The Journalist Responds

Dear Tukai,

I will not forward this to anyone, least of all, to a newsperson.

There are two types of us in India these days: those who say, either “Chalta hai, salary se matlab rakkho,” or worse still, who say, ‘come one old fucker, get modren;” the second group is like me who most often suffer tummy cramps, very often feel pukish, despite a perfect digestive system, and when drunk shriek and shout obscenities against the fellow scribes who are raping our country's moral (!) fabric. I do not see the point, when everything is TRP driven.

Why talk about the TV. Today's Hindustan Times had a bottom anchor piece, which shrieked how KBC 3 is infinitely lesser in TRP, according to TAM ratings over the past four days, the four days after its birth! Who the hell is bothered about some bloody sldier who killed the Hizb commander and died for that (or for his Country)?

Why talk about Kashmir and militancy? When the son of the India head of Adobe was kidnapped, the media sprang up and ran such a stink, but for the past two years, poor people, a lot of them Biswases and Haldars, lower caste, poor Bengalis, living in a hell now known as Nithari, had been complaining about children missing, and then the butchery is unveiled and the police chief of Noida says there has only been a marginal rise in heinous crimes year-on-year!

Are we taking about murders here? Or is this a marauding of the Indian conscience? Is there anything in IPC and CrPC that can deal with this? We are ruled by the lowest common denominator in cultural tastes. The slum-dwellers - or those from the middle and upper middle classes who have the same taste are turning the TRPs of Kyun Ki Saas Bhi Kabhie Bahu Thi. These are the serials where the advertisers are putting their money in.

It is also not a shame that the BBC gave the news on their channel. They too are driven by competition. They have devised a policy of going Indian and covering such an incident. I am not being cynical about BBC, for which I have a huge respect. But a year ago, they would not cover India if 20 people died in a train accident... it is another matter if a skier in the Swiss Alps got trapped and survived, that merited almost live coverage.

The BBC's country head, sales, gave me an interview in which she said they are giving more attention to India, because no fool can ignore India today (she did not mention, it though, but the fact is our leaders are best at the smart talk, our PMs and ministers mouth how great we are as a knowledge superpower, when all we do is menial work (BPOs) for US companies at 1 / 10the prices an American guy would take)

The credit for BBC is it does its work methodically, thoroughly and without any sensationalism, but the rest of it is all business and hardly altruism.

I am in the media business now, in the sense that my job with www.indiantelevision.com is about broadcasting and marketing etc. As jobs go, I find this very exciting, but I do get to see the innards of the damned media. It is an ulcerated intestine where gangrene is just about to set in.

Please brother, do me a favour. I am sick of being in the media, my wife wants to study abroad. Can you take me in for three months out there and see if I can set up a biryani selling shop or something. I truly love cooking and I want to do two things, make sufficient money to take holidays and write my books.

Of course, if you think that you want to start an internet campaign against what reviles you, I am all game, but then, we need to change tactic. I can find the respone email IDs of these crappy news channels in India and then we could garner all our strength to gather just 1,000 friends, who would spend a dedicated 45 minutes at watching the channels and then shaming them with letters on the net.

This is a Gandhian politics on the net. Some years ago, there was dispute between green NGOs and Lufthansa, and the NGO got people to bombard the airline’s email boxes. It hit the compnay so badly since those who were trying E-ticketing, could not because the mail boxes were jammed. The airlines lost a tonne of gold.

If you want to do it this way, and there is a dire need to do so, then I am seriously with you. Let me know.

Lots of love
Mithudada (Sujit Chakraborty)

Sujit will be contributing a media column from this Saturday.