WHEN SILENCE SPEAKS - The Dark Side

This might be the beginning of a time when we are going to be forced to confront some truths about ourselves. Things that will make us uncomfortable and compell us to visit our dark side, the 'O look how good we are as a culture and a society which believes in family values and which the rest of the world wants to emulate from us' syndrome that which we suffer from.
While it may be embarrassing and difficult to face, the purpose perhaps of the process is, to help us to transform ourselves into becoming the best people in the world who deal with life honestly and in an uncorrupted way.
Jitesh Pillai, an old friend and I were tweeting away a few minutes ago about the Sania Mirza, Shoib Mullick and Ayesha Siddiqui drama unfolding in front of our eyes all over the media as the young talented, gifted couple hurtle towards their wedding day which is the 15th April, 2010.
What made me stop tweeting and write this peice, is when Jitesh reminded me that we may be in a frenzy about this today and praise the media for having exposed truths about what goes on behind the ghunghats, veils and pyjama kurta's of our so called pious society, but watch how this too is a forgotten story within the next two days.
I had to agree.
We have wasted the last 15 years of important time when communication breezed in through the open windows and doors of every Indian household whereas we could have changed mindsets and altered perceptions to make ourselves a race more prepared to face global realities instead chucking it away on mindless drama and fiction coming out of a sick society which had it embedded in their heads so deep that tradition is their monopoly and that they know what the world wants.
We can call the Sania, Shoib and Ayesha saga one that belongs to a repressed muslim society where what goes on behind the scenes is this, but it actually mirrors the truth of our entire middle class belonging to all religions and classes, which is essentially made up of upwardly mobile societies who were once aspiring to be whom we as communicators were projecting ourselves to be like through our media, in the last 25 years or so.
And now that today they are a reflection of what our truth is behind the facade we have successfully put up for the world outside, a reflection of our hypocricy and double standards, all we are left with to say is 'Welcome!'
We have to understand that we have distinctively two medias.
One which tells stories of the make belief like that of Tulsi which has only progressed to a child version of the same in Ballika Vaddhu in the last 12 odd yeara, and the other which tells stories of the real girl, the young MBA being gang raped in Pune, at the same time when the biggest tennis star of India goes on to get married to the biggest cricket star of Pakistan amidst controversy which exposes our realities totally.
We have to admit to our pathetic culture which has forced us for decades to hide our truths behind purdahs and ghoonghats, exactly like we end up doing through our storytelling as well. We have repeatedly cloaked our truths behind all the wonderful and beautiful images of doomed marraige ceremonies which made our men complacent in their chauvenism and women in their servility at the time when we had all the opportunity to do otherwise and even pocessed the talent to support it.
Then we have to realize that if we don't want media to forget the most important issues so quickly, then fiction has to pick up from where fact left of.
Fact has no choice but to move on to other pressing issues in a country where so much is happening simultaneously, but we, as an industry of storytellers, have to see to it that the narratives of our fiction carry forward the memories of horrific incidences reported by fact, so that everybody does not fall into amnesia and we can stop them from happening ever so often.
While each channel telling stories has to run by its own idiom and vision, we have to accept that the communication for a larger good is collaborative and those who know it have to come together so that it is told correctly to those who don't know it.
And by this I don't mean fiction has to get too serious and unbearable to be called entertainment, and all creative writers must be understanding what I am saying here.
Fiction is in unbearable mode right now because executives following collections are dictating it, and absurdly serious as well, but give talent the freedom from the shackles of numbers and market research and bring it under the common brief of the larger message instead, and see how genuinely creative people make you laugh and cry and entertain you and communicate the right values and morality as well.
Now that a new generation of people are growing up and taking birth under the influence of communication from the whole world available to them through every media, and we're caught with our pants down, lets be ashamed of the farce we have run for the last so many years.
Let us turn it to our advantage and change it for the better.

It was just the other day that a chill went up my spine when a reputed media proffessional I was lunching with called the Rahul Mahajan Swayamvar disgusting and in the same breath said, "but in the week of the wedding atleast the channel which ran the show went up in ratings to be at number 4 and crossed Sony TV for the first time with its GRP's".
A paradox, I agree, but scary!
Reeks of the countless times I have met with educated and sensible TV proffessionals with ideas that have been dumped with a given explanation that I am too intelligent for the Indian audience and that my sensibility is my limitation.
The fact that I want my intelligence, my thought process and sensibility to rub off on the audiences who will recieve my communication through my storytelling is something they have never heard of and don't want to deal with either.
The exploitative nature of our communication through our narratives are apparent because at the end of the day all that has ever mattered is the cash and the ratings.
The few who were different when we in India, perhaps, had the best storytelling on Television in the world, were outnumbered and their expression was stampeded upon by scores of feet running in an aimless race with no finish line in the plan.
Enligtening a race with enriching tales has always been considered a stupidity in the feudal context and it has taken 'this' form of humiliation through the 'Slumdog Millionaires' of the world, the viral spread of the Sania-Shoib-Ayesha story as well as all those other stories of brutality and corruption of our highest offices which are beamed through the media to the rest of the world, to strip us of our feudal masks. Our monopolistic attitudes and 'everything runs in the family' culture.
Now we seem suitably insulted and one can see the elite, the intelligensia and the so called intellectuals as well as all the pseudo expressionists clamoring for attention of media to focus on which side they are on.
It's not just India but Pakistan and the rest of South Asia which suffers the same.
Fatima Bhutto exposing the hypocricy of her own family and the politics of power played by her aunt in her interviews with Barkha Dutt and Karan Thapar which I have seen recently on the tube, is the result of the same force that the information and communication revolution has empowered people with in the last decade or so and that which has enabled the SILENCE TO SPEAK.
It may be harsh but I can't help but say that it is the same sensitivity of intention required by the media in the communication being made through all its storytelling, which will eventually compell an architect and engineer designing a skywalk or a pavement to think of how the disabled will use it, as that sensitivity of intent which will also drive a young adult in the villages of India to understand what he should do with a hard on when he gets one.
And if we don't get the communication right, we are in for much more trouble than we are in as we speak.

Comments

"There are problems and there are answers but one who is going to solve will sacrifice"

"Politicians kept the country uneducated so that they can rule for longer"

"Poverty is our birthright but its not for me"

"The TV media in the name of TRP is away from the responsibility of creating a socially aware society. We are mockery in the hands of media money game"

"People like us who wants to put our thought across get these blog posts read by few intellectuals and forgotten. I think it should be treated like national anthem depicting the state of our super-realism for shaping the future of upcoming world super power"

and finally a kabir dohe -
"sukhiya sab sansar khaaye aur soye. dukhiya das kabir jaage aur rove"