Call It What You Will

Sabbatical. Phoenix and ash. Thing is, have gotten back to writing, but this time about technology. Will attempt to write here also, although that's easier said that done.

Things have changed, it's been two years. But somethings one can always go back to, like memory-islands from when you were three years old. Or old sticky habits.

Let's see.

Endha Channel Madam?

Post removed. The prose lacked poetry

Stung!

Sting operations of a certain kind leave a bad taste in my mouth. I dislike performing acrobatics with 'hidden cameras' just so I can prove I can be a brave reporter. A sting operation is not merely about bravery - it is valid to conduct one if larger public good is at stake and if credible information can come from nowhere else. This other day, we were covering a (by now) much-publicized issue of the patenting of an international drug by a pharmaceutical company. We decided to look into a certain hospital's interest in the case when a few facts did not seem to tally.

It is an open secret that most of the drugs distributed for free by this hospital are sourced from the pharmaceutical firm in question. It was important to get the facts; it would be lucky if we could get someone to substantiate them. This hospital's relevance to the story the reporter was covering was, by then, nil. It added at best a very small dimension to the politics of patenting. But. In a journalist's world a sound bite is paramount. And if you are a television journalist, Sound Bite is God. So we had to get a doctor to discuss the case on camera. Any journalist totting a video camera should know that he/she is a spectacle wherever he goes and can not get people to talk about vegetable prices without some persuasion, leave alone cases that are sub judice. We should have just left. We didn't. We tried to milk the opportunity. The doctor knew we wanted to talk about the case and revealed nothing. We knew the doctor knew, but continued to push. It became one pointless exercise. And no earth-shattering information was to be uncovered either.

Lesson learnt. I'm not going back into sting without writing for myself a personal template about sting operations.

On Communication

Interesting discussion in class - Does TV push us to believe that we are part of a larger audience, and in turn, does radio communicate exclusively with 'an' individual even from among a group of listeners?

This is an Englishman's question. My instructor from London. He believes radio communicates to an individual, while TV, by construction, plays to an audience of more than one. He uses the example of singing to oneself while driving. He says we find ourselves singing along to a song in the radio, but not to the TV (mostly). This, he justifies, is because we are conscious of our co-viewers while watching TV. This comes from the movie-watching experience, he says, during which the whole family sits together. TV viewing is an extension of movie-watching, which is why we share the viewing-experience with the others in the room, he says.

Is this also because the radio necessitates the use of only one sense, making it that much more closer to the contemplating mind and the individual; whereas, one uses both sight and hearing in TV-viewing therefore pushing thinking (and the individual) to the background?

Or, does he feel this way because in his country, people listen to the radio in their cars, in their personal spaces? Is listening to radio an essentially cultural experience? In India, radio-listening (the pre-FM period) has always been a collective activity, with a crowd gathered around an old Murphy Valve Set in rapt attention. In this context, what happens to the argument that radio is a personal experience?

Ergo, communication can never have one definition, nor should one attempt to generalise it to include it in a 'global' basket.

A Lonely Furrow

Sir, I want to discuss something-

I am not talking out of disillusionment. I am only predicting a trend that I see coming. Problems will become 'stories', sadness will be viewed from within 'good frames' and the journalist will lead a problem-free existence.

Journalism has now become a dazed-eye pursuit of grand parties and business lunches. Where you associate everything with terms learnt at college. Where it becomes a career-option for young women and men who toured with NGOs the 'tsunami-affected villages', 'tribal areas with chikungunya' in their final year at college. Where everything is labelled and branded. Sir, this is not journalism. For that matter, in my opinion, the cause or reason that journalism pursues, has no name.

Are journalists trying to define and bracket everything when they use words like 'socialism', 'reconciliation', 'hyper-reality'? Are journalists looking at the world's problems from the framework of these definitions? Are they at all ready to step out from the intellectual safety of these words, into reality? These words don't mean anything to the villager in Bilgaon whose hut was submerged when the Narmada overflowed. We don't need any of these words to understand this villager's troubles. On the contrary, these words only further alienate us from him.

We lament that P.Sainath is ploughing a lonely furrow; we refuse to see that this furrow is lonely because the rest of us refuse to join him there.

The Baron and his young nubile women

You think some time in the near future all news-presenters will start looking like stewardesses? Bright clothes, brighter lipsticks, coy smiles, fake concern on their faces? With as many news-channels as there are private airlines, are we standing on the brink of a How-to-make-news-in-5-minutes revolution?

On a bus back home

What I miss most when I'm not here are the Phirangs. Phirangs with holes in the pink colored dhoties they wear, phirangs with Jasmine strings tied to the rear-view mirrors of the rickety scooters they ride, phirangs with the Yoga-mats, and that one phirang especially, who I see everday- with the orange flower stuck daintily behind his ear.

Also I miss the shopkeepers. These are the world's best. They only look at your hands and feet. Whatever it is that you are buying. They only look at your hands and feet.

The thing about this city's people is their strong sense of You and I. Where you and I are different people; where you and I play the same game by different rules. Where 'I' live here. You may live here too, but You dont belong here.

I was knocked out of my senses yesterday by the scent of Nishagandhi at the city's gates.