The 6pm Smack In The Face

For one of the many times in my life, I finished a book for the singular purpose of skinning it with a blunt and rusty knife and pulling its fingernails out with a pair of pliers. After I finished, it, though, I didn’t think that it deserved such attention.

But what the hey, I am a man of unlimited opinions which nobody listens to, so I shall tilt at this windmill too.

The 6pm Slot is, very simply, a waste of time. I was done reading it after 3 pages; the rest of it seemed like the literary equivalent of watching paint dry. And that is what you keep doing when reading the book: waiting. Waiting for the characters to add another dimension so they don’t look like cardboard Rajnikant cut-outs or sound like tropes. Waiting for the plot to explode, or at least blossom, into some sort of depth. Waiting for ideas and concepts and the cut-and-thrust of repartee and the brevity of wit.

Naomi Datta brings the big bad world of television to us, and it leaves us as most television does: with an unutterable sense of ennui. The shenanigans of the central character – which seems modelled on a mixture of the authoress, Becky Bloomwood, Bridget Jones and the regular girl-next-door-that-you-wouldn’t-give-time-of-day-even-on-Rakshabandhan – ostensibly take you into the life of a television producer, that much harrowed soul who would much rather be sticking flowers in her hair and emancipating street urchins than sullying her soul with television, but what to do? So the much-belaboured heroine goes forth once more in search of the Holy Grail of rating points (which, of course, everyone in television does without any thought to sensibilities, sensitivities and the general idea of good distaste) unto the breach and takes the brunt of “public school educated dickheads”, itinerant myriad-chinned brown-noses, half-reformed Eliza Doolittles, megalomaniac news channel Grand Panjandrums, the male penchant for sex and the unpredictable television viewing preferences of the Great Unwashed.

Which is the problem I have with this book: everything is too convenient. The characters are what one would expect in the world of television, the scenes are what one knew would happen (‘cos Bunty’s daughter’s friend’s fiancée works in TV and she told me all about what goes on in there – did you know that all reality shows are scripted?), the dynamics are specious, the situations impossibly pat. It’s like a Madhur Bhandarkar movie; it’s a point of view of a person looking in from outside, a clichéd, unimaginative, dinner-table account of the inner workings of a whole different world, full of staples and tropes and platitudes. Oh, and an extremely trite love story.

For somebody to dumb life down like this, it takes a very special talent. Maybe it was thrust upon her.