India TV: A news channel with a difference

In office, the discussion around the lunch table typically is about what's the next news on India TV (or what the last interesting news was). India currently has a large number of news channels, and when some major event takes place, all the channels concentrate on that. So, for example, when the blasts happened in UP, this was covered on all the channels, and was only replaced when Maninder Singh was caught with cocaine, and there was the sight of each channel trying to find their own set of people to interview, including people on the sight, former cricketers, and so on. The one glorious exception to this entire new coverage was the news on India TV.
India TV seems to have a found a niche of its own. It tries to cover sensational news, leaving behind the likes of Star News and Aaj Tak. So, for example, India TV was the first channel to investigate and find the news about an illicit sex racket running on the premier Rajdhani trains, it periodically covers tales of haunted places, about other sex rackets running with plenty of description (in fact, on a lighter note, a friend of mine got a blasting from his wife for watching such a sleazy channel when she occassioned to see some of the coverage, but he managed to wriggle out of this situation by explaining it as a national TV channel). At another time, the channel was trying to run a story about a ichadari (snake that can change shape and become a human being as well) snake as well. Similarly, late at night, they have a discussion where they get doctors and advisors and get people to phone in and talk about their sex related problems.
So I normally do not have much of a tolerance for such kind of news, but this seemed interesting enough that I thought that I would try it out. Today afternoon, I switched to India TV, and found them running an exclusive on a snake couple writhing together in the water somewhere in Madhya Pradesh. This was running for around the 3-4 minutes that I was watching the channel, and this seemed fairly interesting :-). In the night, I ran into something that seemed far more stable, this was Rajat Sharma interviewing Rakhi Sawant on his adalat program.
Overall, the more I thought about it, the makers of India TV seem to be making a hit out of the attempts to make it a niche channel, abandoning too much serious news. After all, if people know about it as a distinctive channel out of the so many news channel out there, and talk about it to each other, then it is a success. And people need a break from serious disaster news.
Maybe I will end up watching it more often, we all need a break from serious stuff going all around us.