This is my first Sunday without Barkha Dutt’s We the People in several years now, and it’s been quite an adjustment.

I signed on to Directv’s offering of Hindi channels back in 2006 and it wasn’t long before Barkha Dutt was competing with Tim Russert, then David Gregory and Fareed Zakaria for my attention over coffee and the Sunday papers every week.  I loved being able – at the press of a button on a TV remote – to have a steady stream of news live from India flow into the living room, kitchen and so on.  For someone like me, who has grown up with the television as almost another member of the household, it was lovely to be able to remain that much more connected to what was going on 9000 miles away.  If RTE were also available, I’d probably be handing over part of my paycheck for them too.  If I ever won the Lotto, some cable or satellite provider would be very happy, as my subscription to a slew of other channels would be one of the changes I’d make early on.

There were other news shows and other hosts (Shekhar Gupta, Srinivasan Jain, Anupama Chopra, Amitabh Revi) I also made it a point to never miss, and whose absence I also feel.

Yes, I am aware that @BDUTT has taken a lot of brickbats for her talkative 26/11 coverage and then the recent recordings with politicians that were released in 2011, but the variety of current affairs her Sunday panels on the show would cover – everything from blogging in India, to the use of Twitter, to the situation in Kashmir, to women in the film business and on and on – I found had value.

True, some guests were on an awful lot, no matter what the subject (Suhel Seth, for example), but for me, it was an interesting (albeit limited) window into the current state of affairs in urban India, given that it was being broadcast on a primarily English-language satellite channel, so both guests and audience too were mostly from that segment of society.  But still, beyond the guest speakers on the often times too large a panel, there were also the audience members to hear from.

In addition to NDTV 24/7, the Hindi Direct package also included NDTV Profit and NDTV Good Times, from where I got hooked on Rocky and Mayur’s Highway on My Plate, and Ritu Dalmia’s Italian Khana (two shows to never watch on an empty stomach), and the Saturday morning broadcast of Sunil Sethi’s Just Books, which kept me up-to-date on the book market in India, new releases, and also the goings-on at literary festivals around the Subcontinent.

And last weekend, as if to make the pain of imminent loss that much more acute, first, on Sunday, there was the Jaipur LitFest and the mega star Oprah as the only guest for the 60 minutes+ of We the People, with Barkha and Oprah sitting onstage, chatting from their matching peacock armchairs.  And just 24 hours later, the latest installment in l’affaire Rushdie erupted, garnering wall-to-wall coverage by NDTV, including Barkha Dutt getting to finally do that interview with Sir Salman, though not up on a big screen in Rajasthan.

But Directv, surely looking at some bottom line, decided, as they did one year ago with the Tamil channel Star Vijay, that they no longer wished to pay what it was costing them to offer the NDTV channels as part of their two Hindi packages, and so, on the morning of January 25th, the tap went dry.  Sure, I’ve still got access to MTV India and the Star channels, but the sexist images of that Grind show makes me want to scream at the TV, and all I get from the Star channels are the weekend films, and the award shows, having so far managed to escape the siren call of the matching-matching bindis and bangles on the many soaps .  Sadly, I’ve yet to see one decent news programme on the Star channels, and don’t get me started on the state of the homegrown US-desi ads.

And for the sin of lobbing off the NDTV trio of channels, Directv – already too pricey – have reduced my monthly bill by only a few dollars.

Yes, yes, I know, you can see a ton of NDTV content online, but sorry, for me, it’s just not the same as being able to switch on the TV and get my news or other programmes there, rather than on my laptop.

And lo and behold, what appeared on NDTV’s website the same day that Directv dropped them?  A press release trumpeting their partnership with Dish Network in the US.  Clearly, Directv is slowly throwing up its corporate hands as far as the South Asian viewer is concerned, and ceding the territory to the Dish Network.

So now I have to decide if I want to go through the hassle of switching to Dish (ugh, what will that entail?  Two sets of technicians – one to remove the Directv dish, another to put up the Dish dish?  After my recent dealings with Directv and their multiple faulty and moribund DVRs over the holidays, the thought of all that makes me want to lie down in a dark room with a cool compress on my forehead.)

There’s also Optimum, but they have no decent news channels that I’m aware of, and there’s this new service from Mela.com, who have a great line-up of Southern channels, but no NDTV.

Can’t some bright MBA out there in the industry come up with a way that the customer can actually get what she wants, namely, a long a la carte list of channels, instead of all these dreadful prepackaged sets?

Anyone out there who uses Dish or Mela.com, or anything else, please do write in and tell me what you think.

There’s that line parents give their children: ”It’s not that we’re mad at you, we’re disappointed,” and I think it really sums up my mixed feelings about the chat show (or should I say “cat show”, for all the catty behavior exhibited therein?) that is Koffee With Karan.

Amrita of IndieQuill and Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood invited me to discuss the first half of Season Three with them on their joint venture, Masala Zindabad, which we did here several months back.

As I watched this season, I kept thinking to myself “Karan Johar is such a smart, funny guy who knows a ton about the Hindi film biz (“I’m an industry bachcha” he said on one episode); he’s capable of so much more than just this.”  And the few times that guests like Sajid Khan or Zoya Akhtar stray too far down the let’s-discuss-the-actual-film-biz path, our nattily attired host brings us all back to far more important things like “Deepika or Sonam, the brighter future?” or “The Khan for all seasons – Aamir, Salman, Shahrukh?”

Sure, there are funny and sometimes surprising moments on the show, and some that are actually enlightening about the Hindi film industry, but, in the main, the show turns into something of a high-gloss walk through the cafeteria of a very expensive private high school.

There’s the new kids, desperate to fit in and be accepted, there’s the older kids striking a pose and trying to impress everyone, and then there’s the cliques of kids who’ve known each other since elementary school (or maybe even pre-K), who are somewhat jaded and seem to have their own insider-y language and code of behavior that’s unspoken, but known to those special few.

When the season ended recently and Karan and his team of guests handed out their awards, we concurred that we found the award categories rather bland and decided to do our own on a follow-up podcast, and also touch a little bit on the new show, Simi Garewal’s India’s Most Desireable.

You can hear the awards, end-of-season podcast here, and if you’d like, you can subscribe to the whole series of podcasts on iTunes.

On this episode, you can hear:

Masala Zindabad’s KWK Season 3 awards

The Good

• The guest I’d actually like to meet for a coffee or a drink
• The most pleasantly surprising guest
• The cattiest Rapid Fire Round female and male

The Bad

• The most eye-roll-inducing moment/guest/episode
• The most adolescent behavior

The Ugly

• The guest whose ensemble made me say “What the……” or “What was he/she thinking?”
• The most toe-curling, cringeworthy moment/episode

Our wishes for the future of KWK

• The No. 1 change we wish they’d make to the format of the show
• The guest(s) we wish Karan would have on

During the podcast you’ll also get to hear me bemoan the atrocious outfit that the uber-elegant Amitabh Bachchan was dressed in (how could they do this to him??):

and there’s a little rant about very-beautiful-girls-who-can’t-stop-flicking-and-fussing-with-their-hair-so-you-don’t-take-your-eyes-off-them-for-a-moment.  Case in point:

Then there’s this:

And this:

And also this:

No wait, there’s more:

Still more:

And for anyone who’s wondering, this is the object that I am convinced is a Roomba, sitting there on the de rigeur glass-and-metal Koffee table.  As soon as the director yells “Cut!” on the final take, some stagehand comes out and places it on the floor so it can scoot about vacuuming up any hair that Piggy Chops might have shed during all that incessant primping:

Very pleased to see Archie Panjabi among the Emmy nominees just announced for her excellent work in CBS series The Good Wife.

That show has been one of the best written, most intelligent and consistently surprising series to come along in several years.  It’s layered and textured and never takes a misstep.  And one of the characters I most look forward to each week is Panjabi’s Kalinda, for her brains and her strength and her unpredictable edge.

Here’s an interview I did with her several years back at the time of the release of A Mighty Heart.