Your Mama! Or The Blitzerization Of Indian TV
By Trevor Selvam
29 October, 2009 - > Countercurrents.org
In the past two weeks, I have viewed three shows on NDTV 24/7 and one
on CNN-IBN live. On one NDTV show, the moderator was Mr. Vikram
Chandra and the other one had the ubiquitous Ms. Barkha Dutt. The CNN-
IBN show was moderated by Ms Sagarika Ghose. All three of the shows
had to do with Naxalites or Maoists. The NDTV shows had the
emblematic war-drum like sound effects and graphic interplay that
aped the “War on Terror” style of the Fox/CNN networks. The lead
caption of the “Maoist Muddle”, the talk show hosted by Ms. Dutt, had
an old Western badlands style letter font in use, which would swish
back and forth, when Ms. Dutt took a break. (No! they did not play
the theme tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or Appaloosa).
Ms. Ghosh’s moderation was subdued in comparison and I would say,
more interested in extracting a minimum possible new thought process
in this discussion. However, the two guests on this show, Mr. Gautam
Navlakha of the EPW and Mr. Swapan Dasgupta of trash-the-left-any-
which-way-you-can fame, took off their gloves in no time and while
Mr. Navlakha could have restrained himself a wee bit, I could
understand the anger he felt with the asinine, Rush Limbaugh-esque
harangue of Mr. Dasgupta. A third guest, Mr. Sudipta Chackravarti,
writer of the book Red Sun, attempted to steer a safer line between
the absurdly nonsensical right wing cant of Dasgupta and the enraged
decency of Navlakha and got nowhere in terms of contributing to the
discussion. While this particular show did make an attempt at clean
lines and decency in terms of format, the NDTV show, as usual, was
like a Vegas-style slot machine/ video game box circus with Ms. Dutt
rushing around town-hall style, impatient as hell, and making shallow
summaries from time to time. Mr Vikram Chandra used his stationary
command centre approach to parse everyone’s unfinished thoughts,
by interrupting them and making sweeping summaries and essentially
telling off those who wanted to raise larger issues. Barkha Dutt’s
pancake makeup and potty-designer clothes added further vacuous glitter
and frenzy to the otherwise polyvinyl theatre that she now stages frequently.
I think Ms. Dutt has run out of the chutzpah that characterized her initial
foray into cable news and live reporting. She has bought into the
ethos that employs her i.e be true to the status quo definition of
the nation, no matter what, uphold some sanctimonious interpretations
of “terror, violence and democracy” and mendaciously ignore the
institutionalized violence that characterizes the Indian state and
all its institutions, especially the police. I am sure the fact that
there are at least one hundred criminals sitting in the Indian Parliament,
does not seem to have any impact whatsoever on all these apologists in her show,regarding the greatness of “the world’s largest democracy.” One of
the goofy guests in the show, named Tavleen Singh, gave an “Arey
Baba!” style shpeel on how great it is to be part of Indian democracy
and not be part of Pakistan or China. No jingoism there! And these
are experts on “the greatest threat to Indian democracy”?
What is wrong with these shows?
They all pander to a sensationalist, alarmist and finally a
fabricated version of the facts on the ground to start with. In their
rush to compete with each other they also use melodramatic
terminology to describe events. During a Chukka Bundh or a Rail Roko
(stopping trains during a general strike in an area, for example West
Mednipur) , some channels in no time started referring to it as a
“Train Hijack”. Chukka Bandh has been going on for ages. In fact in
India it happens almost every day. People vent their anger by
stopping trains. A hijack is something else and as a result in no
time people are talking about the Taleban and prisoner swaps etc.
Arnab Goswami’s Foxy network (Times Now) goes over the deep edge with
Goswami almost leaking sputum from the sides of his mouth, calling
the Lalgarh PCPA, a “ terrorist” outfit repeatedly during his so-
called moderation of events. He invites people to speak and then
trashes them continuously, hogging the limelight himself and repeatedly
changing his “one basic question” several times. Santhals and tribals with traditional weaponry are called “armed Maoists and terrorists.” Even the CNN
and BBC prefer to use words like militants, referring to these same
incidents. Goswami, of course, is universally recognized in India as
the yellowest of all TV moderators.
The primary problem, as I had stated elsewhere in a previous essay,
is that these Indian TV channels have not gone through the stage of
development that American radio and TV shows had gone through—of
nuanced, thoughtful interdictions---that preceded the Wolf-
Blitzerization of Cable news. The Bill Moyers and the Amy Goodmans of
PBS, NPR and Democracy Now! have for a long period of time upheld
decent, selfless, incisive, conclusive interviews and glamour, glitz
and circus acts have not been their bag. A tradition exists in
American radio and to a certain extent in Public TV that preceded
Time-Warner’s onslaught on the mind waves.
India’s Doordarshan, staid and unexciting as it often may seem, does
not follow this bombastic TV style that Barkha Dutt and Vikram
Chandra espouse. But, Indian TV has missed out on the tradition of
the thoughtful radio show. It has taken a leap into the nightmare
Vegas style, as far as intellectual cadence goes. Pretty much like
the fact that India also skipped over (for the most part) the laying
down of optical fibre-glass high speed lines and jumped into the wi-
fi data card and satellite disc technology, at least in some regions.
Convenient, but unnatural, in some respects. There is thus a missing
link in India’s media development. It is not a matter of quickly leap-
frogging into the newest technology; it is very simply a question of
missing out on a stage of incipient intellectual development. And
that stage requires some genuflection on what it is to be a real
democracy. Having elections every five years or having law courts and
elected officials (even without criminal records) amounts to drawing
lane markers on Indian city roads. Nobody takes it seriously or
avails of it with pride. It is like an attempt at showcasing the
trappings of democracy. As simple as that. When Mr. Chidambaran
cajoles the country’s intellectuals and so does the West Bengal
government officials, suggesting that any sympathy for the Naxalites
amounts to seditious behaviour, it is the beginning of a McCarthyite
era of “Un-Indian” activities. In that sense the Americanization of
the Indian polity has been seamless since the fall of the Berlin wall
and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is no wonder that the Indian
state, once a champion of non-alignment and independent post-colonial
political direction, has done a fantastic somersault into the lap of
the United States. It is unthinkable that the same forces that have
just decided to “phase out ”of Iraq, have now arrived in India and
are engaging in what a US commander described, only a few hours ago
on NDTV, “the most advanced counter-insurgency operations” with
Stryker tanks and various elements of the US Army, Airborne and
Cavalry divisions and paratrooper wings, right next to New Delhi!
Does Barkha Dutt care? Does Vikram Chandra give two hoots that
American boots that were kicked out of Vietnam and are being kicked
out elsewhere and especially out of Latin America, are now stomping
around in this country? When Barkha Dutt and Vikram Chandra and
others invite Indian intellectuals, historians, economists and
political scientists who wish to raise some fundamental issues about
Indian democracy, they are swept away by the undignified hollerings
of the loafers they also invite. So first rule: Do not invite more
than three people, at a time. Let them speak to a very specific and
elevated concept about the actual workings of Indian democracy. Let
them conclude and do not bust them up, half way, with your own
impatient and argumentative vox populi style journalism. If you need
to invite other people, arrange for a Part 2 of the same debate, with
others.
What are some other reasons?
Aside from the two or three people at a time that PBS and National
Public Radio invite, the calibre of the people invited also happen to
be those with extraordinary historical acumen and analytical skills.
Mr. Chandra, amongst the hordes he invites, brings in loafer-type MPs
from the BJP and CPM to trot out their standard rhetoric on behalf of
“Indian parliamentary democracy, law and order, national security and
non-violence”. The BJP fellow keeps ranting hysterically about how
“criminal” the Maoists are with their barrel of the gun power
politics and the wily CPI(M) fellow (typical of the Bengal CPIM)
snidely jibes away, with a crooked smile on his lips, at the Maoists
for not “following the example of the Nepali Maoists.” Also invited
are a Maoist sympathizing poet, a Gandhian activist, another EPW
editor, a retired police officer (who turns out to be quite sane,
decent and at least logical, despite his law and order leanings).
Surprisingly, there is also a young Congress MP from Andhra, who is
quite lucid that the Naxalite problem cannot be a resolved by guns
and choppers, when for sixty two years the State has been absent in
the lives of the Adivasis. Anyone who is decent (and the Congress MP
who seems very much like one) and waits his turn, does not get the chance
to lay down the facts. He or she is either shouted down or stopped short
by Chandra or Dutt. Such a procession of flag bearers and party hacks
and straight laced law and order folks can never provide education to
the masses, who expect to imbibe something from these shows. It ends
up being a five-a-side indoor football mêlée and opinions, ideas are
never developed. People go home, convinced that India is a
flourishing but troubled democracy, Naxalites are violent idealists
backed by foreigners and terrorists, that wealth will trickle down
someday to the poor if law and order is maintained and the ultimate
profanity ---that if Maoists participated in the democratic process
(as some other Naxalites seem to be) then they could also have their
day under the sun! All these sacred Indian cows are then chewed
vociferously and thenspat out like pan-masala on the walls of Indian
media, for the next half hour in rapid-fire mode. By the time we are
two minutes into these so-called forums, not a single assertion is
made about the actual facts. There is no discussion on what
constitutes “development”, no discussion on institutionalized
violence, no discussion the existing statutes of the Indian
constitution and how they remain unfulfilled after 60 years, no
discussion on the role of the Indian Police force, dubbed as the
world’s worst law-breaking and human rights violating outfit, no
discussion on the charter rights of the aboriginal people of India,
no discussion on the megalomaniac plans of P. Chidambaran to relocate
85% of India’s population into urban centres, no discussion on the
devastating and stultifying environmental impact of damming India’s
rivers and attempting to join them up (another Chidambaran hair-
brained plan) and no discussion on the twenty five years of
systematic development work in the Dandakaranya, which the Naxalites
have engaged in from using shifting crop agriculture, innovative
irrigation, land distribution, mobile educational projects, health
clinics, where for 62 years the GOI has done zip. Mr. Chandra
demonstrates clearly that he is not a moderator, not a listener, that
he has come made up his mind and injects silly conclusions each time
the bell rings for an ad and Barkha Dutt does the same with a proto
yank mannerism-- “Don’t go away.” In reality, it is time to switch
off. But I keep my patience till the end and until the swishing
militarist/western sound effects that keep happening every few
seconds, come to a final end.
When I sat down to write this essay, I was reminded of a time, in the
early seventies when I was in the US and the Watergate scandal had
broken out and Nixon was about to be indicted. I was sitting in a
room with African American friends, when one of the TV commentators,
mostly white at that time, declared that American Democracy would
weather this storm and the rebels in US campuses were nothing but
agents of foreign left-wing governments. My buddy, who sat next to
me, spat out two words-- “Your mama”!
Trevor Selvam is a free lance journalist
By Trevor Selvam
29 October, 2009 - > Countercurrents.org
In the past two weeks, I have viewed three shows on NDTV 24/7 and one
on CNN-IBN live. On one NDTV show, the moderator was Mr. Vikram
Chandra and the other one had the ubiquitous Ms. Barkha Dutt. The CNN-
IBN show was moderated by Ms Sagarika Ghose. All three of the shows
had to do with Naxalites or Maoists. The NDTV shows had the
emblematic war-drum like sound effects and graphic interplay that
aped the “War on Terror” style of the Fox/CNN networks. The lead
caption of the “Maoist Muddle”, the talk show hosted by Ms. Dutt, had
an old Western badlands style letter font in use, which would swish
back and forth, when Ms. Dutt took a break. (No! they did not play
the theme tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or Appaloosa).
Ms. Ghosh’s moderation was subdued in comparison and I would say,
more interested in extracting a minimum possible new thought process
in this discussion. However, the two guests on this show, Mr. Gautam
Navlakha of the EPW and Mr. Swapan Dasgupta of trash-the-left-any-
which-way-you-can fame, took off their gloves in no time and while
Mr. Navlakha could have restrained himself a wee bit, I could
understand the anger he felt with the asinine, Rush Limbaugh-esque
harangue of Mr. Dasgupta. A third guest, Mr. Sudipta Chackravarti,
writer of the book Red Sun, attempted to steer a safer line between
the absurdly nonsensical right wing cant of Dasgupta and the enraged
decency of Navlakha and got nowhere in terms of contributing to the
discussion. While this particular show did make an attempt at clean
lines and decency in terms of format, the NDTV show, as usual, was
like a Vegas-style slot machine/ video game box circus with Ms. Dutt
rushing around town-hall style, impatient as hell, and making shallow
summaries from time to time. Mr Vikram Chandra used his stationary
command centre approach to parse everyone’s unfinished thoughts,
by interrupting them and making sweeping summaries and essentially
telling off those who wanted to raise larger issues. Barkha Dutt’s
pancake makeup and potty-designer clothes added further vacuous glitter
and frenzy to the otherwise polyvinyl theatre that she now stages frequently.
I think Ms. Dutt has run out of the chutzpah that characterized her initial
foray into cable news and live reporting. She has bought into the
ethos that employs her i.e be true to the status quo definition of
the nation, no matter what, uphold some sanctimonious interpretations
of “terror, violence and democracy” and mendaciously ignore the
institutionalized violence that characterizes the Indian state and
all its institutions, especially the police. I am sure the fact that
there are at least one hundred criminals sitting in the Indian Parliament,
does not seem to have any impact whatsoever on all these apologists in her show,regarding the greatness of “the world’s largest democracy.” One of
the goofy guests in the show, named Tavleen Singh, gave an “Arey
Baba!” style shpeel on how great it is to be part of Indian democracy
and not be part of Pakistan or China. No jingoism there! And these
are experts on “the greatest threat to Indian democracy”?
What is wrong with these shows?
They all pander to a sensationalist, alarmist and finally a
fabricated version of the facts on the ground to start with. In their
rush to compete with each other they also use melodramatic
terminology to describe events. During a Chukka Bundh or a Rail Roko
(stopping trains during a general strike in an area, for example West
Mednipur) , some channels in no time started referring to it as a
“Train Hijack”. Chukka Bandh has been going on for ages. In fact in
India it happens almost every day. People vent their anger by
stopping trains. A hijack is something else and as a result in no
time people are talking about the Taleban and prisoner swaps etc.
Arnab Goswami’s Foxy network (Times Now) goes over the deep edge with
Goswami almost leaking sputum from the sides of his mouth, calling
the Lalgarh PCPA, a “ terrorist” outfit repeatedly during his so-
called moderation of events. He invites people to speak and then
trashes them continuously, hogging the limelight himself and repeatedly
changing his “one basic question” several times. Santhals and tribals with traditional weaponry are called “armed Maoists and terrorists.” Even the CNN
and BBC prefer to use words like militants, referring to these same
incidents. Goswami, of course, is universally recognized in India as
the yellowest of all TV moderators.
The primary problem, as I had stated elsewhere in a previous essay,
is that these Indian TV channels have not gone through the stage of
development that American radio and TV shows had gone through—of
nuanced, thoughtful interdictions---that preceded the Wolf-
Blitzerization of Cable news. The Bill Moyers and the Amy Goodmans of
PBS, NPR and Democracy Now! have for a long period of time upheld
decent, selfless, incisive, conclusive interviews and glamour, glitz
and circus acts have not been their bag. A tradition exists in
American radio and to a certain extent in Public TV that preceded
Time-Warner’s onslaught on the mind waves.
India’s Doordarshan, staid and unexciting as it often may seem, does
not follow this bombastic TV style that Barkha Dutt and Vikram
Chandra espouse. But, Indian TV has missed out on the tradition of
the thoughtful radio show. It has taken a leap into the nightmare
Vegas style, as far as intellectual cadence goes. Pretty much like
the fact that India also skipped over (for the most part) the laying
down of optical fibre-glass high speed lines and jumped into the wi-
fi data card and satellite disc technology, at least in some regions.
Convenient, but unnatural, in some respects. There is thus a missing
link in India’s media development. It is not a matter of quickly leap-
frogging into the newest technology; it is very simply a question of
missing out on a stage of incipient intellectual development. And
that stage requires some genuflection on what it is to be a real
democracy. Having elections every five years or having law courts and
elected officials (even without criminal records) amounts to drawing
lane markers on Indian city roads. Nobody takes it seriously or
avails of it with pride. It is like an attempt at showcasing the
trappings of democracy. As simple as that. When Mr. Chidambaran
cajoles the country’s intellectuals and so does the West Bengal
government officials, suggesting that any sympathy for the Naxalites
amounts to seditious behaviour, it is the beginning of a McCarthyite
era of “Un-Indian” activities. In that sense the Americanization of
the Indian polity has been seamless since the fall of the Berlin wall
and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is no wonder that the Indian
state, once a champion of non-alignment and independent post-colonial
political direction, has done a fantastic somersault into the lap of
the United States. It is unthinkable that the same forces that have
just decided to “phase out ”of Iraq, have now arrived in India and
are engaging in what a US commander described, only a few hours ago
on NDTV, “the most advanced counter-insurgency operations” with
Stryker tanks and various elements of the US Army, Airborne and
Cavalry divisions and paratrooper wings, right next to New Delhi!
Does Barkha Dutt care? Does Vikram Chandra give two hoots that
American boots that were kicked out of Vietnam and are being kicked
out elsewhere and especially out of Latin America, are now stomping
around in this country? When Barkha Dutt and Vikram Chandra and
others invite Indian intellectuals, historians, economists and
political scientists who wish to raise some fundamental issues about
Indian democracy, they are swept away by the undignified hollerings
of the loafers they also invite. So first rule: Do not invite more
than three people, at a time. Let them speak to a very specific and
elevated concept about the actual workings of Indian democracy. Let
them conclude and do not bust them up, half way, with your own
impatient and argumentative vox populi style journalism. If you need
to invite other people, arrange for a Part 2 of the same debate, with
others.
What are some other reasons?
Aside from the two or three people at a time that PBS and National
Public Radio invite, the calibre of the people invited also happen to
be those with extraordinary historical acumen and analytical skills.
Mr. Chandra, amongst the hordes he invites, brings in loafer-type MPs
from the BJP and CPM to trot out their standard rhetoric on behalf of
“Indian parliamentary democracy, law and order, national security and
non-violence”. The BJP fellow keeps ranting hysterically about how
“criminal” the Maoists are with their barrel of the gun power
politics and the wily CPI(M) fellow (typical of the Bengal CPIM)
snidely jibes away, with a crooked smile on his lips, at the Maoists
for not “following the example of the Nepali Maoists.” Also invited
are a Maoist sympathizing poet, a Gandhian activist, another EPW
editor, a retired police officer (who turns out to be quite sane,
decent and at least logical, despite his law and order leanings).
Surprisingly, there is also a young Congress MP from Andhra, who is
quite lucid that the Naxalite problem cannot be a resolved by guns
and choppers, when for sixty two years the State has been absent in
the lives of the Adivasis. Anyone who is decent (and the Congress MP
who seems very much like one) and waits his turn, does not get the chance
to lay down the facts. He or she is either shouted down or stopped short
by Chandra or Dutt. Such a procession of flag bearers and party hacks
and straight laced law and order folks can never provide education to
the masses, who expect to imbibe something from these shows. It ends
up being a five-a-side indoor football mêlée and opinions, ideas are
never developed. People go home, convinced that India is a
flourishing but troubled democracy, Naxalites are violent idealists
backed by foreigners and terrorists, that wealth will trickle down
someday to the poor if law and order is maintained and the ultimate
profanity ---that if Maoists participated in the democratic process
(as some other Naxalites seem to be) then they could also have their
day under the sun! All these sacred Indian cows are then chewed
vociferously and thenspat out like pan-masala on the walls of Indian
media, for the next half hour in rapid-fire mode. By the time we are
two minutes into these so-called forums, not a single assertion is
made about the actual facts. There is no discussion on what
constitutes “development”, no discussion on institutionalized
violence, no discussion the existing statutes of the Indian
constitution and how they remain unfulfilled after 60 years, no
discussion on the role of the Indian Police force, dubbed as the
world’s worst law-breaking and human rights violating outfit, no
discussion on the charter rights of the aboriginal people of India,
no discussion on the megalomaniac plans of P. Chidambaran to relocate
85% of India’s population into urban centres, no discussion on the
devastating and stultifying environmental impact of damming India’s
rivers and attempting to join them up (another Chidambaran hair-
brained plan) and no discussion on the twenty five years of
systematic development work in the Dandakaranya, which the Naxalites
have engaged in from using shifting crop agriculture, innovative
irrigation, land distribution, mobile educational projects, health
clinics, where for 62 years the GOI has done zip. Mr. Chandra
demonstrates clearly that he is not a moderator, not a listener, that
he has come made up his mind and injects silly conclusions each time
the bell rings for an ad and Barkha Dutt does the same with a proto
yank mannerism-- “Don’t go away.” In reality, it is time to switch
off. But I keep my patience till the end and until the swishing
militarist/western sound effects that keep happening every few
seconds, come to a final end.
When I sat down to write this essay, I was reminded of a time, in the
early seventies when I was in the US and the Watergate scandal had
broken out and Nixon was about to be indicted. I was sitting in a
room with African American friends, when one of the TV commentators,
mostly white at that time, declared that American Democracy would
weather this storm and the rebels in US campuses were nothing but
agents of foreign left-wing governments. My buddy, who sat next to
me, spat out two words-- “Your mama”!
Trevor Selvam is a free lance journalist
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