No place for centre

A few weeks ago, a headline in a national daily read, "CWG -- India's shame. West says Indian infrastructure a joke." The same daily ran a headline last week which read, "CWG -- India's pride. West says Indian infrastructure better than the best".u00a0


Illustrations/Satish Acharya

It always intrigues me how in discussion, public discourse and especially the media, national opinion, whether about ideas, events or people, emotional or factual, fluctuate between totally brilliant or downright disgusting with nothing in between. It's as if all things that require public attention must somehow involve extremity or superlatives, otherwise it's just real and therefore, not worth discussing (ignoring, of course, those insane enough to think that any media should reflect reality).

Place for maturity thus, i.e. temperance, analysis and any feeling in the middle (read: complexity) seems impossible. Two articles followed one another in a magazine six months apart. The first headline read "Lalit Modi -- God", the next, once the IPL world had changed, "Lalit Modi -- Not God").

God is thrown out a lot in relation to people. Sachin Tendulkar is equated whenever he is amidst runs, like at present. A number of Three Idiots film reviews ended with, Raju Hirani is God. A leading national magazine cover went even further -- it had Rahul Dravid raising his bat during some match- winning feat in Australia in 2004 -- and the text just said God in capitals.

Now, I don't know much about the workings of the heavens, but something tells me, however you view the Almighty's daily schedule, creating shady private cricket leagues or a double century or making films loosely based on Chetan Bhagat books might be a slightly lower priority for Him that created the world.

The philosopher Friederich Nietzsche, later a favourite of the Nazis, believed that heroes aren't born, they are created. Ours is a culture where synonyms for the heroic ("God", "Top Boss", "Supremo", "Head Honcho" etc.) create the public image that makes the public believe ("He's the Big Man" is commonly overheard in offices).u00a0
I'll avoid movie or TV star examples because they actually are worshipped.

Milk is often poured on a stone version of Amitabh Bachchan in interior UP, and after South Indian megastar Raj Kumar's demise a (BJP free) chariot carried his idol while a hundred thousand people followed -- no different from an immersion of an actual God.u00a0 Elections can be swept by actors who have played any role in anything vaguely religious. (If not elections, the next best thing of the modern age -- a call to be invited on Bigg Boss).u00a0 A Hindi TV channel actually carried images of Indian cricketers after the Australian victory, with Ram, Laxman and Hanuman superimposed on our batsmen's faces.

The fall however is equally extreme. Headlines to malign someone don't just say so and so accused of theft or allegedly some criminal wrongdoing. They say "Nation bays for Suresh Kalmadi's blood" (clearly not a pluralist democracy but a Viking tribe) or "India wipes out Australia" (which seemed to be geographically okay after the cricket loss) or, one recent one which inexplicably said "Modi blows up".

After a disastrous Sholay remake by filmmaker Ram Gopal Verma, when a tabloid film critic asked him, "What would you say to the nation that is asking for your head?" he responded, "It's just a film". Beheading someone for a flop is the best effort made till date of combining film criticism with Asterix.

And of course, it's never enough just to inflate things with euphemisms. Things must also have clear winners and losers. Some months ago, a business TV channel had a panel of the world's leading CEOs, and the moderator asked the head of a Wall Street bank, "Tell me -- has India beaten China?". To this the gentleman sensibly replied, "Economics is not a sport".u00a0u00a0

Defenders would say, we are not the only ones doing it. World journalism has generally become tabloid-driven -- everything influenced by Hollywood blockbuster lingo. The western readership however has seen it long enough to tell smut from news and often, the smut is so ridiculous, that they employ wit, making it clear that it isn't a BBC headline. When New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught with a prostitute, an American tabloid headline read: "Ho No".

Ours however, mixes up the smut slyly with the reportage so it doesn't just result in a smirk and dismissal but is carried into dinner parties and office cafeterias as serious debate. ("Is Rahul Mahajan married to 96 women?" And other such topics of global importance).

In contrast, there's the stark opposite to our superlatives -- British understatement. As we won medals at the Commonwealth and there's sudden interest, hitherto unseen, in the triple jump, javelins, badminton etc. and people shout out names we'd never heard of a day before, headlines like "India bathed in Gold" and "India's Golden Era" surfaced.u00a0

A London paper ran the following headline for its Commonwealth gold medalist "UK man wins medal. Pleased".u00a0u00a0u00a0 Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year.u00a0Reach him at www.anuvabpal.com