If life gave Arnab Goswami lemons he’d question life’s motives, the wages of the farmer who grew the lemons and end by calling the lemons Pakistani agents and asking for their resignation as fruit. That’s just who he is as a journalist and it’s a trait that he has ingrained into the very fibre and fabric of the channel he runs. So, it came as no surprise that once India lost in the World Cup, Times Now had their daggers sharpened, drawn and buried into the Indian team’s back, even as the Indian tail-enders walked back to the pavilion. Called PowerPlay, the show was hosted by Anand Narasimhan and Tina Sharma Tiwari. What it lacked in grace and logic, it made up for with shrillness, outrage, entitlement and Times Now’s usual cringe-worthy hashtagging. The hashtag #ShamedInSydney set the tenor for Times Now’s programming. (The hashtag mysteriously vanished from Times Now’s Twitter timeline following a Twitter backlash, but Narasimhan it seems forgot to delete it.)

No sooner did the final Indian wicket fall than the flames returned to Times Now, licking at the panellist boxes and threatening to burn the few former cricketers foolish enough to think anything good could come of being on Times Now. Times Now once again displayed its trademark flair for choosing outraged, geriatric panellists, last seen in cave paintings, to spew the usual diatribe about money destroying the game. In addition to these fossils, Times Now also had Zaheer Khan, Charu Sharma and Atul Wasan – who looked like a deer caught in headlights – as the show began with the outraged hosts demanding, among other things, for MS Dhoni to be sacked as captain. You’d think that, given Narasimhan’s background in sports presenting, he would see this defeat for what it was – a near-inevitability. But one would not have guessed that Narasimhan had any background in sports reporting, or even a grasp on the basic concept of sport, based on the clueless outrage he spewed. Instead of using panellists to give viewers a sense of perspective about the match, Narasimhan attempted to use them as go-betweens to demand apologies from the Indian team. Times Now’s ticker-writers backed him up with tickers asking whether Virat Kohli should apologise for disappointing the country. A news channel effectively demanding a 26-year-old to apologise to the entire country for having an off-day playing cricket, that’s what makes Times Now India’s number one English news channel.

If Narasimhan was the guardian of India’s pride, his co-anchor, Tiwari, was no less. Wearing a permanent scowl as if her panellists had body odour issues, she proceeded to accuse Dhoni of being remorseless and behaving high-handed with the media, while demanding that panellists echo her anger. She hit the heights of her cluelessness though when she demanded that Kohli be dropped from the Indian team to teach him a lesson, exhibiting a level of cricketing acumen that would be embarrassing were it to come from a stick. Some sense of sobriety was brought about after Atul Wasan finally had enough and threatened to leave the show causing the anchors to tone down for the few minutes that were left. Still, Times Now is not one for mercy and as the red ticker at the bottom of the screen informed us, The Newshour was only two hours away. At sharp 9, Arnab was back on television to remind us why Narasimhan and Tiwari are mere understudies. With his intro itself Arnab told us that his best-case description of the match today was a walloping. In true Arnab melodrama, the problem wasn’t that India lost, oh no, it was that India had surrendered. And, of course, if you disagreed with Arnab’s point of view, you were in denial. Arnab was here to question the Indian team for losing. Using his exalted position as editor-in-chief of a national news channel, Arnab demanded to know why R Ashwin wasn’t introduced until the 18^th over. Whenever a panellist trashed the Indian team, Arnab would regurgitate the panellist’s last two words as if in agreement. Sensible viewpoints weren’t in short supply but they were out shouted and dismissed out of hand. Even as sanity was treated like the plague, Arnab questioned everything from Dhoni’s decision-making to Dhoni’s body language and stopping just short of criticising his hair style and taste in women. Never mind that prior to the World Cup, we had lost to Australia repeatedly in both a test as well as a limited-over’s series. Never mind that based on that series we weren’t expecting to get this far in the World Cup. Never mind that Australia was playing at home. No, none of that matters, because Arnab needs his outrage and outrage he shall have. The pointlessness of his outrage though was best summed up by him, when he said, “It wasn’t that we lost, it was that we allowed ourselves to lose.” This is also true of Times Now — it isn’t that we watch it, it’s that we allow ourselves to watch it, and as long as we do the circus will go on.