musings after a holiday

I’m sitting down to write anything after such a long time that I can feel a certain excitement and nervousness in my thoughts. It’s surely been a while.

I was home the entire last week, and got to see after a long time what are the popular television shows that occupy most of the Hindi speaking households in the North. There are some very well produced shows, while most are just run of the mill sensationalist and hyper-melodramatic family serials.

Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate seems to be doing very well, and while many are very quick to label him an opportunist and that he is merely repeating the same problems that everybody knows that India is facing, it is really refreshing to see such an eminent personality bring them into the national limelight. If it takes Aamir’s superstardom to get the average television viewing Indian to face the grim realities of our society, he has all my support.

Indians love patting themselves on the back, and our collective insecurities and touchiness are stuff of legend. When an eminent non-Indian personality criticizes our country or our society or any of our mannerisms, we become extremely offended and our English media goes to town drumming up its sensationalism. At the other side, when a famous non-Indian (preferably Caucasian) personality or celebrity praises India or Indians, it becomes national headlines. Our love for a white man’s praise is amazing, and so is our hurt when we aren’t liked.

The reason I state this is because when we like patting ourselves on our backs, we tend to pretend most of our problems do not exist. In fact, even when they do, they tend to become great media sensationalist stories. For example, thousands of bore wells are dug across India without permission and they greatly deplete that region’s underground water reserves, but bore well stories only surface when a child gets stuck in them, and after a while, is either rescued or dies.

Last week at home I realized that everybody is hooked into television for good or for bad. Horoscopes are very popular on vernacular television, and every Hindi ‘news’ channel has their in-house Pandit ji or shastri ji or Guru ji with the day’s forecasts, and solutions to various problems in life.

Looking at television, I have always wondered how in the world does an average Indian have so much appetite for politics and news. There are dozens of news channels in every language, and while many of them have become infotainment channels, most are still content to simply report every big and small political and human interest story as if it is the most sensational event in humanity to have taken place at that moment.

The parlays for the election of the President, the Vice President, and many other office bearers have been successfully turned into political potboilers by all those involved. For the media, nothing pleases them more than to see conspiracy theories and politicians going at each other on each and every decision that needs to be taken in the country.

The politician themselves, well, we know love their limelight. It’s actually very sad to see how much Indian politics has degenerated into something crude, unprofessional, and very unbecoming of a country that doesn’t stop boasting about its largest democracy. I am beginning to realize that when it comes to our democracy and political systems, I think all our lives we are fed with superlatives, such as our human demographics, our voting systems, our election structures, but I doubt if a vast majority of Indians have ever looked objectively at our political system and ever tried to understand it. Children have a subject called civics, clubbed with history for the most part, that is supposed to teach them about our political structures, our rights and responsibilities, our constitution, our national bird and animal etc, but I do not think we have any understanding of our political system. For example, India’s stance on foreign trade, GM foods, IPR, international relations etc, are things that are best left to a select few in the Government, and most Indians aren’t even aware of what they mean. In fact, for the most part, being a part of democracy, many times what the politicians think the people want goes completely against what the country needs.

Indian diplomacy is one area where I feel there is a glaring and dangerous gap between what is right for the country versus what the masses think is right. For one, the political class of India has a deep seated belief that Indian Muslims sympathise with other Muslims even if they are tyrants and enemies. I really believe this is not true, but there are many instances where the Government of India puts the safety and security of this country at grave risk only because it believes that it is appeasing the sensibilities of Indian Muslims.

However, for the national media, I think national security has become a game, and given the fireworks that the average Indian gets to see on television, I really doubt they even fathom the gravity of putting our national security at risk. We are used to being killed by terrorists, but if the enemies or traitors of this country manage to wipe out not hundreds but thousands in one go, then what’ll happen? The politicians will begin operation blame game and operation clean up, and the media will pull each other down like crabs in trying to grab the juiciest morsels while shouting itself hoarse, and the common man will discuss it with family and friends and express anger and then wish for God to step in.

Yes, God, that was the other big debate that went on in my head constantly as I saw more and more depressing stories of human trauma and injustice. I’ll leave that for another post.