Penblunt & Hogwash

Television that people deserve

Pinaki has threatened to suspend my column from his blog because I am not taking care to keep in mind that a blog is a universal platform.

He accuses that I am indulging in too much of Indianness… Indian idioms, phrases, characters, analogies, situations… none of which have any universal context and hence is so much gibberish for the international reader.

As a failed author, I had never thought, or realised that I would have an international readership when readers back home have shunned me… rather my publisher has decided that I am not good enough for them, so I may be excused for forgetting that.

But I can only write the way I can, which is poor, but nevertheless can’t help that, can I? So the only recourse left is to provide contextual information as footnotes, as stopping midway and doing that in parenthesis disturbs the thought flow of a puerile intellect.

I have been dwelling (duelling, as well) on the issue of the (Indian) Broadcast Bill, with Gabbar Singh*¹ the Indian minister for information & broadcasting facing off with the broadcasters, who insist that they are mature enough not to breach laws on privacy, obscenity and so forth….

… and in the same breath, do so by showing a former starlet bathing in the nude in a jail bathroom…. What a scoop it was my countrymen! What a mature piece of journalism.

So what was the news in that show? Well,: a jailer had used a spycam to shoot this starlet while she was in jail for terrorism-related charges, and while she was bathing, and this jailer had been suspended.

The justification was that by showing the footage, the news channel would be Breaking News as to well this is the footage for which the jailer had been suspended.

The channel can even go the extent of claiming it was trying to help the criminal justice procedure by showing the footage before the jailer, or a bribed police official did not damage the tape or destroy it!

Well, Gabbar Singh and the broadcasters met last week and well, Gabbar hid his famous pistol under his belt over his pot belly and said: Well, we are with the media and for the media but the media must not maximise profit in the name of freedom of expression.

That is what the media has been doing here in India, the budding ‘soft’ super power, the rising intellectual Sphinx straddling the world from measly BPO units and calling that a knowledge-based economy!

The point is what can you expect when the basis of India’s new found pride is standing on loose gravel? That loose gravel has been created by the political class, which has fostered caste politics, communal partisanism, mythical economic rise, raising hoodlums and murderers to the pedestal of parliamentarians!

Gabbar Singh can shout now, but the media of a country, like its rulers, is what the country deserves.

There are these channels, you know, which pretend to be holier than some others because they also show ‘meaningful’ programmes sometimes, as against those who show ghosts, humans becoming snakes, women beating their husbands in courts with rubber slippers, and so forth.

They say that ‘those other channels’ are ruining business and are fretting and fearing that popular choice swinging the way of ‘those other channels’ the big spenders in the ad world may swing that way too.

These holy channels say that the claims of ‘those other channels’ that the latter are giving what the people are demanding is not true, that the people are being fed rubbish as news and are getting sucked into an environment where rubbish becomes news.

I have been asking these holy channels, why don’t you go for a survey, and find out really how many such people actually watch this as news and how many flip through as a matter of curiosity.

They have not been forthcoming in taking up the offer, so what is the way out?

The only way out for them is now to side with the government and bring in a Code of Conduct for the news channels which would restrict such ghost-rape-human as snake-cow-eating-dog bits as news. Not to speak of starlets bathing in the nude inside jails.

That is where the holy channels face a dilemma, or what is called in one of the Indian languages, Hindi, as a dharamsankat, a crisis of conscience.

What is that dharamsankat?

First, it would amount to dog eat dog meat, because, after all, those other channels are also news channels, so what will the world say?

Secondly, if you gave the government an inch and it started taking miles, and someday impose such severe restrictions that stifles democracy?

Rubbish.

It was only once, during the reign of late Indira Gandhi, former prime minister that for a short period of two years, the government of India had imposed severe press curbs. Once in 60 years of independent India.

India being now the cynosure of world eyes, with the second largest democratic economy, as against the much larger but fettered economy of China, Indian governments in ages to come would not dare to do any such thing.

It is not the decade old Indian news TV industry that is mature, it is the Indian polity that more mature.

The simple truth is, Indian news TV guys are not clear which way to take their content so as to maximise profit, so each one wants to keep all doors open.

For them democracy and rights means, we shall do what we want on TV screens, and we shall fight within ourselves… the government will only be allowed to sit in the gallery and watch a country being taken down a colossal content sewerage pipe!

Footnote:

*¹ Gabbar Singh is a film character from what is called an evergreen Indian film, Sholay, in which he is a bandit and goes about terrorising common people. The reference is to the Indian information and broadcasting minister (legitimately; but in a roughshod manner) brining one cricket channel and several others to their knees in the recent year.