Every interview with Mallika Sherawat should carry a statutory warning. Watching her talk her ostensibly liberated bilge is injurious to the nation’s health.

For months she was allowed to talk for effect which a lot of us mediapersons mistook for a cause. Now I think Sherawat needs to be put on a leash before she ends up causing herself grievous injury.

On Sunday evening on Sony Max she was back talking on her favourite topic — me and my liberated body — on Bollywood Dil Se. Giving us the usual spiel about how a majority of the Indian population is young and that they don’t mind her stripping (why should they, when she’s the acknowledged new wet-dream girl?!) she suddenly turned on the elderly population for its hypocrisy in sexual matters, calling them doglaa.

Lady, mind your language and your attitude. Apparently Sherawat hasn’t been brought up to respect people who are older than her, or else why was she calling our parents and grandparents bastards???

More importantly why do the TV channels give so much importance to such self-serving shockers? Haven’t we had enough of them during elections? All through the campaigning Sonia Gandhi was the brunt of utmost ridicule. And now suddenly all the channels can’t get enough of her good qualites.

Pramod Mahajan who couldn’t stop baiting her before elections, and who became as ubiquitous on television post-election as Sonia Gandhi, admitted in not so many words to M.J. Akbar in his excellent tete-a-tete The Encounter (CNBC) that the foreign-origins issue is dead.

Everyone on BBC’s Question Time India on Friday was extremely sympathetic to Sonia’s cause. One senior female journalist said how once when she was covering a public address by Mrs G, not one person in the audience felt the lady’s foreign origins were an impediment.

Where were all these valued opinions when Mahajan and co were busy taunting Mrs G on television? Suddenly the lady who cannot be the prime minister can do no wrong. How come? Star News flew off to Italy on Sunday night to talk to Indians there who said they were very happy to see Sonia Gandhi at the brink of power.

What else could they say??? Why Indians in Italy should feel any differently about Sonia Gandhi is a mystery to me...as much as Star’s recently introduced horror Koie Jaane Na.

I’m yet to figure out what the plot is all about. But I do know some deep mysterious forces are controlling the serial’s quirky karma. Last week a doctor (whom I recognized only by the white coat he wore) stood with the serial’s leading lady in front of a Mataji idol in a hospital and lectured her about an evil force in her life which can be banished only by the child in her kokh.

Womb temperature rises...as plots plummet to inconceivable depths. Zee’s Bright Hope Lavanya has fallen with every episode. The characters are either screeching or whining, depending on which way the TRPs take the writer.

Lavanya’s husband (who was also Kashish’s husband on Kahiin To Hoga until he kicked the bucket last month) behaves like Akshay Kumar in Dhadkan. While wife plays truant and churlish he sighs and looks out of the balcony for a view from the flop.

Then there’s shrewish woman with a paralyzed husband who spits so much venom you wonder how her kin survive. Bile bile bache! Why are the soaps so badly written? At least Ekta Kapoor’s Kehna Hai Kuch Mujhko and Kahiin To Hoga make you smile a while. The latter even made us sob a jot when Kashish lost her husband. The scene where little socks for her unborn child are brought out to make her cry, was heratbreaking into its echoic homage.

Remember Jaya Bhaduri turning inwards for a stonily silent salvation after her stillborn child in Abhimaan? I wish our soaps would only refer back to old films and not vandalize their plots and characters.

It was a treat to have the legendary Asha Parekh on Zee’s Jeena Issi Ka Naam Hai. Thank God! After getting Diya Mirza and Arbaaz Khan on the show a lot of sceptics began to wonder if the show should be re-christened Hassna Isski Ka Naam Hai.

That evening the radiant Ms Parekh was surrounded by old friends and family. From her long-term friend Shammi to her favourite co-star Shammi Kapoor, they all had something to say.

The film footage so fabulously articulate, said the rest.

While we’re on Jeena Issi Ka Naam Hai I must say something extraordinary happened last week. The guest was Satish Kaushik, and one of his old friends Raja Bundela burst into tears saying, "If we can’t be friends again in this life then the next.."

While the emotional impact of the scene was undeniable why must private emotions, and that too those which are breached and bruised, be made so public? Having said that I must say that the highest achievement for any television talkshow is to connect people. And if Kaushik managed to re-connect with his old friend then nothing like it.

Connectivity on television can be a two-pronged affair. Last Wednesday on MTV’s Love Ke Liye anchor Shehnaaz arranged for a housewife called Mehnaz to dance like Britney Spears for her visibly embrasssed husband who didn’t know what was in store. This, apparently because the husband had lost interest in his wife.

And the dance was supposed to revive his interest and rejuvenate the marriage???? Wow! Reality TV gone bust. Speaking of which I recently saw Busted on Reality TV and I must say I was appalled. A disgruntled female scretary was caught raising her dress and peeing on her boss’s chair.

"If I knew there was a secret camera I wouldn’t have done it," she told us with sigh. To pee or not to pee….The lady has little reason for embarrassment because a few night earlier we saw a man being chased and..ahem…raped by a donkey on the rampage while he was trying to defecate in the fields.