everyone milling around.I first saw Real Telangana TV when a colleague showed it to me. None of my friends in Hyderabad seem to have heard of it either, even though it was started in 2011 by the Ruby Group of Companies, which also owns Ruby Channel.Real Telangana TV’s existence mocks other media organisations’ diversity policies. A lot of the people who work there are proudly “pakka” local Hyderabadi people with no background in journalism. “Many of them would run autos, or sell things locally, and now they help us write the script for the videos because they know the language and the accents well,” said Mohammed Manzoor, Real Telangana TV’s manager. Where else on Indian news do we see women in hijabs as anchors, or news shows created by working class writers?Manzoor gave me examples of what he meant by knowing the language well, speaking in rapid Deccani about a political leader. Real Telangana TV wants to make news engaging for people who don’t know Urdu, or who might not know the names of political leaders, but deserve to know the news. This means one wonderful thing: Real Telangana is able to reach the audience they want, simply because those who write the news belong to the same class as the audience.
Source: Sick of TV News Channels and Shouty Newsreaders? Prepare to be Mesmerised by Real Telangana TV – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger
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