TALES OF TRAVESTY
DR. JITENDRA SINGH
Pope was on a visit to Paris and was being driven around the city by his hosts. While passing through a suburb, one of them casually pointed out, “This is a colony of prostitutes’’. To this, the Pope too casually inquired ‘‘You have an idea, what is the number of prostitutes in Paris ?’’
The newspapers reported next day with a banner headline ‘‘Pope inquires about prostitutes’’.
So, that is the enigmatic prowess of media. And the anecdote is from the times when it was mostly the print media and round-the-clock electronic news channels were still not around with their share of breaking news.
In the contemporary political context of India, the ‘‘Aam Aadmi Party” (AAP) has emerged as a glaring example of this double edged media phenomenon. The incredible manner in which the AAP, within a brief span of one year, rose to a crescendo riding on the media back and then, within a month, found itself grounded with the same media chasing its ministers on midnight raids which ended up as midnight misventures. And, the ‘‘Dharna’’ for Lokpal which had shot the activist Kejriwal and Co. into unprecedented media hype found itself being replaced by an unsavoury ‘‘Dharna’’ by Chief Minister Kejriwal against a mere police SHO.
The attraction and aura of media attention is so overpowering that it often takes away the individual’s discretion to draw the line of ‘‘optimum’’. Even in the days of ‘‘Doordarshan’’, the Information Department’s over-enthusiasm to show extended visuals of the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, day after day, during the half an hour evening news bulletin had ended up in numerous jokes based on Rajiv’s favourite Hindi phrase ‘‘Humko Dekhna Hai, Hum Dekhenge…’’ and proved disastorously counter-productive at the hustings with a saving grace only in the last phase of Lok Sabha poll that incidentally took place after Rajiv Gandhi’s unfortunate assassination at Sriperumbadoor.
A major pitfall of the electronic media is that often visuals get the better of vision and beauty gets the better of brain. The thought gets sacrificed at the altar of appearance and content gets sacrificed at the alter of mannerism. Just as Kejriwal’s muffler around head and neck becomes a new fashion symbol but only after inadvertantly exposing what lies inside the head beneath the muffler.
In the ultimate reckoning, in the realms of political world, what finally matters is whether the media got the better of you or you got the better of media ? This dilemma may sometimes go beyond the comprehension of an ordinary mortal or the common man who knows little where to draw the line between the self and the self-image. To cite Ghalib’s poetic lament ‘‘…..Duboya Mujhko Hone Ne, Na Hota Main To Kya Hota !’’ What matters finally for Umapathy is whether… ‘‘Media Ke Aap’’ or ‘‘Aap’’ Ka Media ?
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