A Newspaper's Cri de Coeur

I was a part of the daily routine of most households and people used to read me along with the morning tea. I had an air of solemnity as I was holding mirror to the society and highlighting some of its warts. I could make or break reputations or even bring down the governments. A late editor of a leading English daily had once bragged he was holding the second-most important job in the country.

At school, teachers would advise students to read newspapers to improve vocabulary and general knowledge. And diligent civil service aspirants used to pore over my editorials, with dictionary close at hand, to help them with unfamiliar words. In pre-television days I was the ultimate window to the world.

However, right now I am facing an existential crisis and pundits have been writing my obituaries for a while. The combined onslaught of television, internet and WhatsApp forwards have been taking a heavy toll on me.

In the pre-internet days when television was the only threat to newspapers, some enterprising publishers tried to remodel me as primarily an advertising and marketing platform and dumb down on social issues. A famous press baron once even said that news is mere space filler among the advertisements, or words to that effect.

So broadsheets became tabloidized and all pages reeked of a Page 3 feel as newspapers stooped to conquer the yuppy eyeballs by providing them a feel good experience. Those working in the newsrooms started getting reprimanded by their higher-ups - please don't carry such 'downmarket' photos, our newspaper has an upmarket readership.

The coming of the internet further eroded my advertisement catchment pool. Thanks to some online classified listing platforms such as Olx and Craigslist, our clientele for classified ads disappeared. For the customers it no longer made sense to go to a newspaper office to submit an ad, pay per word and then wait for days to see it published - when all this could now be done at the click of a mouse and often at free of cost.

Remember those pages and pages of matrimonial ads on Sundays: Highly educated US-settled Iyengar Brahmin engineer looking for a 'fair' bride of the same caste, or a fair, well-educated, cultured Goud Saraswat Brahmin girl looking for an alliance; intespersed with words like 'decent' marriage (a sly hint that dowry will be offered) or 'simple' marriage (no dowry). To digress a little these columns gave a glimpse of myriad castes and other imponderables such as gotra and manglik that come into play while fixing marriages in India.

These ads too started porting off to those dime a dozen matrimonial sites such as Jeevan Saathi, Bharat Matrimony and some to more granular caste-specific sites like Nair Matrimony or even those catering to divorcees like SecondShaadi.com.

Amid all this disquiet on the advertisment front, subscriptions were also on a free fall despite dirt cheap rates. The predatory pricing by some leading players ensured that newspapers remained even cheaper than the daily chai-sutta expense of its readers.

Even in the households where I had entry, it was a coffee-table-to-attic existence, with every family member regarding me as part of the furniture. I was considered way too 'low-tech' and taxing to read because of the falling attention spans of people and the younger generation in particular. There is now even talk of a 'post-text society' dominated by videos and memes.

Those travelling by trains or buses used to carry me to kill time, but now they have their smartphones to stream them music videos and movies. Anyone without a headphone during travel is now considered a Philistine.

While this death in slow motion has been going on for years, Covid-19 pandemic has appeared like one of those masked movie villains who surreptitiously enter the ICUs in the dead of night to pull the ventilator plugs.

My entry suddenly got forbidden to apartments and households. The resident welfare association unclejis saw me as a disease carrier. For many I was a good riddance, as they were happy in their post-truth bubbles - with the daily fix of dubious WhatsApp forwards, plus 9 pm prime time debates aired by North Korean channels.

Newspaper circulations started getting reduced to a fraction of what they were in the pre-Covid era. The smaller ones started shutting down while the larger ones started cutting down on pages, print runs and ultimately jobs. Losing a job during lockouts is the unkindest cut, but for many journalists and other newspaper employees it is the new normal.

In the post-Covid world the newspaper industry will be reduced to its skeletal form and probably the worst hit will be ground reporting with journalistic checks and balances. This will only mean ceding the ground to fake and unverified news, which has already overrun most social media platforms.

The television channels gave up ground reporting long ago and settled for a less expensive model of prime time anchor and panelists engaged in a debate, which at best is a staged circus with very little journalism and loads of propaganda thrown in. Certainly not a good model to follow and not at all conducive to democracy.

Only a handful of publications, mostly online, may keep the flag of journalism, as we knew it, aloft. But for how long is a big question.


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Indrani Mukherjea Saga: Reality TV Trumps Soap

Real life has trumped reel, or fact has outwitted fiction in its own game. The Sheena Bora murder mystery is turning out to be far racier than the wildest imagination of Bollywood script writers and TV news channel owners are already feeling giddy and wet dreaming about record-breaking spikes in TRP. 

The fact that the prime characters happen to be a high profile family and the arch villain Indrani Mukherjea, with no wealth or lineage, had reached this social upper crust by using her social climbing skills has added a dash of pizzazz to the tale.
 
However had some Bollywood film maker made a film based on a similar story line before this infamous incident unfolded on our TV screens, it would have been riddled with hurdles. First of all not many producers would have been intrepid enough to finance such a macabre script, with no heroes and easily more than fifty shades of villainy. In the next stage it would have run into trouble with censors, who would have advocated many cuts to make it Bharatiya sanskriti compliant.
 
After release the critics would have made a mincemeat out of it. Probably this is how Rajeev Masand would have reviewed the movie:

It would be gross understatement to say that the movie plot is too convoluted: A second wife of her third husband is charged along with her second husband of killing her daughter from her first husband who was having affair with her third husband's son from his first wife.
 
The plot is riddled with holes and leaves many things unexplained. The third husband has no idea whether the murdered girl is his wife's sister or her daughter. The girl goes missing for two years and everybody in the extended family has readily believed that she had gone to US.
 
The police also come across as bumbling idiots who do not pursue the case after stumbling across a body cut to pieces and packed in a suitcase. Surely the script writer has not done his homework and was way too lazy to tie up such loose ends.
 
A boring feast of gore and deceit. Watch it only at your peril. I would go with half out of five for this tedious mind numbing crime mystery marred by a brain dead script!!
 
But the recent events have proved that truth can be far spicier than fiction! And the harried middle class has found a new 'fix' to escape from their daily drudgery by gawking and tut-tutting at the permissiveness of the amoral rich on their 56-inch LCD screens.

To cash on this sentiment Bollywood scriptwriters may be busy pounding on their laptops, over numerous cups of 'cutting chai' or 'chhotta pegs', to churn out a blockbuster based on this 'true story'. Hopefully critics would take a more considerate view towards the bizarre twists and turns in the plot once these films are released.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat