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?
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