ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the extreme weather coverage Indian television news underscored narratives of technological and military prowess while eliding structural concerns, such as poverty and infrastructural underdevelopment. Specifically, it illustrates that television news coverage reduced these weather events to environmental spectacles; images took precedence over substantive coverage of long-term climate change. The chapter analyzes two weather events are strikingly different: one was initially perceived as a routine monsoon event and only gradually revealed to be a major disaster, while the other was predicted to be a catastrophe and proved to be a routine flood-causing storm. It unpacks the particular ways in which Indian television news channels tapped into different aspects of India Shining discourse in covering the two events. The chapter divides the analysis into three distinct moments - precyclone, landfall, and postcyclone - to enumerate how news coverage tapped into aspects of the India Shining discourse, which was gaining a stronger foothold in public culture, and weather media.
