More inauguration events, please

We don’t seem to have enough coverage of politicians cutting ribbons or announcing major projects these days

I wait for inauguration ceremonies the way BMC officials wait for people with grievances, or lawyers for divorce cases. I think of them as opportunities to better myself and learn a little more about the honourable men and women tasked with making sure things are running smoothly in our country. I know politicians look forward to them too, possibly for reasons markedly different from my own, but there must be some excitement on their part too. After all, it’s not as if they get enough attention.

It’s why I think we need to spend more time looking at these ceremonies and announcements because it doesn’t seem as if our media houses cover enough of them. Newspapers often seem to spend more time on things like tragedies or Miss Universe pageants than on play-by-play coverage of what is being inaugurated by whom and where. If there’s a public toilet being announced in Dharavi and a minister is at hand to cut a ribbon, I think we need to know. If there’s a minor road being repaved to replace one that was paved a year ago, we should be informed. If a highway built by a previous government is being renamed and inaugurated by a new government, it should be on our television screens.

We need names and details, pictures of the food that is being served, video coverage of hands being folded in greeting. We just don’t seem to get enough of this, and something needs to change.

Luckily, the government often steps in to address this by buying full-page advertisements every other week. Some may say this is a blatant waste of our tax money, what with malnourishment and dire poverty ravaging millions of us daily, but they fail to understand that taxes should be spent judiciously, and informing us about ribbon-cutting ceremonies is often more important than making sure children in government-funded schools have enough to eat. A meal may fill a few bellies for a day, but the announcement of a new highway can compel a lot of people to buy more cars, making sure a lot more taxes are generated. It’s obvious where our priorities should lie.

There are other reasons why we need more of these announcements during prime time. An inauguration ceremony can be more entertaining than any reality show, for those who choose to look carefully and read between the lines. Look at the profiles adorning the announcement posters, for instance. Look at the rows of men and women smiling and waving from their allocated slots at the top or bottom of banners and hoardings. Don’t look for information on who has built a project or what it has cost, because that is private data that doesn’t concern us. All that matters is who intends to take credit.

Then there are the images of what a completed project will look like when it finally opens 20 or 30 years from now. An airport in Uttar Pradesh will become a replica of one in Shanghai. A park in Varanasi will turn into a Disneyworld from Florida. A road in Haryana will morph into a highway from Tokyo. These aren’t falsehoods being pushed towards us by overenthusiastic government employees; they are carefully planned projections of what our country will look like if we only shut our eyes to reality and opt for a world of fantasy instead. To be pessimists and accuse the government of lying to us is simply to show an unfair preference for the truth.

I hope we have more full-page advertisements and live coverage of new inaugurations in the year to come. The world has been depressing enough since that pesky pandemic arrived, and we need happier stories to distract ourselves. Enough of farmer protests and activists being held without trial. What we need is better camera angles and more drone-powered footage of our ministers waving while walking towards an inauguration.

It is my hope that more resources are diverted towards this sort of coverage to counter the negativity that India increasingly attracts outside our borders. The international press spends way too much time on our alleged human rights abuses, alleged failure to stem corruption, or our alleged inability to generate jobs for the youth. It’s time to seize the narrative from those naysayers and project the image of a vibrant country where new things will be built decades from now.

We may not have jobs, money, education, or prospects. We have announcements of new projects though, and that should be enough.

When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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