Our response to the ‘Response from CSDS’

You may want to look at our initial article, followed by response from CSDS.

[Reprint of the response to Yogendra Yadav of CSDS].

Looks like Yogendra Yadav and his CSDS is pulling a Manmohan on us.   When CSDS says: “Such an impression arises partly from a misreading of the survey findings,” we would like to point out that our objection to the survey is not just the results or its interpretations but the means and methods employed in the survey which according to us are clearly biased and fraudulent.  The question here is ethicality and validity of employing a person who has publicly professed his loyalties to a cause that is in essence anti-Telangana to conduct a survey within Telangana on an issue that dwells upon creation or non-creation of Telangana.  

The flimsy and intellectually dishonest response from CSDS tends to insult our intelligence.   We are not ready to buy their specious argument that: “Our survey clearly shows that within the Telangana region nearly two-thirds of those who have an opinion support a separate state.”  Our contention is that it is highly improbable that 27% of the people of Telangana would have no opinion on an all-pervading issue which affects them on a daily basis, especially when the figure for the same question is only 10% in Seemandhra where there are no on-going agitations as intensive as in Telangana.  It is like saying 27% Iraqis living in Iraq are either ignorant or carry no opinion on the subject of American invasion of Iraq, while only 10% are ignorant in the nearby Iran.  

Opinion Poll in Andhra Pradesh: Response from CSDS

CSDS has responded (Our allegations are at “Opinion Poll in Andhra Pradesh: Not funny anymore”).  The response is reprinted below.  CSDS has admitted to the following:

1. CSDS employed P Narasimha Rao who is honorary convener of Samaikyandhra JAC. 
2. Most of the investigators that went into Telangana are from Seemandhra.  
3. It is ‘possibly an error of judgment’.  CSDS ‘would therefore carry out an independent verification of these survey findings and report the findings to the public within the next two months’.

 [Response from CSDS reprinted]

Clarification on Telangana related findings of the State of the Nation Survey by the CSDS

The publication of the findings pertaining to Telangana in the CNN-IBN State of the Nation Survey undertaken by the CSDS and presented by The Hindu has evoked strong interest and intense reactions, natural in a passionately contested issue like this one. We have been accused in some quarters of carrying out a flawed exercise biased against the movement for a separate Telangana.

 

Opinion Poll in Andhra Pradesh: Not funny anymore

By Sujai and Dileep

The Secret Chapter of Srikrishna Committee Report gave step-by-step instructions to subvert the genuine people’s movement of Telangana.  It advised the Government to use the media outfits to manipulate the news and opinion in order to suppress the movement in Telangana.

The recent survey from two national media outfits CNN-IBN and CNBC-TV18 in collaboration with Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) throws open the question if indeed there is anything called fair media in this country.

To the question asked: People have different opinions on the issue of a separate Telangana state.  Some people say that Andhra Pradesh should be bifurcated into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, while State should be trifurcated into Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Rayalaseema.  Others say that Andhra Pradesh should continue as a united State.  What is your opinion on the issue? 

Venal Journalism in India

Modern secular democracies who define themselves as ‘free’ nations have not come about just like that.  It was a tortuous journey of nearly thousand years where the common man fought against the powerful regents and institutions who believed they had a divine mandate and hence divine right to rule over the people with absolutism.   Regents or the Religions manifesting as the State was the most powerful enemy of the common man for millennia, ready to strip him of his rights at the pretext of protecting him from imagined threats. 

 A modern nation defined and built institutions to protect the common man from the tyranny of the state, ensuring there were enough checks and balances to protect democracy from being subverted by the State or the powerful groups.   The role of independent media was crucial to ensure democracy was protected from being hijacked by these vested groups. 

And yet, we see an ominous trend in India where the media houses, instead of making an independent investigation, instead of conducting a free debate, instead of checking the powerful groups from usurping the freedoms of the common man, have start aligning themselves with the State and the powerful lobbies, acting as their mouthpieces, engaging in subversion of democracy.

Sophistry in Indian media

Nietzsche said, ‘There are no facts; only interpretations’.

This is so true with the newspaper Times of India (TOI). For over three months they ran extensive Lead India Campaign urging and exhorting urban voters of Bangalore to come out and yet. Few days before elections, they even predicted a dramatic increase in the voter turnout because of their campaign. Voting took place yesterday in Bangalore and the results are out.

Bangalore records a ‘feeble 50%’ turnout. According to TOI,

The 50% average for the four Bangalore constituencies is lower than the 54% recorded in the last Lok Sabha polls before delimitation.

So, in reality, after the intensive campaigning we saw the turnout decreased by 4% from the last Lok Sabha elections. As again, the rural Bangalore compensated for urban Bangalore. Bangalore Rural posted 58% turnout while Bangalore South and Bangalore Central posted only 45% turnout.

However, that did not stop TOI from making the following claim. Their patted themselves back on the first-page lead-news story saying:

Call it the impact of the aggressive ‘go-vote’ campaign by various citizen groups or the sheer need to take charge of their destiny, Bangalore saw a 6% higher voter turnout…

‘What?’ you may think. ‘What sheer nonsense!’ you may say. How could TOI twist the facts around to suit their agenda you may ask! For that you have to read what Nietzsche said once again – no facts, only interpretations, and of late TOI has become very good at it. The next sentence tells you how they use the facts to promote their agenda.

…as compared to 2008 assembly polls.

You see – though the Lok Sabha turnout has actually decreased from 54% to 50%, TOI conveniently compared Lok Sabha turnout with Assembly poll turnout to prove that their campaign achieved success. Most often, the dynamics for Lok Sabha polls and Assembly polls are quite different, and that’s why the pundits keep the comparison separate.

TOI has mastered the art of sophistry, and their incessant campaigns on every issue are only becoming annoying – but my fear is that it will soon become the biggest propaganda machine, worse than Indian politicians, capable of brainwashing its readers to promote its vested interests and ideology. That day is not far away.

Exaggeration in Indian Reporting

Watch an Indian news channel for twenty minutes, especially in the regional languages like Hindi or Telugu, and you will think that the world is at the brink of a major disaster. Every news item is ‘breaking news’. It is flashed innumerable times with all kinds of jazzy fonts and colors accompanied with blaring and ominous music. Young anchors have their own take on each issue; their prejudice doesn’t come as insinuation but is directly embedded within report. Then there are chest-beating and table-thumping young reporters who make every news item an imminent cause for World War III. Indian way of stressing the importance of an issue is to shout aloud and repeat the same sentence over and over again.

Most Indian news channels are downright crappy. Their crappiness can be measured by the number of tickers that keeps floating around on the TV screen. Some of them have 5 lines of horizontal tickers at the bottom taking up nearly 40% of the viewing area. Some texts scroll across faster while some move slow – don’t know why. The text in the tickers has nothing to with the news item being discussed. There are additional boxes displaying ads and irrelevant messages, making the TV screen resemble an Indian road, where everything and anything goes- cars, lorries, mopeds, cycles, pedestrians, cats, dogs, cows, meandering through construction material, pot holes, garbage, and loads of shit. Trying to make way out of it is a painful task– same holds true for Indian news channels. Making sense out of them is an onerous task – you feel exhausted after few minutes of watching.

One accident flip of remote, sometimes I land on such Indian news channels. If I linger for more than five minutes, my blood pressure starts to rise and I feel restless. I suddenly realize that I am doing something really dangerous, take immediate action and flip the channel to a saner channel and take a deep breath and vow never to tread into those troubled waters again.

According to me maturity of a news channel can be directly measured by the number of tickers floating on the TV screen. The less the tickers more mature the news channel. Take BBC or CNN for example. The news is delivered in a calm tone, even when it is the gravest of the issues. The tickers are minimal. They are one or two of them, relevant to the news item discussed – not very different from the roads in the West.

Indian news channels report an event in lofty words, making it poetic, using outlandish analogies right from Indian Cinema and Mythology. The news report is no longer a report, it is a piece of art, an epic, a saga, where a hero has to save a princess in distress from fiery dragons, slaying elephantine serpents, while scaling huge castles, and so on.

Indians are quite comfortable with such exaggerated, fictitious and flowery language. In fact, they encourage it. When I was a kid in a school, teachers used to praise the student who used bombastic language to describe something. If you used ordinary language, it was not appreciated. Ostentation is a virtue. When writing a speech for an event in my college, a girl used thesaurus to make it look sophisticated. So, she took a sentence which goes like, ‘with a vision to make our college more competitive…’, and substituted the word ‘vision’ with something that sounded more pedantic. The result came out as, ‘with a clairvoyance to make our college more competitive…’ thereby making the sentence meaningless and complete nonsense.

When I participated in college debates in my fourth year of college, I had to face a bunch of students who were quite well versed in the art of debating, some of them winning awards from President of India. I was new to debating. I had never done it before in an organized way, and it was my first time ever (though we had extensive and lengthy debates in college hostels). To my utter surprise, these veterans of debating carried Roget’s Thesaurus with them all the time. We had few minutes to prepare the speech, and during this time, these guys would consult this tome and embellish every sentence substituting ordinary and easy-to-understand words with sophisticated but hard-to-understand words, sometimes resulting in loss of the purported meaning. They were so caught up in making their speeches bombastic that they did not concentrate on the essence of the topic. [Thankfully, the judges of the college were not impressed by the flowery language.]

Poetry or fiction writing in India is always a challenge. Many young writers get caught up in trying to use unnecessary and out-of-place metaphors, analogies, phrases and hard-to-understand words making the writing incomprehensible. What is the point of communication, I asked myself many a times? Is it to impress the other person, or is it to be well understood?

This fascination with such pompous language is not something new to Indians. Here’s a snapshot of an Indian chronicler of history from Harsha times (500-700AD) [1]:

Instantly on hearing this [the news of his brother’s murder] his fiery spirit blazed forth in a storm of sorrow augmented by flaming flashes of furious wrath. His aspect became terrible in the extreme. As he fiercely shook his head, the loosened jewels from his crest looked like live coals of the angry fire which he vomited forth. Quivering without cessation, his wrathful curling lip seemed to drink the lives of all kings. His reddening eyes with their rolling gleam put forth, at it were, conflagrations in the heavenly spaces. Even the fire of anger, as though itself burned by the scorching power of his inborn valour’s unbearable heat, spread over him a rainy shower of sweat. His limbs trembled as if in fright at such unexampled fury…

He represented the first revelation of valour, the frenzy of insolence, the delirious of pride, the youthful avatar of fury, the supreme effort of hauteur, the new age of manhood’s fire, the regal consecration of warlike passion, the camp-lustration of day of reckoning.

No historian can take such documents seriously. It’s very hard to figure out what is fiction and what is a fact. A historian trying to reconstruct Indian history finds a report on war sheer fantastical [1]:

[Meanwhile his] enemies were best by all manner ill omens: jackals, swarming bees, and swooping vultures terrorized their cities; their soldiers fell out with their mistresses while some, looking in the mirror, saw themselves headless; a naked woman wandered through the parks ‘shaking the forefinger as if to count the dead’.

Indian politicians, news reporters, and Indian speakers tend to use such language all the time. Maybe Indians find reality too discomforting, and hence find solace in such grandiose and fantastic world made up by their imagination and grandiloquence.

Sources:

[1]. A History of India, John Keay. Harper Collins.

Idiocy on TV

You don’t have to go really far from your home to discover the kind of idiocy that pervades India these days. One wrong flip of the channel, I suddenly land inside a new world – which happens to be the world most Indians are living in. Indian news channels, especially in the Indian regional languages, can be quite crappy, and give you an insight into the kind of drivel Indians are being fed on a daily basis.

In addition to the news, which is posited as facts, and hence undeniable truths, these channels also indoctrinate Indians with superstition, blind belief and orthodoxy on a daily basis, as if it is coming from an authoritative source. The whole charade should not be dismissed as harmless. It is carefully constructed, arranged and engineered to make people dumb.

Most of us are familiar with how the real news is relayed to us by someone sitting behind a desk who is peering into a computer or another document talking in an authoritative voice. Most viewers take news pretty seriously. If the news says, there is a bomb blast in Kanpur then there is a bomb blast in Kanpur. Nobody questions if it actually happened or if it was just a hoax being telecasted by this TV channel. If they said that Prime Minister resigned, then PM resigned. They don’t question it. The stock markets tumble accordingly based on such news. The stock brokers don’t wait and ask themselves – ‘hey may be, this TV channel guys are just kidding’.

So, when these TV channels talk about astrology, there are quite a good number of viewers who take it pretty seriously. One such wrong flip landed me into such Hindi News Channel (Star News or something like that). An astrologer who looked more like a college professor was sitting behind a laptop. The viewer would dial in and give details of their birth – the date, the time and the place of birth. This astrologer would type in the details into his computer. The viewer would then relate his/her problem.

Here are some of the problems. A lady called to say that her family is losing money in all the investments they have made and looks like there is no way of recovering them. The astrologer looked into computer and answered her. It seems a Rahu or Ketu or one of those goddamned planets is in some wrong house. And therefore she will see this happening for the next few months. He even asked her not to invest her husband’s money directly or indirectly during the next 45 days or so. He then gave the solution to get over the problem. He asked her to visit the temple for the next 45 days and donate jaggery and ghee. He asked her to feed crows, and also get rid of old coins and coal from the home.

The other caller told him that her health is not good and she is constantly worried about the job promotion. The astrologer solved it for her. He told her that Shani is now in a different house. She should put some paste on her head everyday and put black powder on two animals which have two different colors, bury some ingredients in the home and do some puja on daily basis.

No wonder India continues to remain superstitious and blinded.

Not only this, most viewers don’t seem to object to the crass TV shows. There is a TV ad from Reliance. A wife is talking to her husband on the phone. The wife is at her home. The guy is traveling in a posh car somewhere on a hillside close to Simla. They are talking about their old memories. The guy walks to an old monument. He says everything is the same. He looks at an etching on the monument – Raj loves Sneha – something like that. Both of them dolefully remember the great old moments. Indian audience completely identifies with that moment and gets swooned.

Nobody bothers to ask a simple question – isn’t writing on old monuments, etching on them, vandalizing, etc, a habit we want Indians to refrain from?

India bans ads

Before I tell you what it is, let me make my stand clear. Government should not ban any ads. It should not ban any books. It should not ban any movies. It should set up bodies that monitor these medium of communications – like censor board for movies. If the censor board has deemed it right for the Indian audience, the government has no role to play there. It cannot and should not ban it once it is approved by this board. However, if someone deems that the content (which is already approved by the board) to be distasteful, malignant or harmful to the society, they can take it to the court. And that someone includes the government as well. If the Government of India doesn’t like something, it should take that something to court and fight its battles there. And after that battle is over, only the court’s decision has to followed, not government’s diktat.

We have seen many such incidents in the recent past where the Government of India decided to ban things it didn't like.

1. A book detailing the riots that happened in New Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi where thousands of Sikhs were killed in a single massacre was banned by the Government of India.
2. Government of AP banned Da Vinci Code because it felt its viewers (Christians) would be offended by it.
3. Government of India banned FTV and AXN (TV channels) because they supposedly aired inappropriate content. [I want to know if the same government has ever watched the regional channels where the content is closer to soft pornography- relayed day after day during prime time to everyone, including kids].
4. Now, the Government of India banned two ads, one of which it termed ‘racist’. Though I do agree that this ad may have been racist, I do NOT approve of government's decision.

Distasteful Ad

What was this distasteful ad that Indian government banned? According to Times of India,

The advertisements were found to be “racist” and in poor taste.

The ads showed a man of Caribbean descent being served chillies at an Indian dhaba but being denied drinking water by not just the waiters but also other customers.

Of course it sounds racist. I am against all such ads which show certain races inferior, certain colors inferior, and naturally occurring physical attributes inferior. I think Indians should grow up, as audience, as advertisers, and as movies makers. ‘Fair and Lovely’ ad is one such campaign which undermines confidence level of millions of Indian girls who think they are dark (and therefore inferior). Now, it started to undermine the confidence level of millions of Indian guys too with their new products that targets dark men.

This ad that the government banned, I am quite sure, might be really distasteful, and I am quite sure, most Indians may have not even thought about it. That’s how most of our ads, TV shows and movies work- they inculcate these prejudices against dark people, handicapped people, other ethnicities, all in the name of jest and comedy.

There are many Telugu movies where a handicapped person meets with a misadventure bringing in hilarity, mirth and laughter from the audience. In one movie, a black woman is married to an Indian comedian, and the very appearance of that black woman on the screen is seen as comical and funny- because she represents two inferior things – one, that she is really dark, and second, that she is very fat. Both things are seen as objects of ridicule and this is what this black woman represents in this movie.

Indian audience is really quite immature, and so are the movie makers, the ad makers, and of course the journalists. The list also includes the government leaders, the teachers, the professors and businessmen.

Immaturity is no excuse for deepening the ills of our society.

End of Rickshaws in Kolkata: Should we miss them?

In the recent THE HINDU edition of YOUNG WORLD (the complete newspaper for children), 15 Dec 2006, Antara Das writes about recent West Bengal Government’s decision to abolish the use of hand pulled rickshaws.

The only time I ever traveled on this rickshaw was in early 1990s when I visited Kolkata for the first time in my life. My friends assured me that it’s a lifetime experience and that I should definitely take a ride. I was very uncomfortable sitting in a rickshaw that was hand pulled by a man who was barefoot, was thin and scrawny with minimal clothing. However, I succumbed to my friends’ assurances and I sat on it. That five to ten minute ride was the most uncomfortable journey that I took. I was on the edge of my seat all the time- I was uneasy and was feeling queasy. Once the ride was over. I got off and swore I would never ride one again. It was just weird being pulled by another man like that.

I always thought it was inhumane and I never liked those rickshaws. Now, that the government has decided to scrap them, I was very happy. However, Andata Das’s article sends dual message. Just look at some of her sentences.

# The article is titled “Relic on Wheels”

# “But the death knell for this archaic mode of transport has been sounded”

# “This archaic mode of transport will fade away, and with it the memories associated with the kind of experience it had to offer”

# She asks “Inhuman?” and then answers- “Rickshaws, considered a cheap, pollution free and convenient mode of transport, mainly relied on the unskilled labor…”

# “The system of one man pulling the burden of another was being increasingly considered as inhuman, given the heightened awareness about human rights,” but according to her, “…the rickshaw pullers themselves felt that their work was no less undignified…”

# “…for those accustomed to hailing the sturdy rickshaw-wallah to navigate a water logged street, it is going to be a lonely monsoon”

Antara Das seems doesn’t seem to think it is inhuman. She goes nostalgic about it. She seems to miss them actually. She thinks ‘sturdy’ men run these rickshaws. This is how Indians rationalize all inhuman acts in India. Soon, another author will write the glory days of cleaners of night soil. She will miss those days when those lower caste kids would plunge themselves into sanitary tubes to clean the mess. She will term it as cheap and pollution free methods to clean our shits.

Imagine this is what we are feeding as news to our kids. THE HINDU should have been careful!

Should we celebrate?

Shibu Soren got life sentence. Navjot Singh Sidhu is convicted. Sanjay Dutt is convicted. These are big names and influential personalities. Shibu is from the ruling party. Sidhu is from major opposition party. Sanjay Dutt is son of a politician and an actor. But somehow Indian judicial system seems to have transcended these ecclesiastical power structures to treat them as any Indian citizen.

Should we celebrate?

Haven’t we come long way when no politician could be convicted, where any influential person could get a free ticket out of the trial dockets?

Is this the beginning of a new era? Or is it a small anomaly or a blip on the radar?