Though Kakati was alert enough to correct herself, her bosses concluded that she deliberately wanted to say Mukhya Mantri Atul Bora. It is astonishing that the Doordarshan bosses could think that a newsreader would risk her career in this manner. For the sake of argument, even if she wants Bora to be in Mahanta's position, will this kind of interpolation help him in any respect? But then, common sense is a most uncommon thing at the bureucratic level. Often, motives are seen where none exists. By all accounts, Kakati's was a minor error. Such slips of the tongue are quite common in any broadcasting station.

Having spent a couple of years at AkashvaniBhavan as a casual newsreader I have come across several instances of unintentional errors creeping into news bulletins. In his excitement over the Apollo lunar module landing on moon, a colleague in the Malayalam unit read something like, ``At Indian standard time 10.32 pm, the moon landed on the Apollo spacecraft.'' For all his excitement, the newsreader got a mild rebuke from the unit head.

But worse was the treatment meted out to a friend and colleague, Raveendran. His case was very similar to Kakati's. That day's news bulletin led with a detailed story on the late Sanjay Gandhi. Naturally enough, the Youth Congress leader's name figured several times in the story. The second item was on the Indian President. Raveendran read, ``Rashtrapati Sanjay Gandhi,'' instead of ``Rashtrap-ati Sanjeeva Reddy''. Neither Raveendran nor the standby newsreader noticed the error, which occurred in a split-second.But an alert cartoonist in the South who heard the news drew a cartoon depicting Sanjay Gandhi as thePresident of India. In his caption the cartoonist attributed the source of his information to All India Radio. And that activated the Janata Party's Kerala unit chief K. Chandra Shekharan who shot off a letter to the then Information and Broadcasting Minister, L.K. Advani. He even conjectured that it could have been the handiwork of a Youth Congress activist-turned-newsreader!

Raveendran was blissfully ignorant of the storm he had raised. That was till his next contract was due. He found to his utter horror that his name had been struck off the newsreaders' panel. His moonlighting days had come to an abrupt end. His unit chief expressed his helplessness as ``the orders had come from above''.

As Raveendran was a journalist as well, he did not have much difficulty in meeting Advani. After giving him a sympathetic hearing, the minister asked him to get in touch with the Janata Party leader as it was on the basis of his letter that he had been punished. Raveendran finally managed to meet Chandra Shekh-aranwho, having ensured that he was no Youth Congress activist, wrote a nice letter to Advani. But by the time Raveendran was back at the Malayalam unit, a few months had passed.

Not so lucky was a radio producer I knew in Patna. In the course of his highly popular weekly programme, he asked a young participant to recite a limerick. Lo and behold, she blurted out, ``Gali gali me shor hai, Rajiv Gandhi chor hai (The slogan `Rajiv Gandhi is a thief' is reverberating in the streets).'' It was a live programme!

Those were the days when K.K. Tiwaris lorded it over the electronic media and the Bofors scam had begun to unfold on the national political scene. Within hours of the programme came the order sacking the producer. A little girl's innocence proved costly to him. The Tiwaris have gone but the culture they represent remains the same as ever.