Season of Immaturity

     We had three immature people hogging television last week - displaying various degrees of narcissism.

     Narendra Modi finally came before the media. For months now, he has been constantly taunted for not facing questions, and he had to do something about it. Last week, he gave three interviews, to ANI, to IBN network and to ETV.

     In all three meetings, the interviewers were hesitant and nervous, Modi was uncomfortable but autocratic, and the questions were soft and superficial. Yes, it is a fact that ETV is owned by Ambani, and that TV18, which runs the IBN network, is also mortgaged to Ambani. But let us not get distracted by that.

  I have seen journalists get overawed by great statesmen or great philosophers, it happens. But this was not that. The journalists here were nervous, they were careful that they should not offend him, when all their lives, they do nothing but offend guests in their studios. So either the conditions were laid out carefully by the BJP and the 'right' journalists selected, or we must face the fact that it is not only Muslims and small children who are scared of Modi, but also Hindu adults in the media.

The 100-city Madness

     P.Chidambaram and N. Modi are closer to one another than what their statements on media make it appear. Both share a common economic strategy for the nation. Even though they are at each other's throats - with Chidu naming Modi a brute, and Modi calling Chidu an artificial sophisticate, the two share a common dream for the nation - to build one hundred more cities.
     We may call this the  'modimbaram' strategy. What it underlines is a significant fact - that whether we get a Congress or BJP government, the act of copying economic policy of the USA is going to continue. This portents a tremendous upheaval which will tear out the heart of this country, but I am afraid that such a vital issue has been left untouched, unexplored, by media and intellectuals.
     What does this imply - this building of a hundred more cities? What will be the population of each city? Say, 30 lakhs, which is a small-to-medium city size. Who will populate these cities? Not the residents of Mumbai and Chennai and New Delhi; neither Modi nor Chidambaram will shift there - these new cities will be created out of a massive disturbance to the Indian rural environment.

What has the Media achieved?

Misleading the voter?

As a large section of Indian voters begin to exercise their franchise for Lok Sabha elections 2014, one wonders what has our national television media achieved in the crucial last two weeks, which can influence voting behaviour?
     1. They have quietly allowed the removal of the most important issue: that of corruption.
     2. To do so, they have loudly brought in the issue of communalism - the Hindu-Muslim question.
     3. They have allowed nationalistic jingoism to mix with communalism - the India-Pakistan question.
     4. They have tried to pre-empt voter's thinking by offering 'election opinion polls'.
     In effect, the media has taken the focus away from the Anna Hazare-led and Kejriwal-driven Jan Lokpal anti-corruption movement. What I have seen in the last two weeks is a kind of information blitzkrieg that Goebbels (Hitler's media man) was famous for. Our media has used, abused, and sensationalised communal statements day after day, they have hosted loud and vulgar slanging matches in their so-called 'debates'.

Attack on Arvind Kejriwal

"Why is this happening to him," the media woman was asking, with a wry smile on the corner of her mouth. She knew her cameraperson had got a clean shot of the devilish act of a man first garlanding and then aiming a slap at Arvind Kejriwal. Her channel had already rewound and shown it 30 times. The TRPs were soaring. "Is this conduct right," she continued artificially, trying to sound concerned, while occupying only half the screen - the other half again showed the act of violence, five times in quick succession even as she spoke her sentence.
     One misguided man acted rashly for a moment. A hundred voyeuristic media channels acted deliberately and re-telecast the ugly scene a thousand times. The way they took a five-second shot and went back-and-forth, and back-and-forth, it was an act of violation - the media was brutalising Arvind Kejriwal.
     The camera also followed the criminal as he was escorted out by the police, and they repeatedly telecast his swear words, ending with, 'Kejriwal is a betrayer'. Back in the studio, the woman with the fake concern was at it again - every time she reported that Kejriwal was attacked, she immediately added, "but the attacker says Kejriwal is a betrayer". What is this? Is this what the media reckons as 'showing both sides of the story?'

The Riff-raffs who own Media

     While traveling in Madhya Pradesh last week, I came across a Bansal TV through cable network, whose reporting integrity left much to be desired. I wondered who owned it, and did a little research. It is owned by a Bansal Group of Bhopal which runs Coaching Institutes and an MBA college, and which owns the Ayushman Hospital Group, and which also markets a certain Bansal Edible Oil.
     The research also revealed that the Bansal Group was raided a few years ago by the Income Tax department which recovered Rs 300 crores of undeclared money, much of it in cash!
     How come such a riff-raff is allowed to own a media company?

Who will Speak for the Farmer?

On a news channel last week, Amit Shah represented the BJP party and tried to answer questions from journalists. When asked pointedly about farmers losing their land to business corporations, he began to show his irritation, and finally sneered, "If you are so interested in farming, why don't you raze down this building and do kheti?".
     I recall teachers in rural schools demeaning children by saying, "So, do you want to keep cutting grass? Do you want to be a farmer all your life?". I feel Amit Shah too may have faced such teachers in his school days, and therefore has developed this deep feeling of humiliation and a contempt for anything to do with 'village' and 'farmer'.
     At a Garhwal-based NGO, I have seen an entire generation of village school-going children growing up with this psychological inferiority complex. This is indicative of what is happening all over rural India. When these children grow up and migrate to urban centres, their feeling of inferiority is converted into a contempt for farming and village life, and they cultivate an outer veneer of superiority. In due course, some among them join politics, some bureaucracy, some NGOs, and some become journalists in the media.

Jaitley's Tragedy

Uncomfortable in the open?

   In the late 1980s, when satellite television was being demonstrated as a possibility, a senior journalist friend told me with a smug satisfaction, "Just wait till we have live coverage... the camera will expose all these chaps, it will show the expression on their faces". Sadly, he is no more, but I recalled his clairvoyance during the recent coverage of Amritsar and Chandigarh in all TV channels.

    Television can indeed expose things for what they are, specially outdoors during election time, when politicians have no place to run or hide. Take for example, Arun Jaitley, the BJP candidate from Amritsar. The camera showed him on his road show waving here and there - that established his credentials as a candidate. Then the camera went mid-shot and showed him standing cheek-by-jowl with other party personnel. They weren't his regular Delhi club pals, these were the local Amritsar cadre, who were pressing their sweaty kurtas against his, and Arun Jaitley looked distinctly out of place. Then the camera went closer up, and it showed a face held in steady grimace; it was the face of a man in pain, caught by circumstances in a wrong place. The camera will speak, my late friend had predicted, and last week, I saw that the camera did speak, quite clearly.