THE IMMODERATE MODERATOR

THE IMMODERATE MODERATOR

The inability to concisely speak and with precision is what afflicts most moderators, spoiling discourse. The tendency to keep on introducing panellists with verbosity for an undue length of time in order to gain personal popularity points from the supposedly appreciative audience, a trend that has infiltrated India as usual from big brother USA, is an irritant that takes the initial steam away from the discussion at hand through inordinate verbal extension. This ought to stop and, in an age of little time and a hectic life when patience on an average is at a premium, such undue elaboration of opening procedure really proves counterproductive in an hour's discussion that inevitably runs into a shortage of time towards the end when the programme has to be unceremoniously ended by scuttling questions from the audience. Would it were  that moderators remembered this! It would do their programmes better justice and their profession greater good. After all, such immodesty on their part serves their objective end of achieving success for the programme at hand no good, neither their subjective drive for acquiring approval from the audience any better. Rather, undue wastage of time significantly reduces the quality of the programme both in its irritating initial minutes and at its rushed conclusion with its mockery of a scuttled audience question-time. When habitual like wastage occurs in the intermediate period as well with frequent anchoring into unnecessary stylised verbal garbage, the programme is buried alive by its anchor who is rooted into its destruction by routing it through needless meandering in the woods of words. God bless these moderators with brevity, precision and directness, in short, moderation in anchored manners!

Written by Sugata Bose