Television is that exhausting hyper child

Someone once said: the best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure. Oh well. I watched television recently for long hours out of a hospital bed (enforced leisure), and now I am in a dilemma. Chicken and egg kind of dilemma. Does my watching television as leisure activity signal my lack of intelligence or did that tele reach out and extinguish my intelligence, whatever little there was of it?
Because now I'm walking around in a daze of altered reality. For instance, I can't watch a bird on a tree any more and relax into the moment, because, fresh from my tv-watching stint, I'm expecting it to look up and chirp and trill: "back after this leeetle break" or "kahi pey matt jaiyega, miltay hai break key baad!" And if earlier I could identify this bird, now I dully wonder if it's a Parizaad or Shruti, or a Prachi, or an Arnav or a Rajdeep or a Barkha or some such. I'm also looking at the bottom of my window to see if there are meaningless headlines crawling right to left while the main frame has the bird doing its thing.
This is because watching television has forced me to function in the jargon, the time-slots and the sound-bytes of tv-land. The overwhelming features of TV seem to be advertisements repeated till you are seriously sick, promos of other programs, and a hundred other interruptions to what you want to watch. I have whined piteously about this before, but I have to say it again. Somewhere along the way TV has taken away your dignified right not to be shouted at, not to be interrupted, and not to be told-sold the same thing again and again, all in the span of half an hour. I mean, even the heart-in-the-right place ads asking youngsters to vote...even those are repeated so heavily that instead of taking their advice and voting, I feel like going off somewhere and banging my head dully on a wall till elections come and go.
Only on TV. No other medium is that presumptuous. Imagine a newspaper trying to chop up a report or a feature with a print ad popping up in the reader's eyes at every other paragraph – would you not immediately throw such a publication away, stop subscribing to it, or keep it only to wrap dirty things in? If newspapers can have ads bunched in the Classifieds or specific pages, where those interested can go and browse, while the rest of us can avoid having things sold to us, then why not TV? Guys, bunch your ads at the beginning or end of the program so there is a chance that people will go look at them. People like me are learning to duck your ads by getting smarter and more dexterous with the remote; as for myself specifically, I'm glad to be out of my hospital bed and back to real life where I'm not stuck with my least favourite form of entertainment and information.
One last thing. Noticed how those shouty-screechy channels, especially the English ones, have suddenly cultivated a more sober, quieter tone? Less like children having a blue fit and more like adults having a conversation. All much more sophisticated and 'responsible' sounding than the pre and during 26/11 manic hysteria that they were all free to luxuriate in. Something has happened. While these channels and their star yellers did behave for a while as if anyone criticizing them for the way they covered the attacks and aftermath was committing high treason, they seem to have realised that they need to come down off their high and sober up. How was this change effected overnight is an interesting speculation. Lobotomy? Daily dose of tranquilisers? Or perhaps a crash course in voice correction and modulation to look and sound less like avenging ghouls and more like humans. But it's all part of the act of acting out the news. My grandfather, when TV first came here, was appalled to see newsreaders smiling at the end of the newscast. He thought it was terribly insolent of them to smile at viewers. Deliver us the news and disappear, was how he and people of his generation liked it. What would he make of all the chatting, shouting and acting out of the news today, I wonder.