The view from nowhere

Developing objectivity when reporting a story is one of the most rudimentary lessons a trainee journalist is taught. Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU and a media critic, calls this the “view-from-nowhere’ theory—reporters strive to be completely impartial in their coverage. However, this insistence on objectivity has created a culture of detachment within the journalist fraternity. Reporting loses its fervor and reporters become, as the interview with Jay Rosen puts it, “disinterested observers.”

In his book “Breaking the news,” James Fallows examines a divide that exists between politicians and journalists. The latter go out of their way to prove their objectivity, as they fear that their readership will classify them as “ideologues” if they do not. The result, Fallows says, is “an arms race of attitude, in which reporters don’t explicitly argue or analyze what they dislike in a political program but instead sound sneering and supercilious about the whole idea of politics.”

Games of one-upmanship between political rivals find more coverage than the actual manifestos of their parties. Fallows recounts an episode from a talk show, where prominent journalists Peter Jennings from ABC and Mike Wallace from 60 Minutes are given a hypothetical war situation and made to choose between their country and their profession. The choices they make and the manner in which they arrive at them, Fallows points out, show a dilution of ethics among today’s journalists.

People across the world are beginning to slowly lose faith in the “fourth estate.” In India, the current generation is aware that no news is ever entirely impartial; if anything, it is most partial to the corporate interests that shape it. The recent ‘paid news’ scandal bears witness to this sad fact.

Jay Rosen proposes a solution: media organizations should abandon pseudo-neutrality and rather, wear their influences on their sleeves. He hopes it will be replaced by a “here’s where we’re coming from” attitude.

Not just art for art’s sake

The first thing that strikes you about “Animated Oxymoron,” the art exhibition at the Alliance Francaise by newbies Vandana and Dinakaran, is the sheer honesty in their work. Sure, their youth culture theme has been conceptually done to death, but what stands out is the lack of pretence with which the two former architecture students capture it.

Essentially, the duo has looked at paradoxes and conflicts that the urban youth encounter every day and plays with these ironies in a series of expressive frames. Vandana’s exhibits are sketched with exaggerated proportions, which do not indulge in much color apart from grays and the occasional reds.

This, I discover, has much to do with the dark themes in youth culture that she deals with.

‘Drowning in Ecstacy,’ for instance, is a comment on the rise in alcohol abuse among twenty-somethings, the fallout of the stressful work lifestyle. The sketch shows giant symmetric cocktail glasses with stick figures grabbing at their bases. A woman in a red dress raises a toast, while she is trapped in a large alcohol bottle. This one, Vandana said, was dedicated to a lot of her friends and colleagues.

It takes you a few seconds for ‘Deafening Silence’ to register as the bird’s-eye-view of a living room. The frame shows a pair of feet, dangling from what is presumed to be a ceiling fan. A shoe from one of the feet has fallen off and heads for the vortex that swirls on the room floor. Suicide, Vandana tells me, is one of the biggest problems within the student community, especially as a result of examination pressure.

Dinakaran’s work is a shift from dark social commentary to amusing observations about young people and what makes them tick. While his frames are mostly graphic art, they are cleverly captioned with a number of pop culture references.

“I think films and modern literature are my biggest influence,” he says, as he talks me through ‘Romeo Must Not Die,’ an ode to Shakespeare, Jet Li films and college romances. ‘A Fine Mess’ and ‘Instant Classic’ delve further into the teenage psyche, while using several witty puns to make a subtle remark on the culture of instant gratification.

A lot of these ideas, Vandana tells me, came from a questionnaire they circulated among a random cross section of Bangalore’s youth. Over the course of two months, the duo turned the responses into an art display which is clearly intended to provide social commentary.

But does their work say anything new?

“Well, there have a been a whole lot of people who came and looked at our work, including parents of young people who say this helped them get a perspective on their children,” Vandana explains.

Clearly, this is not snooty art meant for elitist interpretation, but a stripped-down look at the different faces of Bangalore’s youth culture.

While Vandana agrees that aesthetics are what define art, she thinks that a strong social message should form the bedrock of any work. The theme, she tells me, was first conceived before either of them began any sketching. This duo unapologetically ally with the ‘art-for-a-social-cause’ school of thought—something that a number of the city’s art ‘purists’ have recently begun to disagree with. What is refreshing is that these rookies are making no excuses about it.

'Welcome to Haiti:Vol. 2'

Move over, Bono. Watch and learn, Richard Gere.

Hip-hop artiste Wyclef Jean has just taken the whole 'Rockstar-With-A-Cause' idea to the next level. The former Fugee has recently filed his nomination for the presidential candidacy of the devastated island state of Haiti.

After being nearly wiped out by an earthquake last year, Haiti's debt has spiraled out of control. The story behind how it accrued almost entirely matches the debt paradigm of the African continent. It starts, as usual, with owing your friendly neighborhood European colonizers for having rained on their plundering spree. In this case, Haiti were required to pay France to--get this--buy independence from their colonisers. The French demanded compensation for 'the loss of slaves', as a result of Haiti demanding sovereignty.

Now couple this with a regime of corrupt dictators (the Duvaliars, for Haiti) and you have a international debt that reportedly once reached $ 1.8 billion. In the aftermath of the quake, the IMF and the Venezuelan government have waived Haiti's debt. While this gives the country a partially clean slate, there is still the matter of the million people who have been rendered homeless.

So, what's different about Wyclef Jean making a foray into politics? The BBC did an article on 'Stars trading glitz for power', with extensive references to Reagan and Arnie Schwarzenegger.

Well, for starters, Jean won't even have a proper electoral office to file his nomination. The Provincial Electoral Office's headquarters were destroyed in the January 12 quake, the BBC reports. Furthermore, 'one-fifth of the officials charged with supervising elections were either killed or missing', according to those reports.

Clearly, Wyclef Jean's race is very different from that of the 'Leader of the Free World.'

Jean holds a Haitian passport, but has American residency. This could throw a spanner in the works, as the Haitian electoral law requires all candidates to live in the country for at least five years, prior to the elections.

But whether he lands the gig or not, his efforts are most certainly commendable. It takes some guts to move beyond simply playing token Live Aid gigs/ recording charity Christmas singles, and actually jump headlong into the solution. This gig is just too unrewarding to be another planned-to-perfection Hollywood PR stunt.

Kanye West, I hope you're taking notes.

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In other news, the last of the American combat forces left Iraq today. However, reports say that the American air force will continue manning the country's airspace (read: increasingly carry out unwarranted surgical strikes with impunity) till 2018.

Nothing changes, just re-arranges.

T.I.A?

Diamonds are a girl's best friend. Well, a certain Ms. Naomi Campbell begs to differ. The volatile supermodel was in the dock last week, on charges of accepting 'blood diamonds' from convicted Liberian president Charles Taylor in 1997.

Predictably, the mainstream media has focused all their attention on the celebrity factors surrounding the Sierra Leon trials. The BBC, with the rest of the western media, have been in sixes and sevens to get exclusive live feeds of Campbell and actress Mia Farrow's testimonies. One wonders if the trials would have got any major coverage at all, if it didn't involve high-profile western celebrities.

Global reporting continues in its one-dimensional trajectory. News from Africa continues to be mostly about 'dead, black babies', Ian Hargreaves, ex-boss of the BBC, once said. Furthermore, these stories are almost always relegated to the tiny, cobwebbed sections that get seldom noticed in a newspaper.

Take Somalia or Sudan, for instance. They've been torn by civil strife for a better part of the last two decades. Yet, the 1.5 million internally displaced Somalis get little or no mention in the Western media.

Sure, there's the whole proximity argument--why would someone in Little Rock, Arkansas want to read about gun battles in Mogadishu? One word: Globalisation. Shell. Co. and other Western oil giants have huge vested interests in Sudan. As they strike deals with the despotic Muhammad Al-Bashr, thousands are displaced from their homes, which in the oil-rich areas. One might even argue that the whole civil war has little to do with ethnic cleansing and is more about the distribution of resources across the country. This has got to sit rather uneasily with the conscience of the average Redneck, every time he takes his gas-guzzling Hummer for a spin. But somehow, it doesn't.

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In other news, President Hugo Chavez beat me to getting on Twitter. By a whole three months.

OF DRAMA QUEENS AND SOCIAL STEREOTYPES

There are several things that bring out the concept of “longstanding pain” in our lives—queues, government or a wickedly deep tooth cavity. But all these pale in comparison to the object of my irritation today—television soaps operas! Come seven in the evening everyday and my family crowds around the television set, almost salivating in eager anticipation of their daily fix of family drama. Now I’m sure apologetics for this growing form of visual entertainment would argue that it isn’t exactly harmful and would accuse me of making a big noise about nothing. Well, a closer look at the effects of ‘serials’ on any society, especially ours, would reveal that these hour long dramas are not as benign as they may seem.

Essentially, a large section of the public watches these soaps with escapist intentions. They seem to provide a temporary distraction from their otherwise banal and monotonous lives. The ‘riveting’ plots, the big twists and the chunky jewellery complimented by impassable layers of make-up for even the most ordinary, indoor scenes all form a part of this ‘charm’ that keeps audiences across our country glued to their TV sets every weeknight. But here’s the scary bit—what happens when people begin to imitate this preposterousness in their everyday lives? That can happen on many different levels. First, it can result in the creation of extra drama when there isn’t any at all. A lot of soap opera fans eventually develop an honest belief that their lives are ‘empty’ without a good dose of tears, tantrums and scheming. These soaps have only made our society much more emotionally fragile and people have lost the ability to be stoic about the smallest of things. This does not match the requirements of the life around us, which demands a high emotional quotient as a pre-requisite for success.

Next, the audience demographic has seen a major paradigm shift and with the greater accessibility of television sets even in low income homes, the viewer ship has increased. But the settings of most soaps operas have remained the same—big, affluent families that live in mansions with a surprisingly large number rooms for when the characters need to storm out in a fit of rage. Ideas of economic and social meagreness are reinforced within the denied sections of society and they begin to set unrealistic dreams for themselves. Worse still, they might even resort to unhealthy and detrimental ways to achieve their desires. By and large, most soaps only serve to perpetuate stereotypes and this will never give us as a society the impetus to rise above. Intellectually, the amount of stimulation is about as limited as the acting abilities of these soapstars.

It is quarter to seven now and my mother seems edgy. Any attempts by me to make even the slightest contact with the television remote control will definitely result in a week-long banishment from the dinner table. Promptly, the rest of my family takes its place at the foot of the revered Samsung, waiting in deferential silence for the advertisements to end and the first notes of that hallowed theme song to ring out. Oh well, at least we’re spending time together as a family—even if it does involve sitting in front of a screen in a zombie-like fashion for an entire hour.

The Dark Side of India’s Growth Story

At the next election, an issue that will undoubtedly figure prominently will be the plague of rising inflation. After flaunting the prodigious growth of the Indian industry as one of their biggest successes, the UPA must now resolve the darkest blemish on their track record. Last year, they thought it was an inevitable, concomitant phenomenon that would dovetail with the celebrated growth rate of 9% of our GDP. The reserve bank hiked the cash-reserve ratio in a monetary attempt to reduce the liquidity in the system. The Finance Minister reiterated the hackneyed ‘aam aadmi’ rhetoric and labelled it as a supply-side problem that would be sorted by the next crop season.

A year later and things have gone from bad to worse. The inflation rates have hit an all-time high of 7%, the storm after the ‘calm’ of a P.A Chidambaram budget. I suppose it is unfair to place the blame entirely on the government because this rise in rises has global influences. For starters, Mother Nature hasn’t been too generous with her dispensation of weather conditions conducive to growing food crops. Two successive droughts in Australia, the world’s second largest producer of wheat has triggered off a global sense of panic. The consequence, according to economists, is the ‘national hoarding of food grains’. Ukraine, Russia, Uzbekistan and Argentina, all big producers of wheat and other food grains, have begun to curb exports. Back home meanwhile, we read stories of wheat crops being damaged in Punjab on a rather large scale due to unfavourable weather. The Minister for Agriculture, Mr. Sharad Pawar has recently stated that the government is even willing to import wheat to increase the supply and bring prices down. They have already enforced a ban on the export of food grains and there is a feeling among that these moves might ruin farming community.

This is where our government falls short in its duty to the country—stop-gap measures employed to temporarily assuage public panic. The government and its followers believed that the 60,000 crore loan waiver would be the panacea to farmer woes. Hardly a month on and the farmers are discovering the measure to be nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction. Most farmers can hardly avail of the waiver because its land ceiling of 2 hectares is too low for our widely practiced system of joint holdings. Furthermore, the government finds itself in a Catch 22 situation—should it work on reducing the consumer price rise by banning exports? This would be at the expense of the protection of agrarian interests. A lowering of paddy prices by Rs.100 per quintal could have extremely harsh ramifications for the farmers as the losses incurred will be passed onto them.

The government should not forget that this steady rise in inflation rates is also concurrent with an increase in middle class salaries. In the long term, it may not hit them as hard as it will the farmers. Rather than resorting to another myopic reaction, the government should look at dealing with this issue with the long term interest of the farmers in mind. Otherwise, there might even be a greater shift to the cultivation of commercial crops by farmers due to the limited rewards from raising food crops. Unless this government and its successor in 2009 channel their energies at honestly dealing with the agricultural issues of our country instead of handing out the seasonal election sop, the country will dangerously compromise her self-interests.

Cricket's Generation Gap?

Just when you thought Indian cricket had redeemed itself, it begins to pick at old wounds. The latest round of exchanges involving skipper M.S Dhoni and the ‘senior’ players gives us another week’s worth of sports drama. This time, we see Dhoni sporting what he thinks is a well deserved last laugh; this after having proved that the junior players, whose corner he assumed, are worth their keep. And of course, where better to enjoy this laugh than under the ever watchful eyes of our rapacious media.

The reason I intentionally treated the word ‘senior’ in the previous sentence to those punctuation flourishes was to merely highlight the absurdity of the concept that the word implied. ‘Senior’ players are portrayed unfairly as doddering, old men who cling onto their places in the starting eleven until the latter have to be pried from their dead, cold fingers. Let’s explore this concept of seniority in Indian cricket. I suppose this category of fossils would include Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid. Some others may refer to them as the ‘holy trinity’ of Indian cricket but oh, far be it from our BCCI to stoop to such vile acts of name-calling. Let us consider this: the average age of the Aussie team, who have held a monopoly over cricket for a better part of the last decade, is 30. Having played the part of the perennial number two squad who can boast of potential but never any silverware, the South African squad averages at 28. It must be pointed out that players like Roger Telemachus have made their debut only after crossing the ‘big three-O’. Even in the subcontinent, things aren’t very different as the average age of the Sri Lankan national side is 29. And India, after all its petty age squabbles, averages at a much lower 25.

We begin to wonder why so much is made of this seemingly small issue. We also wonder if it is one that is limited to our country alone. I mean, shouldn’t the selectors worry about form and consistency, instead of drawing up these watertight age compartments? Even then, they often find themselves, much like our cricketers, inconsistent in following their own selection policy. Why is someone like Sehwag, who turns thirty this year, picked for the series against Australia despite his diabolical form? On the other hand, why is cricket’s biggest comeback story, Sourav Ganguly relegated being only a part of the test squad despite his excellent form in the shorter version of the game?

We must admit that the away series win in Australia would never have happened if it wasn’t for those pivotal Sachin Tendulkar innings in both the finals. The team and its fans must start to encourage an assimilation of experience and youth. Sure, we need Ishant Sharmas and R.P Singhs but there is no need for harsh age distinctions. Dhoni justified his choice of younger players by mentioning ‘fielding abilities’ as the selection criteria. What about other characteristics such as strategy or composure, which are indispensable? After all, young Manoj Tiwary claims that if he took anything away from this tournament, it was Tendulkar’s batting tips. Not to forget that players like Robin Uthappa haven’t showed themselves to be very competent with batting technique. This is the stuff that sets apart a world-class player, capable of holding his own, from a rookie.

The Indian media’s treatment of our team is very similar to the relationship between the British press and its national football side. We seem to build up our youngsters, throw money at them and even base entire ad campaigns on this concept of a generation waiting in the wings. But how many youngsters have proven to be consistent? Wasn’t Dinesh Karthik once hailed as the next Indian Skipper? Now he can barely keep his place on the team. Performance related pay and a strict watch on player exposure to the media should be what the BCCI focuses on. Otherwise, we’ll be raising a generation of Salil Ankolas, victims of selector inconsistencies. Indian cricket at the grassroots level is undoubtedly an in exhaustive mine for talent. Let’s make sure we raise our young cricketers the right way. But let’s also treat our ‘seniors’ with due respect, appreciating what they’ve given the game.

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