The State of Our Being

In the essay Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, Clifford Geertz quotes Susanne Langer… “certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force, they resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues…” Soon however, “expectations are brought more into balance with actual uses”; the ‘grande idée’ “no longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had”. The anthropologists of course are talking about major intellectual breakthroughs like “second law of thermodynamics, the principle of natural selection, or the organization of means of production”. But gone are the eras of polymaths, of decades of research that went into proving that the world is round. Today, the ‘grand idée’ makes and breaks everyday and is more popularly called #trends. 

Very little research has been conducted on this issue. There is no explanation as to why even well educated, liberal, progressive, intellectual minds are invested in this daily game of cultural Jenga. 

Concepts such as #trends and viral were originally imports from advertising and marketing jargons but nowhere have they seen the vitality like in today’s Indian politics, and journalism. One reason for the delayed but essential liberal-progressive adoption of digital marketing techniques for political agenda could be attributed to the unexpected ‘advertising-campaign’ that resulted in Modi’s win in 2014.  

Nevertheless, in post-Modi India, the great battle fought between the left and the right has only resulted in more Facebook and Insta profiles and more Whatsapp groups and forwards. 

And… #trends!

Recently, we had #farmersmarch, before that it was #sabarimala, and of course #urbannaxal. There are many more. There are world #trends, India #trends, regional/local trends and then of course #trends within specific interest groups like #deepveer or #jatreservation. Sometimes there are words that trend (like woke), sometimes it is song that trends (Kolaveri). Every time, the trend holds within itself the grande idée that promises a revolution teetering on the edge. But the day is done; the #trend is replaced by another #trend. You are still on Facebook. 

Its three days past the #kisanmuktimarch, and it is time to “disentangle ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience (pseudoscience according to Geertz, but for us it will be pseudoactivism) to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise”. After the initial excitement, more sensible views are now becoming more visible. These are not #trends but more like finding ‘needle in the chaff’ and often at the risk of being labeled a digital skeptic who questions everything that’s popular. The sensible and more restrained views agree to the two primary farmer demands - that of loan waivers and right price for farm produce but point out that the leadership of the mobilization have stayed silent on land reforms and have been pushing the recommendations of Swaminathan Committee report to their end without looking at Swaminathan’s report critically. Critically, Swaminathan – also known as the father of green revolution, has encouraged corporate farming and use of pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture which in turn has led to indiscriminate exploitation of water resources for irrigation and has degraded the quality of soil in India. The green revolution has led to a deeper agrarian crisis in the long run and has shifted the focus from food crops to cash crops endangering food security of the country. But once upon a time, green revolution was the #trend, the grand idée. Swaminathan has recently repackaged it as the evergreen revolution to suit better the current times. 

Revolution, and nothing short of it. Porn, is still the most searched content online. That’s how it has stayed, from the beginning. When Cyber Cafes charged over Rs. 50 an hour for a dial up internet service. There is something seductive about technology. Because most of it is secretive, hidden. Like space travel. Today, the 1.5 GB data access per day is Modi-Ambani’s greatest gift to the youth of India. Today we are witnessing unemployment among youth at the highest in last 20 years. Three young people from a Scheduled Tribe jumped in front a moving train in Rajasthan depressed over unemployment in November. 

Every year, just before the wedding season, some or the other celebrity brand endorsers get married to each other. Like setting the stage before rest of the country erupts in a joyous, teary eyed hetero-patriarchal pride. The social media outburst not only helps maintain the balance between tradition and consumerism but also helps hide nightmares like that of Nalgonda’s Pranay. 

This is where social media and journalism merge and it is impossible to tell between NEWS and PROPAGANDA. 

FAKE NEWS, you can still discern, but our dominant culture is defined not by what is reported but rather what is shared.

And who shares it. 

Let me share something(s) with you.

Malini Subramanyam – a journalist was asked to leave Chhattisgarh’s Bastar by right-wing vigilante group Samajik Ekta Manch who used stone pelting, threats and intimidation against the journalist for reporting Indian state’s human rights abuses against the people of the forests of Bastar. 

 

That’s the price a journalist paid for attempting to reveal what is otherwise ‘invisible’ in the media conundrum. Harassment of journalists is nothing new in democracy. Honest political reportage is almost radical activism in a climate of concocted and biased news reports. The murders of Shujaat Bukhari (Editor of Rising Kashmir) and Gauri Lankesh (Editor of Lankesh Patrike), Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist who was behind the Panama expose (many Indians like Amitabh Bachhan featured in the black money leaks) and Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi (Editor of Saudi Arabian Al-Arab News Channel) were condemned by progressive citizens across the world as ‘murder of democracy’.

Journalists who still live to tell the tale struggle against extreme ‘censorship’ and monitoring by media houses themselves for reporting the truth about powerful politicians, businessowners or government officials. Media houses themselves are financed or owned by big corporations ensuring that journalists cannot function independently. There have been too many corporate takeovers, too many editorial resignations, for Indian media to recover its independent voice immediately. Some journalists lost only their job while other media houses who continued reporting unlawful activities were slapped with huge defamation cases against them by big corporates.  
 

Power is impunity. 

Indian journalism was rocked by #metoo allegations against prominent journalists and editors like MJ Akbar, Vinod Dua, Debdutt Ghoshthakur in 2018. Defamation cases against survivors followed. 

The biggest cover-up still remains in the endless chains of murders from Sohrabuddin to Justice Loya. 

No one has a count of the number of deaths in the wake of Vyapam scam. 

Ram Chandar Chhatrapati was the editor of local newspaper Poora Sach (Complete Truth) who first exposed godman Ram Rahim’s rape crimes and died of 5 bullet wounds in 2002.

Regional news have their own flavor. Nothing beats the inimitable style in which journalists report in their local language. Issues reported are often of some immediate context to readers. Power cuts, chain snatching gangs, corruption expose in the building of a road, sex scandals involving local politicians, sex rackets busted in neighbourhood, that’s the desi viral in hinterland India.

It is impossible to tell how much of national or international news trickles down to those pages. As a child I remember the tragic death of astronaut Kalpana Chawla and continuous Kargil War articles that shaped much of our imagination. There is no estimation possible of the amount of regional news that makes it to national news as well. While the Kathua rape case from Jammu received much attention from national media and social media, the outrage over Unnao rape case from Uttar Pradesh slowly withered away.

 

Hindi, on the other hand, serves both as a builder of pan-north-Indian national opinion as well as a language of north Indian regional masses. Accordingly, the writing styles in Hindi media undergo rapid experimentation. If you are a Hindi reader of both regional and (inter)national sensibilities you cannot help but notice how even BBC Hindi reports news in a melodramatic voice imitating the regional voices.  

 

Magazines like Samkalin Teesri Duniya (Contemporary Third World), online news portals like MediaVigil and Bhadas have also contributed to a lot of national Hindi political news reporting and enjoy a wide reach among politically aware readers. Due to shortage of funds or crackdowns by state machinery for reporting the truth, many such independent or people-backed initiatives have died down.

  

It doesn’t make any difference now. News, politics, social media and standup comedy have all become one, merged into one other. There was a time I was presenting shows in All India Radio and we used to be given 5 headlines of news to be read out between the shows. I worked there for a month in 2008. After 2014, AIR started hosting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Mann ki Baat show. AIR also appeared in audio based social media networks like SoundCloud. Sometimes I feel with all this technological progress modern human race has made, where it hid traces of fascism within it? 

Today, it is important to be on social media, to observe who is sharing what, what is published by whom, and before believing in anything, one has to cross check, before acting, even our outrage can wait.

 

Back in the days when I worked in advertising, creative copywriters were paid to think of ideas that could be made viral for brands online. One thought of ridiculous videos, often bordering on shock or crass humour to make content saleable. I often thought in quiet time that advertisements itself are the most widespread virus that have infected the once Open Source internet. In journalism, a story may need planning for months. It might involve identifying leads, negotiating with parties involved in the issue, travelling, often escaping the notice of anyone who does not want a particular story to come out. Journalism involves coming back to the desk, and then endlessly fretting over your report, negotiating again for the balance of truth and pragmatism in a mass publication. Journalism, unlike social media is not just opinion.

P.S. This thing of social media, is just the feeling to run away from everything, you are just surfing on and on, maintaining a link with others yet trying to find an escape from it, like opening up multiple tabs, scrolling, but it is not very easy to find that escape, everything you do, you are being tracked and that feeling of being followed, being stalked stays with you. That is why SEARCH is such an important word. We/you/I are constantly in search of something.

these networks have snatched away our communities from us

think of a spider web

but instead of looking at what it connects look at what it separates

look at each end of the network

you will find an isolated individual.