Skip to main content

Guess What!





By common accusation, Keralites are news hungry by heredity. They have an incurable craving for news in whatever shape it comes. The morning rush for the newspaper  or the extreme discomfort a newspaperless day creates exemplifies the same fixation. But is it not perplexing that even after the TV  has entrenched as a staple daily experience in the lives of an average Keralite,  craving for news has not yet diminished? A state where there are plenty more news channels in the local language, scrolling news incessantly on the  bottom scroll bars  and through the (wise) mouths of the newsreaders,  the news craze is still more robust. 

Where does this urge to know the 'new' come from? At its bottom the desire to know what is happening around you could be a natural inclination of the social commitment of an individual who is living in a community. In the contemporary idiom, it means to be 'connected'. To be in the know of what happens to the people around you can enable one help them in the hours of need. To be in the know of the community members helps on keeping oneself on their toes, so to say. Speaking to the people around, asking after their lives, enquiring as to the new developments, these are standard exercises to keep one connected to the life around. To go and enquire what's up, when there is a crowd in the neighborhood, is part of that communitarian awareness and the tendency to be in the loop of the society. 

Then, when does it spill off into an urge which can't be kept under lids? When does the need for news grow pathological and wakes up the quest mode in us? An evangelical zeal which crests with the feel that there ‘ought to be’ news? When does the willingness to listen if something happens takes a turn to weariness when one doesn't get fed on by news? Can we explain the lust for news a communitarian urge here or is it something less than that? This is as hair splitting as attempting to scientifically define the distinctions between news and gossip. Trying to answer when does a member of a community stop being a social help and begin to be an audio equivalent of a voyeur? Is there a (collapsible) distinction between the scandal lust of the Keralites and the news hunger, at the bottom? Is the rumour bug in the average Keralite , a news-lust over-grown? The hyper social sensitivities of a people making them cross the bounds and desirous and stay there, once they savor the juicy newsy bites? 

The increased presence of T V news channels perhaps points to the same direction. The media business houses, in their finite wisdom, have come to cash in on the heightened what's up urge? To answer the collective call of nature of the Keralites, the channels keep spreading their 'flash resources' thin, but long. Watch an average day’s news channel activity, for a moment. When all the breaks and flashes are spent, when the days debates are done and experts have collected the cash and gone home to roost, when the channelia is done with, go for a viewerly stock taking. How many pieces of news have stayed alive and how far have died down? Have they died down because they naturally got resolved or have come to a natural conclusion? Or is it a fact that, there was nothing to begin with? I mean, the news was no news, after all? Like, the flash of the landfall of a Phailin storm which was kept on alive for absurdly long spell, keeping the hopes alive,  kind of?! When the daily hullabaloo is done with, after all the credits and debits, what is left with is less than what usually appears in a daily the next morning ? Is it not reasonable to ask, what has an average viewer gained gazing idiotically at the news box, all day long? If all the flashes turned flashes in the pan, and all the news breaks have broken nothing, and the leads led to the dust bin, if the residue is less than what could have been confined to the front page of daily , then an elegy to the news-hungry is not out of place, for sure. What has been zoomed in in the morning as the big unfolding story folds more easily than a folding chair by evening. The news hunger is done with. Still for us, the curiosity of the eager news buff is kept alive. The more it peeps, stalks, key holes, hacks, the better. 

Regular newspaper readers (is there a tribe which takes newspaper irregularly? Perhaps, the clever ones are so!) occasionally realizes, after having to go through phases in which they are forced to go without access to it for a long while, that end of the day, they haven't missed much! A week’s denial of newspaper hasn't denied them much. It is pretty cool to pick up from where you have left off a week back and the grand newspaper narrative simply takes off. It connects you to it easily. There is always another unfolding story which quietly lets you in and there you are! What has transpired in the middle has expired so easy. 

Form the harmless, community centered 'what's up' to a nosy 'you know what' is a short spicy distance. It is the distance between a genuine concern for the other and a lip smacking ego trip. It is a one way street. Lonely too. Lonely as the sincere feel for the other gets sidelined here. The news of the other helps you put yourself higher than the other. As an act of one upmanship, it also is an act of putting the other down, to put oneself up. 

Looks like we lap up news in any guise. And in the bargain, we knowingly blur the shades of what's worthy and permissible too. A society with heightened social consciousness like ours, keen to know and quick to act, this is where social sense of morality boomerangs. 

What else can an average Malayali newspaper reader think of on a morning, denied of a newspaper? 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Foregrounding the Backdrops

    On Foregrounding the Backdrops Much of my liking for large pictures has lot to do with the backdrops and the 'others' in the frames. By others I mean the also-rans, in a way! But this is more about the past when pictures were not so common, when not everything could be shot and framed, as we do now. Magazines with photos were a premium then and colour pics even harder to come by. Rather than the ones who were the focus, meant to be the focus, my eyes would involuntarily wander off to the rest of the things and people who have been caught by the camera. It is their looks, expressions, postures, feels, appearance, that my senses will work on. The man in the middle, or men, those on whom the story is supposed to zero in, will fade out and the backdrop will zoom in. Imagination tracking those to their illogical conclusions constituted my act of reading the pictures. It was such a delight as it helped one keep the trivial off and enjoy the core of the margins. When o...
13 comments
Read more

Can Politics Empathise?

  E. M. Forster wrote about the need for ‘tolerance’ and argued that the real force which can help rebuild the world after the World Wars will be not love or forgiveness, but 'tolerance'. Though I read that essay long back during student days, as it was ‘taught’ as part of curricular requirement, it was 'studied' and then abandoned, in a way. But still the argument of the essay kept coming back, as it does now. I didn't grasp quickly the inherent link between empathy and tolerance, but there sure is a reason why Forster showed up. There are many ways the two, tolerance and empathy, complement each other and the presence of the former can surely help build the other. Empathy is the capacity to know and experience how others feel, putting yourself in another's position. But is there something like political empathy? Why is it not there, generally speaking? I would like to explain political empathy as the capacity of one politica...
12 comments
Read more

The Profes'sorry'ate!

If what was reported in the social media sometime ago was true, an MLA once asked a Minister whether Professorship category existed in Colleges. The reply from the Education Minister was that it doesn't, even though, they say, the response was from the minister who designated himself as Professor! The tendency to brand oneself as professor among College faculty members is on the rise for while. Many of those who have even recently joined the educational service as faculty prefix a Prof. before their names. Or, that is what I feel when I go through some of the reports in the media regarding College activities. As a result almost all of the college faculty are entitled to be designated Professors that way! Some relate this with seniority. If you have been in service for a while, have been teaching long, then you can stick the label on you. Or you can allow others to stick it on you. It grows on you and you take a new feel about who you are! A Professor Babu enables you to be...
8 comments
Read more