Sitting, presumably, somewhere in the northern regions of this country, everyman Sagar Verma wrote the following comment under a Times of India web story on TV star Urvashi Dholakia’s performance on Sach Ka Saamna: ‘I like these [sic] show very much bcoz this show give the money on saying truth...’

In fact, what TV viewers like Verma really like about reality television is the ability to watch folks make complete asses of themselves. Hundreds of thousands of people including 12,148 Facebook fans of Iss Jungle Se Mujhe Bachao and over 500 FB fans of Sach Ka Saamna tune in religiously at prime time to watch celebrity washouts and people-like-us say and do things that most of us swear we wouldn’t, not even for money. Nobody really believes that these shows will transmogrify its viewers; that a cheating spouse will be incited to come clean because someone else did so on national television. What it does do is offer an opportunity to relish the indignities of others. Like laughing at MTV’s bakras, we watch the debasement of our fellow beings because we’re in on the joke; we know these people have made revelations with long-term repercussions. And thank God, we’re not that stupid.

It’s even more satisfying when contestants don’t even win. There’s a purer if sinister satisfaction in shaking our heads at Smita Mathai, an aunty-next-door participant of Sach Ka Saamna, precisely because she didn’t even make money from owning up to fantasising about other men and wanting to kill her husband. If she hadn’t had a sudden bout of self-consciousness over the question of would she cheat on her husband if he wouldn’t find out then she may have won a few lakhs. But as it turned out, she lied and lost, and now everyone who stands to judge her will do so knowing that she’s no better than them, at least not economically. We have always offered celebrities, even minor ones, more liberty than our peers, and Mathai would perhaps have been able to overcome her ignominy with prize money. Now, she’s doomed to spend the rest of her life convincing people that polygraph tests are largely discredited anyway.

But if a pack of politicians—universally derided as a simile for moral corruption—have their way we won’t be able to get our fix much longer. They want to check ‘obscenity and vulgarity’ in TV programmes. An utterly unreasonable cause because if we’re allowed to watch political leaders uproot mikes and yell at each other in Parliament, then we should be allowed to watch B-grade celebrities be stupid on national television. As someone said, “Let us be thankful for the fools.”

India has more languages in danger of extinction than any other, going by a Unesco report on threatened languages. Most of the 196 mentioned languages in peril are in the North-east, with Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland already home to seven dead languages—Ahom, Chairel, Andro, Sengmai, Aimol, Tarao, and Kolhreng. And four have between 50 and 100 speakers left. “This isn’t surprising,” says Professor Udaya Narayan Singh, who was part of the report as former director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages. “These are not languages you can get jobs with. This makes people move to languages that are powerful. Younger generations speak the language only with their parents and for in-group communication.”

Singh notes the primary challenge in language data collection is that the census is the only regularly updated reference. “It gives us the literacy rate and speech varieties, but no lists of dialects and speech varieties spoken by less than 10,000 people.”

However, there is one exception. “In 1954,” says Singh, “linguists made a demand to the home minister to include questions on mother tongues. The census of 1964 had information on all mother tongues.”

At the remote Galapagos island, made famous by Charles Darwin’s research, the stork has come visiting. The dad to be is 90 and his name is George, a Galapagos giant tortoise. At that age, males of the species are said to be in their “sexual prime”.

For the sake of variety, one assumes, George had the company of two female tortoises, who he made suitable use of. The eggs hatch in 120 days. According to reports, Galapagos Tortoises, among the species Charles Darwin observed to formulate his theory of evolution in the 19th century, were hunted for their meat by sailors and fishermen to the point of extinction. Their habitat has also been eaten away by goats introduced from the mainland. Some 20,000 giant tortoises still live on the Galapagos, and are now subject to a determined conservation effort.