Times Now is a news channel that understands entertainment better than most entertainment channels in India. So you have everything loud, jazzy and almost 70-mm, Dolby-like on the channel.

So when the channel does something, the honchos at entertainment channels, which primarily depend on the same sort of drivel to drive home their message and crank up TRP ratings of their medium, should take note. On Monday afternoon, the honchos at Times Now, which could be said to begin and end with the chief editor, decided India wants to see, hear and listen more about the national shame: the gang-rape and attempt to murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a moving bus.

So it cut live from Parliament, where the MPs were at their raging, emotional, tragic and vacuous best.

The point is not to run down the channel for showing the discussion on the tragedy live. No, it did all right — Indians deserve to know their MPs can get “outraged”, “shocked” and “sad” at issues other than scoring political points. But hang on, were they not trying to score a point, here, there and everywhere?

Sushma Swaraj, BJP’s uber-belligerent leader of the opposition in Lok Sabha, sought death penalty for rapists. Her demand, PTI reports, found support in the other house, too, party colleague Najma Heptulla, DMK member Vasanthy Stanley AIADMK's V Maitreyan. While Maitreyan urged the government to amend the law and introduce death penalty for rapists, Heptulla said, "Death penalty is the only punishment that is to be given. We can enact a law. This will serve as a deterrent.”

One is not getting into the positives or negatives of death penalty as a deterrent but a bit of number crunching would tell us why it’s not a demand worth the paper on which it would be reported tomorrow. According to National Crime Records Bureau, the number of rape cases reported in Delhi was 459 in 2009, 489 the following year, and 568 in 2011. Simple arithmetic says this translates to one rape case reported every 18 hours.

But the conviction rate in rape cases is just 26.4 percent across the country, with 83.6 percent cases pending trial.

While no one expects solutions to emerge in parliamentary debates, usually, Swaraj, Heptulla and Maitreyan’s was just about as unconvincing as pat solutions can get. India has 477 people waiting on death row; the last one, Ajmal Kasab, was hanged last month. The convict before that was hanged back in 2004.

Over to NCRB again: of 1.27 lakh rape accused facing trial in courts in 2011, the courts convicted 21,489. If all these were to be hanged as suggested above, simple arithmetic says that’s nearly 59 hangings every day.

Without getting in a noun like possibility, let’s just say: think for yourself. And think also about what MPs can, and should, do with the little time they make available in Parliament.