MTV Makeover

MTV has gotten itself a makeover, its more colourful and the framespace is well utilized for the logo on top-right, new-shows ad on the top left, marquee tickr on the bottom. I would give a full 10 on 10 for the look. But what it lacks is the quality in the shows it airs.

DND - Discover and Download has replaced the SuperSelect, this is definitely a good watch, though if you are a Internet junkie, you might be discovering more cool sites and downloading more fun stuff yourself than taking a hint from Niks.

I was a huge fan of Raghu and Roadies, I remember every Sat 7Pm last year, Shradz and I would watch it together and chat about it over SMS. I was hugely disappointed in everything that followed the much enjoyable auditions. The roadies were a bunch of losers, the tasks were lame, and the worst- roadies who couldn't ride a Bike, wasn't this show supposed to be all abt bikers??!! Quite expectantly I don't carry the same enthu to watch a whole new episode of Roadies - Hell down under coz I am sure, no matter how Raghu and Rajiv ridicule the contestants they will manage to pick the lamest of them all as roadies.

The other day I caught up on Gtalk, ex-roadies Shambhavi and Anmol host this show in weird costumes, I wonder if they decided to replace Mia, anyway this is yet another lame show with 2 blondes talking about things that doesn't concern you even in your wildest dreams!! May be the reason I hate this show is the fact that both these gals were the meanest foulmouthed characters on earlier Roadies. Is this the kind of message we want to spread - to be mean, arrogant and you get to be famous, what happened to all that "honesty is the best policy" motto that we studied when we were kids, I think its high time we go back to Moral Science books.

PS: I would give my 2 cents if they could play some good music at length in the least.

-RN

Revival of TV

After a long hiatus ( TV Withdrawal ), my TV has been re-incarnated. Was I glad to see my old tv placed in its niche in the living room. The happiness was short lived, until I noticed the remote control was of a different make than the one we used, ours was a trademark device, the battery pack at the back was packaged with few strips of metal to connect the batteries +ves and -ves and few pieces of paper to hold it together, all done by us after we had broken the device over a fight!!

I switched on the TV and already had started to miss my old remote. But this was not the only thing I would miss. Minute by minute I realized the main qualities of my old TV that I would go ga-ga over were all gone in this new one owing to the fact that the IC board was completely damaged and had to be replaced with another and hence most of the functionality was screwed up!!!

First and foremost point to notice was the low "Speed of Channel Flicking", channel flicking requires 2 jobs done in quick succession, one being pressing on the Program+ or Program- on your remote, this ofcourse our thumbs have been trained quite well. And the other being the actual changing of the channel on your TV. With the old but new TV, this was a considerable
let-down,there was a black screen popped up for a microsecond while switching the picture from one channel to another(Yes, this is annoying) and the time taken to browse a given number of channels was longer than earlier, effectively it means lower productivity!!

Next was the "-/--/---" button on the remote, I have always hated this one. These are the ones to set the single digit or double digit or triple digits channel. So, in effect you wanted to switch to channel number 45, you had to press "-/--/---" button twice, "4" and "5". How primitive is this? I hate it. The older one was smarted, you had to just click "4" and "5" in succession on voila!! you had channel 45.

Next was the memory, the "Alt C" button, used to go back to the previously watched channel. The older tv had a smart check in its memory and never stored the current and the previous channel to be the same, the newer one doesnot have this. So, if you make a mistake of choosing the same channel, you will end up with duplicacy of the info, what good is this?

Following up on the previous point -memory, the "Alt c" gets refreshed back to "0" everytime you switch off your TV, so in case of a power down, you would not remember which 2 channels you were juggling with prior to it! In a channel band of 1 to 100+ its gonna be a huge task to find what you were watching earlier!!!! A major let down.

All in all, the experience of watching TV has been drastically pulled down with my old but new TV. Its got the same body, but the soul has been changed. Watching TV is no more fun, high time I need to think about changing the set. Its going to be hard to give up which was once a beauty and a great old friend.

PS: I still am a huge TV junkie. I have managed to sit though whole of Sunday glued to this TV even with all its limitations.