Obsession with trivia

on the spot
Tavleen Singh
Every time I come home from some foreign land I discover some new facet of our dear Bharat Mata. So this time when I returned late one smoggy night last week I discovered that we are a country that currently appears to be obsessed with trivial pursuits. Or is it just the media that is obsessed with trivia? I am not sure but am prepared to concede that it could be just the fault of our hyper-active, hyper-hysterical news channels that a traveler arriving in our fair and wondrous land would be left with the impression that all of India’s major problems had been dealt with and so we have time to spend long hours dwelling on matters of no consequence. On the day of my arrival I discovered that the Hindi news channels were totally absorbed by the Shahrukh Khan non-story and the English news channels by the Narendra Modi non-story.
Shahrukh Khan wrote an article in some foreign newspaper in which he commented on the occasional problems he faces because of being a Muslim and this was picked up by Pakistan’s Home Minister and its leading terrorist and used gleefully as an example of the unhappy lot of the Indian Muslim. The story would have been ignored in the days before 24-hour news channels but now this seems impossible. Eager-beaver reporters raced off to South Block and demanded answers from high officials in the Ministry of External Affairs who instead of keeping their mouths shut happily proffered needless comments thereby bringing themselves down to the same level as the Pakistanis. All of Tuesday evening the Hindi channels discussed the story as if it were the most important event. Beetle browed ‘intellectuals’ were summoned to participate in noisy panel discussions and they speculated at length on the nuances of Shahrukh’s alleged unhappiness until they were interrupted by the movie star himself. He had just returned from some trip abroad and although he refused to talk to reporters at the airport (possibly because he did not know what the fuss was about) he later altered a speech he was giving at an awards ceremony in Mumbai to declare that he was not an unhappy Indian Muslim. After this it became the non-story it had been from the start.
Meanwhile, the English news channels I watched were obsessed with the possibilities of Narendra Modi becoming prime minister because some senior BJP leaders had suggested that he was the party’s best candidate. It is not at all clear whether the BJP will end up naming him their candidate nor is the general election imminent so it really is a non-story at the moment but to my amazement I came upon at least three major anchors discussing the subject as if it were a momentous political development. Inevitably the panel discussions they anchored were filled with banalities, speculation and such a long list of ‘what ifs’ that it was hard to take the debate seriously. Do you begin to see what I mean about trivial pursuits?
What makes me sad is that there are so many grim political and economic issues that could be discussed and that stare a visitor in the face from the moment he lands at an Indian airport. As I went through immigration at Mumbai airport I noticed yet again the unnecessary and utterly useless procedures on which huge amounts of taxpayers money continues to be wasted. I did not need a landing card to enter Switzerland but needed one to re-enter my own country. Why? The immigration official who examined the landing card spent long minutes pouring over it. Why? Then as I tried to head for the baggage carousels I was stopped by yet another official who wanted to re-examine my passport and when I asked him whether this was because he did not trust the immigration official who had just stamped it he said it was to prevent people from entering India without an entry stamp in their passports. It seemed not to have occurred to him that this was impossible since a rogue entrant would have been prevented from entering by long queues of irate passengers and a barricade of immigration desks.
While waiting for my luggage I observed another needless practice. Someone on the public address system said, ‘Ladeeez and gental-man velcome to Mumbai.’ What was the purpose of this announcement? Which passengers of which flight were being addressed? More importantly why does India’s commercial capital continue to have one of the worst international airports in the world?
On the drive into the city I came up against a long list of uniquely Indian problems. Filthy streets, squalid slums, desperate poverty and the sad sight of small children waiting at traffic lights to sell wilting flowers, glossy magazines and pirated books just to make enough money to be able to eat a small meal. To see them reminded me of that most shameful of all statistics that half of Indian children are malnourished. Why do we so rarely see discussions about this on television? Why do we never see discussions on the horrific state of Indian urbanization? After the scenic, serene and spotlessly clean cities I had traveled through in Switzerland the squalor of Mumbai struck me as especially horrific but these are things that seem not to concern us because of our obsession with trivia.
As these thoughts passed through my head on my gloomy drive home I remembered a conversation I had with a famous TV anchor in Davos. I asked him why current affairs programming on all our television channels had such a hysterical edge about it and why there was not more real news reporting and he replied that it seemed to be what viewers wanted. He said, ‘We tried not long ago to have just news at 9 pm and our ratings dropped so dramatically that we had to go back to having a panel discussion. What do you want us to do? If we don’t get the advertising we cannot afford to remain in business so we give people what they seem to want.’ It is an argument that is often made to justify the giddy, ditsy quality of most Bollywood films so perhaps what India is going through at the moment is a very long, very silly season. Unfortunately, it gives our political leaders a chance to avoid dealing with our real problems because until there is public pressure they see no need. Nobody likes trivial pursuits more than our political leaders do.

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