The tyranny of perception management. Only a few hours after she gave birth, Kate Middleton posed with a big smile for the cameras with her baby daughter in her arms. Her flawless, yellow dress hugged her perfect, postpartum body and as she cooed over the baby and waved at the invisible crowds, you forgot what it must have cost her to dress up for one more photo op with her husband.
Everything is a photo op today. Even an earthquake. And not surprisingly, a certain section of the Indian media has been criticised for being insensitive towards Nepal, as it turns the devastated nation into just another TRP trigger.
There is something about the flash of a camera that alters human behaviour chemically. A camera reminds us of our marrow deep desire to be remembered, to be frozen in time. And that is why news anchors whose job it is to moderate news, turn themselves into news bytes. So an Arnab turns himself into the loud, sweaty mouthpiece of the nation, Barkha Dutt holds hands with Leslee Udwin while she defends the “narrative around MY country,” Rajeev Masand wants you to know how many stars HE is going with while rating a film.
But then with the democratisation ushered in by the Internet, for every opinion, there is a counter opinion and every one wants THEIR viewpoint to be registered.
In the hurry to be heard and share and be shared and be followed, sometimes lines are crossed and insults traded between all sorts of unlikely adversaries ranging from the master marketeer of selfhood, Chetan Bhagat and the deliciously funny Twinkle Khanna to the crass and intentionally offensive KRK and the always ready to bite a bait, Anurag Kashyap.
It is all entertainment. It is all good fun.
Even the viral video featuring Radhika Apte is just a trending hashtag in the final analysis. Regardless of who said what, the fact is that lakhs of people watched the clipping and violated her sense of dignity with hungry clicks.
A television actress on the other hand wrote an open letter to Shonali Bose accusing her for sexualising CP patients in Margarita With A Straw as if sexuality was something dirty and should not be considered to be a part of a physically disabled woman’s life. It is this kind of a mindset that accepts the overt sexualisation of heroines in item songs but cannot stand honest lovemaking on screen between two women or two men or even between a man and a woman. The kind of mindset that leads to tragic marriages between men and women with different sexual orientations and brings the long suppressed angst of an unloved wife out on a Facebook wall in a suicidal note.
What havoc personal tweets and even Whatsapp messages can cause was demonstrated by the ugly spats between Sunanda Pushkar and a woman she presumed to be her rival, just days before her death while all the pathbreaking work IAS officer DK Ravi did was overtaken by his presumed infatuation for a colleague and the number of times he had called her and messaged her.
Technology builds bridges for sure but it also makes everything accessible, even the darkest spaces in people’s lives, their shame, their secrets, their pain and their losses. Be it the victim of a riot or an accident who is asked by a reporter, “So how did you feel?” to Facebook and Twitter wars, we have forgotten the basic human lessons of good manners, discretion and decorum. We have forgotten how to hold our peace, shut our mouths and our WiFi networks; and live in a space where every thought is not meant for public consumption and people do not go viral, but live offline without the hunger to be somehow always be acknowledged by the faceless millions, so that they, for a shortlived instant, can become a face in the crowd.
with The New Indian Express Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.
This just nailed it. A few days ago I was watching a TV reporter film an old couple in Nepal dig some useful items from their house, I wish they could lend a helping hand rather than the false rhetoric about it. How many journalists in Nepal offered even an hour of volunteer help?
Since yesterday the world is taken over by the validity of Salman verdict,so either you are for it or against it and anything else makes you an online untouchable.
Always love your to the point and hard-hitting posts.