A new reality show in which a bunch of suitable men vie for the hand of Bollywood starlet Rakhi Sawant is an interesting twist on the prevailing custom of Indian men choosing their brides.

“Rakhi Sawant ka Swayamvar“, which harks back to the ancient tradition of princesses choosing a groom from a line-up, began airing on Monday night, pitting more than a dozen men from varied backgrounds — and with varying singing and dancing abilities — wooing Sawant, a colourful personality known more for her antics off camera.

It may be yet another publicity stunt for Sawant, who claims she will marry one of the men at the end of the series in a traditional wedding ceremony.

It may be yet another move by the channel, fighting for eyeballs and advertisers, to score high TRPs - or Television Rating Points that show how popular a programme is.

Still, it offers some respite from the female stereotyping on the Indian airwaves: from ads that show women as being incapable of any decision save the right cooking oil for the family, to shows that glorify child marriage and female foeticide under the guise of ushering in social change.

A soap featuring a child bride married at the age of eight claims it “very sensitively portrays the plight of children who are unwittingly forced into marriage, in the name of tradition”.

A brief blink-and-you-miss-it disclaimer at the end of the show says child marriage is illegal.

Competing for shock and awe value on the same channel is another soap that features a village where newborn baby girls are drowned in a pool of milk.

Not recommended viewing in a country where the gender ratio is so skewed in some states that it has set alarm bells ringing. The networks claim they are raising awareness of these “social evils”.

But that is not a primary concern; they have TRPs to deliver, viewers to satisfy and advertisers to please.

Sure, TV is capable of sparking debate and bringing about change, but for a casual viewer seeking an insight into how India treats its women, what’s on primetime telly is scarcely redeeming, is it?

The concept of a televised war was born in January 1991, when news networks reported live on the missiles slamming into Baghdad and millions watched from the comfort of their living rooms as tracer fire lit the sky above Iraq's capital. A decade later,  the world watched in minute-by-minute horror as the twin towers came crashing down in New York. 

Now, with the ferocious militant attacks in Mumbai, we have arrived in "the age of celebrity terrorism". Paul Cornish of Chatham House argues that apart from killing scores of people, what the Mumbai gunmen wanted was "an exaggerated and preferably extreme reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion". 

It's too early to tell if governments will respond with extreme reaction, but the saturation coverage of the drama in the world's media would suggest that, at least on this level, the killers were successful.  

"Almost within minutes, television screens showed harrowing scenes of pools of blood where people had died or been injured, hotels ablaze, Indian army snipers firing at distant targets, and CCTV images of the attackers," Cornish writes.

The first reports of shooting in the streets of India's financial capital did not actually come from the mainstream media.  A BBC news technology blog suggested that the social networking site Twitter  "came of age" during the attacks because it carried messages on the shootings some time before television networks and news agencies started reporting them. Indeed, according to a Reuters report, blogs fed an information frenzy on the 60-hour gun rampage and siege, underlining the emergence of citizen journalism in news coverage.  

However, the live coverage that followed on television networks, particularly Indian ones,  was shrill, sensationalist and bordering on the hysterical. As the Financial Times points out, this is not new in India's competitive television market, where some channels flash the words "Breaking News" all day and "the only thing that matters is to be 'first', even if first is wrong".  The blizzard of reporting inaccuracies over this incident was astonishing. In a despatch on why we should take reports from the scene of a massacre with a grain of salt, Jack Shafer catalogues the instances from Mumbai of what he calls "crap masquerading as authoritative news".

How does high-octane reportage like this feed into the popular mood, and how far could that influence the hands of policy makers in New Delhi and Islamabad?

To find out, watch for Breaking News.

Prime-time television in India is not really known for sensible content. Especially the soap operas. I have never been a fan but one tedious evening, I switched on the telly and sat through one “saas-bahu” serial after another.

What was it about family dramas that kept millions of Indian women glued to their TV sets each evening? I intended to find out.

In one such episode, a mother-in-law laments the loss of an unborn grandchild.

“We have lost our grandson and our daughter-in-law cannot bear a child after this. Now we will never have a grandson to take the family name forward.”

I wondered how the mother-in-law could be so sure the unborn child was male. Did she get a sex-determination test done? Or was it some divine revelation.

As the story of one serial after the other unfolded on screen, I realized that to be the “perfect” woman on Indian television, one needed to be a docile housewife and sacrifice everything for the family’s happiness.

Even if that meant putting up with philandering husbands.

Women who wear western clothes or work for a living invariably have loose morals, or so these soap operas would have you believe.

I am all for escapist TV and can forgive the sight of glamorous women going to bed in flashy saris and make-up.

But I find it hard to accept that millions of eyeballs are being exposed to such regressive programmes day after day.

Can the television industry shrug off its responsibility so easily in a country where killing of female foetuses is common and preference for sons runs deep?

In a report last year, the United Nations estimated that 2,000 unborn girls are illegally aborted every day in India.

Experts warn that fewer women will spark a demographic crisis in India which could lead to more crimes against women — as there would be fewer left to marry.

I am not asking television producers, many of whom are women and lead very different lives than that of their characters on the telly, to broadcast sermons on female foeticide.

But it will take them just a few changes in their scripts to conjure up a healthy dose of daily entertainment — without sending their audiences the wrong message.

A new ad campaign featuring Bollywood stars Saif Ali Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Neha Dhupia has viewers’ curiosity piqued with its almost soap opera feel, with each advert dealing with a new episode in their love triangle.

The story so far: Chopra and Khan were once together, and Chopra still carries a flame for him, and half a heart-shaped locket. Khan, who has the other half of the locket, is about to propose to Dhupia, but also still has feelings for Chopra. Incensed  Dhupia dumps Khan, and in the latest episode Chopra was looking for Khan at the airport.

So here’s the $1 million question: What was keeping them apart? You’ll never guess: Chopra’s dark complexion that lost out to fairer-skinned Dhupia.

The campaign for Hindustan Unilever’s Pond’s White Beauty will have us believe Chopra’s “wheatish” complexion - the polite term still used in Indian matrimonial ads - is the only reason she is not with her one true love.

But never fear, Priyanka, for Pond’s White Beauty with lycopene is here.  Watch the four episodes so far of Kabhi Kabhi Pyaar Mein here

These ads have only multiplied in recent years, as more cosmetics makers clamber onto the bandwagon for fairness cream which in adverts magically make women more desirable, successful and modern.

Shops stack a dizzying array of fairness creams and lotions from home-grown majors and multinationals alike. But in one way they are really fair — they now make them for men, too. The advertising, however, has guys biking on dirt roads or hanging out with their macho buddies.

Fairness creams are a multi-billion rupee industry in India, and Fair & Lovely, the original launched in 1978, is a blockbuster product for Hindustan Unilever.

Perhaps there is a case for a product that clearly has a demand in a country that places such a premium on fair skin.  Has their increasing popularity anything to do with the asipirations of millions of Indians in an increasingly globalised world? And what about their advertising?

“There is too large a population that equates fairness with beauty and superiority,” said Kiran Khalap, co-founder of brand consultancy Chlorophyll.

“It is so ingrained in our culture and sensibility, it is hard to imagine where the advertising can go from here.”

Chopra, in a promotion for the ad campaign says: “Love makes the world go round … Pond’s White Beauty gives it a helping hand.”

In love, all’s only fair, it seems.