My first journalistic assignment in 1990 was to interview painter, sculptor and architect Satish Gujral. Adding to the challenge was that Gujral's hearing was impaired, and he could not talk clearly enough for notes, because he was born deaf. He spoke through his wife at the Delhi art gallery where he was holding his exhibition after many years.

One statement that Gujral, a renowned artist, made was astounding. He said that historically Indians were not responsive to visual arts at all. That was his assessment of why the art scene in India had lagged behind. Immaterial of the validity of his view, the impact that audio-visual pop art is having on the entire subcontinent comes to mind. That subcontinental aesthetic sensibility is impervious to the visual arts can remain a point of debate, but current affairs seem to have corrected that particular historical wrong; too much of this part of Asia is swayed by video, or the audio visual.

The historical reverberations are there for that too. The dominance of dramatic arts in various Indian subcultures and regions, their ability to cut through the literacy roadblock, to reach out to wider audiences has been ably relayed to the new technology of cinema. Cinema married the more easily translated elements that can be called either the most populist and universal or the lowest common denominator, and the simplest, that of storytelling themes, and spread them across the subcontinent. From that humble beginning, Bollywood today might be the only worthy competitor to Hollywood globally.

That was that, as far as history goes. But the television takeover of the media, now including entertainment and often dominated by the latter, has made the new subcontinental receptivity to the video a rather intimidating prospect. The better halves of a growing consumerist middleclass, the housewives, are now a major part of media planning. The plethora of family soap operas in every language on television have a huge undercurrent of decision-making, housewives being targeted in commercial breaks.

While television is slowly and surely redefining the ethos of a vast majority of newly discovered ethnicities that is basking under the glare of the economic boom, there are also indications that television footprint is not merely uniting viewers to collective sighs and tears over the fate of family fortunes of television characters.

It has radicalized the media in the sub-continent, while it has also simplified national opinion to the lowest common denominator, thereby adding volatility to the, often extreme, economic nationalism and political suspicions.

In December 2001, five Nepalese were killed in a riot in Kathmandu when rumors about an Indian Bollywood star allegedly deprecating Nepal and its people ignited anti-India feelings, and sparked street riots and arson.

Similarly, the breakdown of the high profile Agra summit between Indian Prime Minister AB Vajpayee and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was blamed on two television related developments by both sides. Indians said that President Musharraf’s nationally televised interview with India’s prominent editors had hijacked the talks. The Pakistani delegation claimed that the television statement of the Indian Information and Broadcasting minister, Sushma Swaraj, which laid out several issues but remained silent on Kashmir, derailed them.

The mundane political monstrosities within the corridors of power are getting televised under the boomlights of television crews. The aged chief minister of Tamil Nadu being carried away from inside his bedroom by a posse of cops in the middle of the night is television footage for good. How the 111 Brigade stormed the state television station in Islamabad, and soldiers clambered over the gates and walls of the Prime minister’s house in Islamabad, is now forever on beta.

The latest coup in the subcontinent, in Nepal, is under the furious glare of television commentary, resetting relationships between countries by logging into popular sentiment on various sides of national borders. Had satellite television in neighbouring Nepal reached the level of maturity it has in India, the royal massacre inside the Narayanhity Palace would also have been on television. The dread of that thought might have played on King Gyanendra’s mind when he ordered a media shutdown triggering an old form of independent media’s Houdini act in the face of fascism.

Even as television is spreading a kind of intra-globalisation within South Asia, it is also breeding avant-garde usage of technology to serve some of the more traditional aims of the media. The Tehelka expose' of political corruption in defence deals in the Indian capital was such a case to the point.

Development indicators have nosed up the chart in many places, demographics have been remapped and old divides like rural/urban, and rich/poor, have been caught in the uniformalizing gusts of globalization. These were not always equal and uniform across the region, but despite differences in intensity the phenomenon is already irreversible.

The patterns of media independence vary throughout the region, so do the degree and scale of democracy, but again, each South Asian nation is caught in the vortex of an inexorable change. Some, usually the elite, claimed to calibrate, monitor, espouse and understand, what was leaving a vast majority gasping to grasp.

Unlike in the past, the democracies of this region had to take into account public assent for national policies. Television killed the isolation of national borders, and, simultaneously, spoke to a majority with an immense handicap: the illiterates. The literate lot, too, spilled their spleen or insights into the country without borders that the Internet affords, giving the final pushover to geographic borders.

This churning, too fast for anybody to monitor, is constantly changing the dynamics of the region and resetting the tone and substance of relations between countries in the sub-continent. It is typical of the phenomenon of satellite television that its tentacles invariably get entangled in the issue of private and government ownership. Earlier, whenever Indo-Pak relations had their periodic frosts, India would ban PTV, while Pakistan had a host of channels to ban. Only Doordarshan, the Indian government owned channel, just would not meet the brief to blank out the enemy propaganda.

Now that independent television channels have arrived and are thriving in Pakistan, a degree of sanity, and perhaps parity has been achieved. But taken together, it will lead to the kind of balloons that the current Indian minister for broadcasting Jaipal Reddy has just floated; adult material on television can be allowed provided the channels self-regulate their material and air it after prime time.

Satellite television is another tiger that South Asia is firmly riding; getting off perhaps is not too much of an immediate concern. However, regulation, benchmarking, calibrating debates that have nationalistic undercurrents, codes of conduct and other such issues will have to be arrived at beyond national policies and persuasions. But right now, the subcontinent does not care about getting off the tiger. It is enjoying the ride on the video tiger.