Saakhi: When Media Reduces War to a Video Game, News to Some Stale Jokes
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes about what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author, and chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
In a period of lawlessness, your brain suddenly splits. It begins to experience time in two dimensions. One is the subjective time driving your personal life, your personal ambitions, dreams, and reflective abilities. The other is the vast historical time as experienced by races and generations before you. That as you read about it, appears to be a huge juggernaut at once ruthless and uncaring of individuals and their hopes or aspirations each time it begins its journey on some path planned by destiny.
Can we accept, as media persons, that leadership, time and again, is bringing forth vast changes in all spheres, including in your profession, making you feel small, redundant, and full of self-doubt? The laws proliferate and change so fast that every one of us suspects he or she may be breaking a half-understood new law somehow. And so when a citizen we know to be totally innocent of the charges levelled against him/her is hauled and "held back for long questioning", by authorities, our first reaction is to wonder even if momentarily that maybe he has broken a law somewhere along the way. Authoritarianism feeds on such an atmosphere of doubt and confusion about the constitution. Hence the proliferation of decrees and ordinances, and bills being passed hurriedly by voice vote.
A long existence under such circumstances makes the people docile and ready to follow the new rules of the game unquestioningly. In 2023, we learn countries earlier considered 'friends' must now be seen as unfriendly under the new treaties signed by those who live and work only in the vast time not available to us. The more space the Vast Time buys for the state, the less there is for us to ponder over the new developments. We accept projects and new buildings made with public money being gifted personally to us by the leadership. We accept becoming stooges to superpowers we see shaking hands and giving bear hugs to our leadership. The future shall, we learn, no longer grow organically out of our known historical past but a new world order, newer coalitions that mandate a new interpretation of history.
Schools, colleges, and institutions all must abandon old history and subscribe to new ones even if it doesn’t make sense. Our subjective time seems to have ceased to matter. Suddenly a war erupts far off but our media is feeding us a mish-mash of irrational images, myths, make-believe, illusory visuals: leaders launching billion rupee projects, new trains, new colleges, speaking to students of a new AI-armed tech-savvy India, flying off suddenly and seen next in the remotest idyllic setting praying to ancient gods with Vedic rituals. Kishore Kumar’s lines spoken to a dictatorial mother come to mind: "Aapne iss ghar ko Swarga aur hum subko Swargvaasee bnaa diya hai (You have made this home into heaven and we are now all heaven dwellers)".
Only the irrational, you find endures.
The pattern followed is the same all the world over. First, they come for those who create values to destroy those who know what those values are. Then you co-opt value givers' phrases from the abandoned past and use them to great effect in international gatherings of like-minded new friends. Then you hand the baton to the media and they fill the space with loud music from a totally make-believe band. By now one can recognise the bespoke spokespersons of this brave new world: the ever-furious moustachioed generals and “domain experts”, the constantly interjecting anchors with their mile-long questions answered with more questions by shrieking spokespersons, the matronly motormouths with their perfectly lacquered nails and pouting red O mouths. The only unforgivable crime is an open confrontation with the real authorities.
The media’s salvation is trying to achieve what it can no longer achieve, the trust of consumers. Most of us the world over, frankly read the papers and watch the news like stale jokes written by some bad stand-up comedian and send links to WhatsApp groups with three idiots laughing till tears flow.
Illustration: The Wire
Armed conflict, idiocy, and a disorienting fear of extinction, there is no worse combination. It is fast creating a monochromatic world around us all full of people with hollow eyes, zero attention span, and a great reluctance to dive deep into facts and get the context right for heaven's sake. The ease with which the media can now manipulate minds the world over arises from the nature of the new media consumers. They are perennially connected to multiple devices in planes, in cafes, in parks, and even at the dining table. But they do not seek. They are content to receive. They feel perhaps withdrawing from areas of public involvement they will at least increase the private time they have and enjoy it.
So, the news of a dam breaking and inundating vast swathes of land and killing hundreds, of earthquakes, tsunamis, and cyclones killing and destroying thousands of homes just brings on no protest marches or public effort to bail out the affected. Those in proximity keep making videos of mountains crumbling, homes disappearing in gorges, and bombs reducing whole human clusters to ash and dust. Among those who are watching it on their laptops or smartphones, it only brings a sad shrug and rolling of eyes, “Ah, the Climate Change!’ The war in the West Bank or Armenia or Ukraine is similarly dismissed as a natural mutation of “historic cycles of ethnic warfare”. And the media pushes its agenda further by colouring it with religious tones so strong that human misery gets hidden.
No wonder loneliness, depression and drug addiction are on an unprecedented rise everywhere. You feel you cannot stop this juggernaut, you just throw yourself under its wheels.
What would it mean if one saw war as it really is? It means to see human nature in its greatest pitch of tension, terror, and cruelty. But if the media will, as it does each day, reduce the whole tragedy to black and white, the Good on the one side and the Baddies on the other, war seems like a video game played indoors with little breaks for food and a quick smoke.
It is time our media cut across the linguistic walls of China to accept the reality of the great divide within it. Also how war magnifies everything associated with everything from history to language: emotion, fury, wild exultation, stubbornness, and xenophobia. They give you a high before they destroy professions and professionals. Real-time wars on the ground or during elections are waged mostly through information dissemination in local language media. It is one-sided mostly and will answer no nuanced questions, only old answers neatly copied and cut-pasted from religious texts and military leaders’ biographies in English.
But our media today is in possession of tools for accurate information and verification from so many sources and in so many languages. It must re-establish the fast-evaporating relationship between ideas and structures among the common men and women. The struggle for the future of the earth is taking place more and more in the realm of people's language where propaganda wars are waged using vernaculars as an effective tool of action. Without realising, most war reporters seem to see things on the war front as the authorities wish them to see. To be independent as a war reporter is not necessarily to criticise them but to step out of false theories of historic rights and wrongs and begin to see and report human beings as fellow human beings rooted in one’s personal space and personal reflections, capable of ‘feeling’ the pain they describe.
This article went live on October fifteenth, two thousand twenty three, at thirty-five minutes past twelve at noon.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
