Dumb and Dumber

 

While reading late journalist/editor Vinod Mehta’s memoir Editor Unplugged, published in 2014 and a sequel to his earlier memoir Lucknow Boy,  one is astonished to see the cockiness of TV news channels in the pre-Modi days. Mehta, whose entire four-decade-old career spanned through the print medium starting from the ancient linotype era, had a love-hate relationship with the TV news channels. 

He used to be a reluctant guest at some of the panel discussions on TV, but savoured the ‘face recognition’ it offered among the general public. He, however, claims that he will never trade his position as a print publication editor for that of a TV anchor.

Mehta chides Indian TV news anchors for lacking nuance while dealing with the complexities of politics, unlike their British and American counterparts, but grudgingly acknowledges that TV new channels have changed the citizen-politician relationship and made the latter more accessible to the aam aadmi. He also lauds TV channels for throwing light on the day-to-day hassles and cruelty experienced by the unempowered class.

A case in point was the brutal gangrape of a Delhi woman in 2012, now known as the Nirbhaya case. The saturation coverage by TV news channels ensured that the issue never got relegated to a statistic and the perpetrators got punished. The victim’s family hailed from a lower middle-class background. Various TV news channels, especially the vernacular ones, have also highlighted the woes faced by the urban poor in metro cities and the pathetic conditions of slums.

TV news reporters back then were very aggressive and never hesitated from shoving the mic in front of those in power and posing tough questions. During the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai and the numerous corruption allegations that the then UPA government faced, the TV journalists raised pertinent questions that had put the Manmohan Singh government on the mat and it had to pay a heavy price during the 2014 general elections.

But after the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance government came to power in 2014, the mindset of TV news reporters and media houses has undergone a sea change. There has been a total meltdown of the combativeness among the TV anchors with most of them toeing the government line. 

They can be now broadly classified into two categories – lap dogs and guard dogs. The former see no wrong in the government and sing praises day in and day out, and totally blank out any criticism or dissent. They willingly and unabashedly work as the propaganda arm of the government.

The second types also carry out the above functions, but in addition, they strain every nerve to discredit and nip in the bud whatever little dissent is left in the country. Former NDTV India anchor Ravish Kumar, one of those honourable exceptions who chose not to join the lap-dog-guard-dog herd, had coined the term Godi Media (media sitting in the lap of establishment) and it soon gained wide credence.

The conduct of mainstream leading television stations during the recent farmers’ agitation and earlier unrests will surely make Mehta turn in his grave. They were busy looking for a sliver of opportunity to discredit the protestors, look for a foreign conspiracy angle, and dub the protesters as anti-national. They never dared shove the mic in front of any ruling party neta to ask some hard questions.

This slavish docility is not confined to TV news channels. Many newspaper columnists have become circumspect and resort to wishy-washy stands on various issues. The same guys had no fear of taking on the Prime Minister and the government during Manmohan Singh’s tenure and before. 

Self-censorship is now a byword for most publications and it is there at all levels - right from the reporter to editor to proprietor. Hence spinning the narrative in the favour of the ruling party is the new credo. Otherwise, government ads stop coming or, even worse, they enter the bad books of state-run investigative agencies. 

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Food For Thought

 

Kunal Vijaykar must be a worried man. Who would have imagined that his rather innocuous TV series on restaurants across India, will turn out to be a vital ingredient for a political storm? In fact, Vijaykar has done many political satire gigs with Cyrus Bharucha for The Week That Wasn't and The News That Wasn't, but stayed clear of any major controversies.

The programme in question was his visit to a restaurant named ‘Silly Souls’, run by Union Minister Smriti Irani’s daughter Zoish. It looked like one of those fine dining restaurants located in suburban Goa, which also calls itself a “Southeast Asian & Italian Restaurant and Bar” offering an eclectic fare ranging from seafood to pork to beef.

The programme got aired without much ado a few months ago and the minister later was quoted by a website saying she was proud of her daughter’s achievements. Trouble broke out when the restaurant got caught up in a controversy regarding its bar licence. It was issued in the name of a person who died a year ago.

This was a Godsend opportunity for the Congress party and it was quick to fire potshots at Irani. She tried to deny the allegations and even held a press conference to say that her daughter was a college student, and the Congress party was doing all this because she had taken on the Gandhi family. The presser got wide coverage in the government-friendly mainstream media. 

But all her spirited defence came unstuck thanks to Vijaykar’s video and Irani’s own earlier statement praising her daughter for her entrepreneurship. Her detractors are having a field day sharing these two widely on social media.

Her supporters, meanwhile, are a bit wary to back her as firstly they see her on a weak wicket with she herself endorsing the restaurant, and secondly, the issue involves alcohol, beef and pork - not kosher to their saatvik sensibilities.

People generally steer away from politics and crime reporting and opt for food and lifestyle reporting to keep controversies at bay. But no such relief for Vijaykar - His food video has become an innocent cause for a political blood sport.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Women On the Forefront

Well-known filmmaker Sudhir Mishra recently said he will be making again Yeh Woh Manzil To Nahin taking into account the current ferment among the student community in the country over the CAA-NRC agitation.

Yeh Woh Manzil... was a haunting film on student politics released in the 1980s. The movie is about three old men who come to attend a college's golden jubilee function after many decades. They had studied there in the pre-independence era and were involved in a botched bomb attack and double-crossed one of their comrades. They never revisited this town after completing their courses and went on to build their careers and were fairly successful.

All their lives they are haunted by the guilt of betrayal, and on the campus, it is further stoked by a series of incidents - when they come across the place where their friend was gunned down by the police; an old professor who immediately recognizes them and the incident, forcing them to beat a hasty retreat; and the female friend of the dead comrade who confronts them.

They come face to face with the current tussle between two groups of students - one led by an idealist student leader and the other by the son of a local industrialist, who leads a band of thugs. They decide to throw their weight behind the idealistic student leader in order to exorcise their guilt.

If Mishra were to make a film on today's student politics it will have a tectonic shift in terms of gender. In the 1980s film probably the only two female characters - one was the brief appearance of the woman friend of the dead comrade and a freelance journalist (played by Sushmita Mukherjee). In the new version Mishra will have to allot women prominent roles, if not the lead role itself.

Right from the early days of protest women have been on the forefront. Whether it is Jamia Milia Islamia University women students leading a march, protecting fellow male protesters from police brutality, handing out roses to the police, or the sit-in in Shaheen Bagh and lastly the surprise appearance of Deepika Padukone at a protest meet in Delhi, when her fellow 'A' list stars maintained a deafening silence, to list a few incidents.

They are taking up their roles with aplomb. Whether it is making fiery speeches or being the lead slogan shouters, holding witty posters, they are confidently defiant. This is something a Savitribai Phule or Ishwara Chandra Vidyasagar would have felt proud of.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried to give the current agitation a communal spin by saying the protestors can be identified with their clothes, but it evoked only funny cartoons and memes. 

The protestors came in all shapes and dresses - with or without headscarf, armed with Tricolour and Ambedkar portrait. Some with children in tow. They sounded confident while talking to TV cameras and minced no words while stating their views.

However, journalist Neha Dixit claims it is not an overnight phenomenon, nor a one-off case. She claims it has been building up from Nirbhaya protest days in 2012 and since then girl students have been hitting the streets for various protests, including pinjra tod and #Metoo movements. In many cases they have taken to streets in the face of family opposition. Hence there is nothing to feel surprised about.

While the mainstream media, especially servile TV channels, tried to ignore to protests or tried to paint the protesters in seditious and communal colours, it failed to stick. Many of these channels ran opinion polls on CAA hoping that bhakts and bots will bring in the numbers to show the protesters in negative light. But even they failed and many of these polls suffered a premature 'take-downs'.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

Article 15: Holding a Mirror

Anubhav Sinha's Article 15 lives up to Cesar A. Cruz dictum “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” For those who believe that caste is history this movie will be a rude awakening, and those who have to deal with casteist slurs, innuendos or even violence this will provide a small token of comfort that caste has finally reached the mainstream cinema.

The movie is an English August on steroids. While in Upmanyu Chatterjee's novel an urbanized, freshly minted IAS officer Agastya Sen, who probably would have been more comfortable working in an advertising agency or a foreign bank, comes face to face with the idiosyncrasies of rural and subaltern India in a town named Madna, in Article 15 it is a foreign-educated IPS officer Ayan Ranjan's (played by Ayushmann Khurrana) brush with Laalgaon, his first posting.

However, the similarities end there, while Agastya Sen gets 'hazaar baar fucked' by ungovernable Madna and retreats to soft drugs, Ayan decides to take on Laalgaon's storied caste system and its 'santulan' (balance), though the movie's ending seemed too good to be true, considering the way the wheels of justice in our country roll in such cases.

The movie begins with a starry-eyed Ayan who has a romantic notion about the beauty of rural India. He had lived most of his life abroad, as his father was in foreign service, and later studied in Delhi's St Stephen's College.

His drive in a jeep on a road bordering verdant fields with Bob Dylan 'Blowing in the wind' in the background is the brief interlude of innocence and sangfroid, before he comes face to face with rural and semi-urban India's heart of darkness.

A lot has been written about the movie and I don't want to get into the review mode. But there are some poignant scenes that got etched in my mind, thanks to some haunting dialogues written by scriptwriter Gaurav Solanki. 

The most prominent was Dalit activist Nishad's (a loosely based amalgam of Dalit activists Rohit Vemula and Chandrashekar Azad Ravan) remark, "Hum kabhi Harijan ho jate hain, kabhi Bahujan ho jate hain. Bas jan nahi ban paate hain taaki jan gan man me hamari bhi ginti ho” (There are times when they treat us as ‘Harijans’ and at times just as a part of the crowd, only never as individuals with rights).

It is a marginalised person's cri de coeur to be heard and recognised. It is the grim reality of a person whose social status is in the bottom of caste hierarchy and faces abuse from the rest of the society all through his life.

Ayan's WhatsApp exchanges with his girlfriend, a social activist, were quite witty and keeps the idealist Ayan grounded. Her remark, Hero nahi chahiye Ayan.. bas aise log chahiye jo hero ka wait na kare (We need people who don't wait for a hero) was a very telling statement. It has been a malaise afflicting our country for too long.

When he feels alarmed by casteism in rural hinterlands, she provides him a gentle reminder of similar discrimination in urban areas, though in a more subtle manner - of separate plates and utensils for servants.

When Ayan enquires with the scheduled caste Jatav policemen whether he and the victim belong to the same community, his response is classic. The policeman explains his community repairs shoes, while the victims' community rears pigs, hence below them in the caste hierarchy. The people of his community do not even drink water provided by them, he claims. 

This particular conversation brings out what B.R. Ambedkar had succinctly described as 'graded inequality' - the watertight hierarchies of casteism that has survived for centuries.

Ayan's conversation with the contractor who had raped the minors reveals the chilling manner in which rape and murder are used as a weapon to keep the poor in a leash. 

Contractor: Aukaat mein nahi rakhe hain sir.....Kam nahi kar sakte. Ayan: Aur aukaat kya hai? Contractor: Jo hum dete hain vahi aukaat hai sir. (Contractor says unless they are shown their place, they will not work. When Ayan asks what is their 'place' contractor replies it is what we give). It gives away the entitlement culture of the privileged in the society and how they lord over the downtrodden.

Despite many shortcomings and criticism of projecting a Brahmin messiah in Ayushmann Khurrana, Article 15 director wades into the malaise of the caste system, where many of his peers fear to tread.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

The Troll Mantra

Hitting above the belt is a strict no-no. It is a sign of a lack of killer instinct. Anyone doing so will immediately be pink (or saffron) slipped.

Political discourse is meant to be debased. We should see it as a bottomless abyss. The moment people think ‘ok, it can’t get any worse’, we should spring a surprise by plunging to new depths.

Red lines are for the sissies. We should see every such line as a new frontier to be crossed.

Knowledge of choicest expletives should be your second nature, as they form the crucial building blocks of our arguments. Ability to coin new pejorative terms (for example sickular, presstitute) would be an added plus and richly rewarded.

Making the opponents and our readers feel perpetually nauseated should be our all abiding motto and we should work tirelessly with amoralist fervour.

The other elements include a gift for sophistry, whataboutery, and demonization. All these tools should be used as and when the situation demands.

If you or your leader is under attack, try to look for skeletons in the opponents’ closet. If not manufacture one. Referring Postcard News can be handy, make that your home page.

Another time-tested tactic should be to deflect the issue by whataboutery. This who-cast-the-first-stone argument helps in immobilizing opponents and misleading people.

Keep in mind some important dates such as 1947 (Congress raj began) and 1984 (anti-Sikh riots), 1975 (Emergency) and 2014 (the advent of Ram Rajya).

Depending on the context hurl back the questions. If it is on the slow pace of development then ask: ‘What good has happened in the last 70 years since 1947?’. If it is about riots and communal atrocities then ‘Where were you in 1984?’. For matters related to the curtailment of civil liberties ‘Why you did not speak up during Emergency?’.

If none of the above work, then there is Jawaharlal Nehru, the ultimate fail-safe option. Even more than 50 years after his death, India’s first prime minister has the unenviable reputation of being the most invoked scapegoat and demonized for all the ills plaguing the country.

Lastly, to blow one’s own trumpet there is always UNESCO. This UN wing is a low hanging fruit and its officials sitting in distant shores have no idea what all gets concocted under its name and gets lapped up as gospel truth on Indian WhatsApp groups.

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes

#Me Too Maelstrom Mauls Many

Five years ago, when Tarun Tejpal, the editor of Tehelka magazine, was caught pants down for his testosterone fuelled antics with a young colleague and later faced the full glare of social media, I had thought that lucky were those editors and journalists who had carried out similar acts in the pre-internet and typewriter days.

Names of M.J. Akbar and some others (still not outed yet), who were part of press club folklore, came to my mind. During my student days in the late 80s and early 90s Akbar was a big name in journalism and his column ‘Byline' was something we all looked forward to in the now defunct Sunday magazine of Anand Bazar Patrika stable. I also happened to read his book Riot After Riot and a biography on Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru: The Making of India). All this gave me an impression of him being a man of great erudition.

But later in a baffling fashion he chose politics and my respect for him went down a few notches, as I thought it was a great loss for journalism. However during my rookie sub-editor days in Mumbai I got to know that the prodigal was returning to journalism and starting a new paper Asian Age.

When the recruitment happened, the grapevine had it that only 'fast' girls were getting recruited and all key position were occupied by women with very little experience. My respect for him dived many more notches. However, still the general perception was that although he was a 'ladies’ man' he was 'good at his job'.

That was also the time India embraced economic liberalisation and newsrooms also witnessed drastic changes. The editor's age profile became much younger and there were more women joining the profession. The look and feel of newspapers also changed, thanks to better printing technology and headlines became catchier than matter of fact.

The presence of higher number of women and younger workforce was a mixed bag. On one hand it brought about greater gender sensitization (use of misogynist Hindi expletives came down) and the blooming of office romances. But some of the superiors, deeply entrenched in patriarchy, took advantage of the power they enjoyed to treat their junior women colleagues as a fair game. They used this by dangling carrots like dinner invites, junkets and out of turn promotions. Those days sexual harassment redress mechanisms were not even thought of.

Newspaper offices then were closed places and nothing spilled over to the public domain. A Tejpal type incident those days would have been swept under the carpet or settled with mere apology or a transfer.

Managements used to close ranks and observe an incestuous 'code of silence' so that the publications name is not sullied. Even rival newspapers too adhered to this code, keeping in mind the glass houses they all were in. In those pre-cellphone/internet days even gossips never used to travel beyond the confines of office canteens or press clubs.

Internet and social media changed the rules of the game as it now 'follows' us everywhere and now it has also proved that in addition to making contemporary events go 'viral', it can even exhume issues that happened two decades ago to haunt the perpetrators by 'calling out'.

In India #me too fire got noticed nearly an year after US. It has simmered for long and took its own sweet time to become vigorous enough to singe people's reputations. But once actor Tanushree Dutta lit the fire, it has been relentless like the French guillotine and many reputations fell by the wayside.

While some were quite obvious as they wore their playboy selves on their sleeves, but names like Vinod Dua, Jatin Das and others evoked shock and disbelief, as they were considered quite progressive and respectable.

It first started with the film industry and later spread to the English journalism, thanks to a journalist named Sandhya Menon. The first to get caught in its cross hairs was K.R. Sreenivas, the resident editor of a prominent daily, to be followed by some Kolkata and Delhi based journalists.

While their ex-colleagues were coming out with unsavoury details about their peccadilloes, I again wondered whether this #me too will address the elephant in the room or be rest content with having a tilt at bit players.

Finally, the much anticipated happened. Akbar got outed and as expected it opened a Pandora's box. And I must admit that despite being aware of his Casanova ways, the Tweets left me shell shocked. They were far more toxic than the above-mentioned press club gossip, which at the most made him appear as a flamboyant editor with a glad eye for women. 

As per the disclosures, he was a sexual predator on the loose, with no one to question or curb him and he got away with all this for decades. Journalist Saba Naqvi recalling her stint in the Telegraph and without naming Akbar summed him up very well, “He behaved like a village Thakur who set off to claim any young thing that caught his fancy."

Amid all this hoopla there are allegations of witch hunt and not adhering to the due process. While the former cannot be ruled out as a few innocent men may get pilloried for no fault of theirs, the latter point does not hold much water. 

In many disclosures the victims had stated that they had approached sexual harassment redress committees, but no action was taken. At the most the erring employees were transferred, which is just a change of scene for them. The infamous ordeal of Rina Mukherjee a journalist with The Statesman is a case in point. She was terminated for filing a sexual harassment complaint against her news coordinator and had to fight a long drawn legal battle spanning more than a decade.

It is a well known fact that at many media establishments sexual harassment redress committees are mere sinecures of little consequence. So far no media company has taken any drastic action like say Infosys took against Phaneesh Murthy in 2002, when he got embroiled in a sexual harassment case. 

Also Read: Bangalore Short Takes