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Fwd: Indian print media:critique: msg#00011
culture.india.sarai.reader
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Subject: |
Fwd: Indian print media:critique |
In the way things are, this was forwarded to me. Good comparative
media reading.
best
M
Begin forwarded message:
It's dressing-down of Indian print media. I mostly agree with the
view.
Cautionary tale By Ayaz Amir (Dawn 2 Dec 05)
IT takes a good two hours in the morning going through a stack of
Pakistani newspapers. It takes about half an hour to go through the
leading English dailies that you get in Delhi. I have had to read
them — newspaper-reading being a habit that members of the tribe
carry with their luggage — these past three or four days (invited
to Delhi for one of those seminars...what else?...in which worthy
subjects are discussed) — and I can say with confidence that I
don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world.
You read them and you get to know more than you probably would want
to about happenings in the film or fashion industry. But if you
want to know a bit about events in the rest of the world you would
have to seek some other fountain of knowledge.
You can’t blame television for being chatty and entertainment-
driven because that’s how television sells. But you would expect
newspapers to be slightly different. No such luck with Indian
papers which, driven by the great forces of the market, have been
dumbed down to the point where they are indistinguishable from any
other consumer product. Small wonder if they are marketed in the
same way and as aggressively as, say, a brand of washing powder or
the latest cell phone from Nokia or Samsung.
There’s no point in singling any newspaper out. By and large, they
all look like tabloids out of Bollywood, devoted primarily not to
anything as gross or insulting as national or international issues
but to some form of entertainment. After the information revolution
and in the age of globalization we were all supposed to be more
‘empowered’. Is such dumbing down the new road to empowerment?
In Pakistan we are supposed to be overly obsessed with politics.
Newspapers are full of political reporting. Columns and articles
often sound as if they are one long wail about the national
condition. Indeed, we have turned moaning and the pursuit of
cynicism into national art forms.
Sounds morbid, doesn’t it? Yet comparing it to the Bollywoodization
of the Indian media, the conscious pursuit of blandness and
mindless entertainment even by such standard-bearers of the Indian
press as the Times of India and the Hindustan Times, you wonder
which is the more insidious, such over-the-top passion as to be
found in Pakistan or the complete loss of passion, at least as
mirrored in the press, you see in India?
You have to admit, it’s a neat arrangement. The masses are
entertained — constant entertainment or a form of it the new opiate
of the masses, much more effective than religion in many respects —
while the governing class and the great captains of commerce and
industry have things their own way at the top.
This principle the later Caesars observed to great effect in Rome
where, when the empire started falling on hard times, they saw to
it that the Roman rabble and indeed even the more responsible
citizens were kept occupied and entertained by never-ending
festivals and gladiatorial contests, so that no one thought too
hard about the intrigues and power games being played behind palace
walls.
Do the mass of American citizens think too hard about what is
happening in their country or what their country is doing to the
rest of the world? That George Bush and the cabal around him — a
more dangerous set of characters than the world has known for some
time — could drag their country into a war on the basis of the most
transparent lies doesn’t say much for the collective intelligence
and awareness of the American people or indeed of their chosen
representatives in Congress.
The same Roman principle is at work here, the masses stuffed to
overflowing on a diet of consumerism and entertainment while the
leaders of government go about their business undisturbed. If
questions are now being asked about the Iraq war it’s not primarily
because of a rush of any new-found awareness but because the
seriousness of the Iraqi resistance is more than anyone in
Washington had bargained for, and because the lies of the Bush
administration are finally catching up with it.
I hope I am not stretching the point when I say much the same
dynamic can be seen in India where the media has managed to do two
things very successfully: (1) brushed some very serious national
problems under the carpet, to the point where there is not much
national or international awareness about them; and (2) celebrated
a story of Indian progress which partly is very real but which also
relies heavily on fiction.
Entire regions of India — UP, Bihar, to name only two states — are
in the grip of serious lawlessness and there is not much that
anyone has been able to do about it. But sitting in Delhi or
reading the Indian press you won’t get this impression. Only when
something out-of-the-ordinary happens, a high profile killing, for
instance — although in India’s wild east even this is no longer
surprising — does it figure in the headlines, otherwise not.
There is a full-fledged insurgency in the northeast — Mizoram,
Nagaland, Manipur, etc — but you won’t get to know much about it if
your sole source of information is the Indian press.
More serious than these two problems is something potentially more
dangerous. From the Nepal border in the north right down to Andhra
Pradesh in the south, a wide swathe of territory almost cutting
through this huge country is in the effective control not of any
government, central or state, but the Naxalite movement. This is a
mind-boggling circumstance, about 160 districts of the country —
the total number of districts in Pakistan being 105 — outside
governmental control. But again the Naxalite movement doesn’t
figure much in Indian discourse.
True, India’s stability or integrity is not under threat. India’s
very size is the biggest shock absorber of all, its capacity to
absorb problems of this nature or magnitude commensurate with its
bulk. Still, to insist, or convey the impression, that nothing
troubles the Indian heartland is to close one’s eyes to reality. As
already stated, the Indian media performs this pigeon act very
successfully.
India is coming of age as an economic power. It is also flexing its
muscles as a major military power. We all know the story and the
statistics. Indeed, talking to an educated Indian who wears his
patriotism on his sleeve (there being no shortage of this kind
because being relatively new to high-power status, Indians tend to
be touchy about different aspects of their nationhood) one stands
in danger of getting an earful of these statistics.
But it is also a fact that the benefits of growth are not evenly
spread, roughly 30 per cent of the Indian population enjoying the
fruits of progress while 70 per cent is still trapped in different
versions of poverty.
While the rich-poor divide is true of most societies, the great
success of the Indian media lies in obscuring this distinction.
Watching Indian TV or reading Indian papers one could be forgiven
for believing that the entire Indian population, one billion
strong, is living the high life. This feat the media has achieved
by trivializing national discourse. The biggest temple of all in
India is dedicated to none of the older gods in the Indian pantheon
but to the new god of entertainment.
The cautionary tale is for us as we move forward on the road to
democracy (a journey which would be made easier infinitely if
Pakistan’s ruling general, fourth in a line of patriarchs the
country could have done without, is persuaded to shed his fears and
his uniform). If we can get democracy without lowering the standard
of national discourse or without the pursuit of trivia, that would
be a goal worth striving for.
Enjoy this Diwali with Y! India Click here
Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110 054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net
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