So here is the overwhelming thing. It is the anniversary of 1984 riots. It was Aishwarya Rai’s birthday yesterday and it is Shahrukh Khan’s birthday today and on top of that.. Bond..James Bond is wowing audience worldwide. So the media is in a tizzy trying to keep up. Why am I clubbing the 1984 riots with frothier headlines? Because for the media..it is all the same. Anniversaries of genocides command as much or perhaps a little less attention than star birthdays and mega releases. I have written enough about both Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan on this site and have nothing new to say so that leaves me with Bond. I have not seen the film. Maybe, something is wrong is with me but the joy has gone out of the movies for me. I no longer feel thrilled at the prospect of sacrificing my morning sleep or my late afternoon snooze on a Saturday for a few hours of screen gazing in a multiplex. Watching a movie was once an intensely transfiguring experience and I could watch a film even by myself with just a pop-corn packet for company. Not anymore. I need a very special reason to go and see a film after a whole week of commuting to work. Maybe someday, if I find somebody more passionate than me about films, I will let myself be dragged by the scruff of my neck to the movies.
Tiill then Bond will just have to wait but yes, I have written many many times in various publications including this one about the 1984 riots. They feature in my book Perfect Eight as well. It always was and is still hard for me to comprehend that we live in a world where thousands of innocent people can be killed with naked impunity and nothing stops, nothing changes, no one gets affected except for those who saw their loved ones being hacked and going up in flames. It beats me that we remember 1984 only on its anniversary. That we do not hang our heads in shame, that this episode like many others in post Partition India is not a gnash on our collective conscience. The frightening thing is not just that communal riots, politically orchestrated or otherwise routinely erupt, murders in broad day light go unnoticed, misogynist politicians spew garbage against women, court cases linger on for decades without giving any closure to victims, a Ruchika Girhotra becomes a faded Facebook campaign, acid attack victims find neither the law nor the judiciary on their side, farmers commit mass suicides while an industrialist builds a 40-storey edifice for a family of four in the heart of Mumbai. The frightening thing is not that these things happen more and more frequently but that they do not affect us any more.If we don’t know about it, it doesn’t matter, If we do know, it still doesn’t matter.
The real violence is not in an act of violence but in the apathy that allows it, condones it, watches it from the sidelines, shrugs and goes on. This apathy is the reason why we as a nation are in heaps of moral, political and every kind of trouble. We are more invested in the drama and the thrill of a new sting operation, a new episode of Breaking News everyday than in taking stock. Even in tragedy, there must be enough entertainment value to keep the viewers tuned in. Unless there is drama, the news anchors do not get excited, the debates on news hours do not get virulent and the TRPs do not go up. Sometimes news reports look and sound no different than the crime shows on TV that sensationalise murders and gender crimes.
And yet more than 3000 deaths in the 1984 genocide have only sporadically occupied the centre-stage in media discussions.and were once even infamously explained away as a reaction to the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The real statistics summing up just how many were killed during what was organised violence will never be known now because there are thousands of stories that the media has no time to hear, our judiciary has no time to document and successive governments have shown no interest in. Another anniversary of the 1984 riots has come and gone. After a few token tributes, the TRP wagon will move on. In search of fresh blood.
Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is an RJ, hosts a daily Ghazal show, runs unboxed writers, is the editor of Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-9380032870/p/itmdf87fpkhszfkb?pid=9789380032870&_l=A0vO9n9FWsBsMJKAKw47rw–&_r=dyRavyz2qKxOF7Yuc ) and an artist.