Cutting Through the Noise...

In the wake of the unpsurge of popular sentiments in the support of the mammoth and "revolutionary" movement that this whole Anna Hazare episode has come to become, there is a different kind of upsurge that I have been witnessing. Upsurge in the critisism of the people, who demand for an alternative viewpoint, a rational debate to follow this whole anti corruption opera bieng staged. I have been on the reciving end of my share of scrutiny and flak from my peers, having bieng one among those who are "UnIdian" and "Insenstive" enough to have dared to speak against the tide. Well, Normally, I wouldnt have bothered to clarify my stance. Afterall, those who are critising me are as entitled to their opinion as I am to mine. However, since Iam being bereft this benefit of doubt, I choose to write this post, not as a clarification, but as an alternate viewpoint, for people to understand, that me and the likes of me, who refuse to say the word as the world says it..are not necessarily devil's advocates..we are people..who call for rational judgement and sane debates over an issue that is being "romanticised" to a level that is has almost reached the levels of insanity. I will not draft this post as another one doing the "SWOT analysis" of the versions of the bill..there are enough already doing the rounds. I speak about the attitudes here..the attitudes being dealt to the people who are giving any thing less than their complete agreement and support to the bill.



First things first...the reason I endorse Arundhati Roy's article here..is not because I hero worship her. Yes, she does command huge amount of respects from me. But respecting someone does not mean blindly following their ideologies and viewpoints. I am as critical of her ideologies as her most stauch critics would be, wen they seem worthy of critism. The same sentiment holds true when I speak of Mr. Hazare as well. I have been a follower of this Magsasay Award winner activist for a long time. Having read about his work at the ground levels, and his success at Ralegan Siddhi..the orginal battleground he has been wokking at..he draws my admiration and respect. I admire him in the way he has unified the country and mobilized the mass over an infestation that is rotting our roots.



Having said tht, I refuse to join my friends and my countrymen in the mega sized, media orchestrated stage show that this "movemnt" has now gone on to become. As an initial supporter of the movement, I have been vociferous in my critism of how the government has acted in tackling this whole episode. From the lollypop they handed to the people..in the name of the "govt's version" of the bill..to the Stallin like attidute in their tolerance of the protest..the goverment no doubt has emerged the villains in this episode. The aroused disconcert and sentimets of the masses againt this is justified, and infact appreciated.



However, this movement has now reached a stage, where these "sentiments" threaten to override our power of rational thinking. where the romanticism threathens to supercede logic. In drafting a law, that holds a power to revloutionaize the constitutional setup, is it justified to let the heart rule the mind..? Is it justified to close ourself to alternate ideas that challenge a popular yet by no means a perfect version of the bill that is being pushed forward. People fighting for the cause call themselves the torch bearers and guards of proleteralian democracy, but in refusing to allow dissent aren’t they themselves underming the democratic setup they so vehementaly claim to guard? Fine, These alternate viewpoints maybe erroneous, but how, without any debate and reasoning can they they assume that their own version, their own viewpoint deserves to be followed? And if they say, they are open to debates and talks, challenging their views ..what reason propels them to tag and dismiss every dissent and every crictic an anti national? In placing themselves and their opnion above all voices of dissent, they are bieng as presuptive as the system they claim to be fighting againt.



Is supporting the viewpoint the crowd supports the proof that I and the likes of me will have to give to prove our Indianness ? Well, that being the case I’d rather take the flak and get ousted from the good books of people, than curb my better sense and speak the “general mind”. Cause the general mind refuses to think anymore..it choses to go with the flow. If u want to change and revolutionalize the system, It requires more than just a show of heart and solidarity..it requires a show of deliberation and reasoned thinking as well. Yes, the motivated masses have done well in coercing the govt to rethink its strategies and attitudes. But in our complete refusal to hear any voices of dissent..even those coming from amngst us , we are ourselves underming and tampering with the pillars our system stands on. We are getting carried away in the media fuelled fury and agitation, which the media keep adding fire to ..as melodrama means eyeballs and eyeballs means TRPs. If defying such absurdities earns me a tag of cynic Id gladly take that. Staying a cynic with a realization of reason and reality is better than becoming a romanticist who places his hope blindly in a pied piper, to be led to a magical land of no despair. If anything, at least a cynic drowns on his own terms.

silent sojourns :)

Lying on your berth, with your curtains drawn, with only the views outside your window and your thoughts for company. A little something that struck me while on a jouney like such, while enroute to my hometown.... :)

My window is misty with little droplets of water, and the moon is shining at me through them..travelling with me, my companion in this silent jouney. My curtains are drawn and Im in my own little space..lit by the duffused rays of the moonlight, split in dazzling colours. Its the most enthralling view of the night Iv ever experienced, one that can inspire poetry. As the train gathers pace, we leave behind the vegetation cover and enter civilization , into the industrial terrain. Suddenly the serenity of the moonlit sky is broken by the blinding lights of the halogens from the factories. The acrid stench of the chemicals and rotting waste hits my nostrils and I know I am back to the world the way it is, as opposed to the way it was meant to be. I know..I am back to being human.

Rally For Sanity

While watching Deepika and Sonam Kapoor gossip about Ranbeer last Sunday on Koffee with karan, I suddenly was hit by a realization that whiling away my time in mundane things was making me intellectually drained. So to build up on my general knowledge I decided to check upon what is the news for the day, and switched onto the news channels. The first one I checked flashed breaking news and so I stopped by to check, only to find out that all the conundrum was being caused by a guy who had decided to do a Dharmendra and had climbed up a TV tower to call for his girlfriend. Breaking news…?? I wondered. Alright, I need some real news, I thought, and so I flipped the channels to stop on another one which had a heated debate going on about whether Rakhi Sawant should get the prime time slot, or should she be relegated to after 11. Bewildered at the dearth of news on these news channels, I decided to check the international networks in my quest for information, and so, I flipped to CNN. “Peering into the royal purse” was the headline, and what Her majesty carried in her purse, was what the panellists were arguing upon. Utterly disappointed, my urge to build upon my IQ went down the drain, and I flipped back to the only thing that I thought made sense on TV that night, Koffee wid karan, and was compelled to write this piece as my clarion cry for rationality.
24 hour news media, as we know it, has become known for its breaking news and developing stories. The 24 hours news cycle is built on one particular thing, generating viewership, but how to get stories to generate that? There is not much you can talk about for 24 hours, so how to keep the viewers, the TRPs and consequentially the advertising revenues coming? Well, the news media seem to have found a formula for that. They elevate the passion of everything that happens, mundane and irrelevant, to make it a “Breaking News”. As time speeds up in our text-and-Twitter culture, news is perpetually pressured to come out fresh, and nothing sticks out fresher than breaking sensationalism. Consequentially, as these breaking news and the developing stories flood the news network, the media is reduced to becoming a circus with everything exaggerated and packaged in flashy content.
The essence of the issue here lies in the fact that 24 hours news networks have lost all sense of proportionality. There is no proportion to how much coverage they give to any of the pieces they carry. The Kala Bandar case gets the same coverage space as the massacre in Dantewada does. As a result you begin to lose the lexicon, the essence of urgent stories and breaking news. The real stories then have to become louder to cut through the noise. Which is a shame really, because this is how media loses its purpose. The media should be a platform which serves to articulate and bring into focus, the intangible feeling of the common man whose voice is idealist but impotent. Instead, it today is serving to provide fodder to satirists who write hour long pieces gimmicking the fools errand that media has gone on to become.
For those who argue that media does debate upon real political issues as well, I have a question. Does a political debate only center around left and right wing, and dynamics of political alliances and disjoints?? We see news networks speculating about which party will win which constituency. But we hardly catch any stories voicing the issues and the troubles of the people in those constituencies. Things go beyond left and right for media to cover. Unfortunately, the media has become too polarised to see that. Instead of being ones with a point of view, they are fast becoming partisans of some of the political parties. The news media should represent a more balanced center, where journalists analyze the facts. But expecting analytical, independent, and objective reporting from the media today is fast becoming like living in Utopia.
So as the news channels sit and brood over the right concoction of sensation, sleaze and news to show, I sit and remember the good old DD days, where the sari clad news anchors were there to abreast the world with the latest, and not just to increase the glam quotient on TV, which seems to be the sole motive of the Reid and Tailor clad news anchors today. Ours is a nation of rallies, so what’s needed perhaps is a rally for rationality this time. A rally, which urges for the restoration of sanity in the media today. For it is as Jon Stewart puts it “The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues here to for unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then, perhaps, host a week of shows on the sudden unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”