TheDailyToast: Will Shiv Sena ink people if there is no press?
Given the spate of tantrums in the nation and the overwhelming amount of news folks available to cover it as a catastrophe of national import, the Editor's Guild of India recently issued guidelines for a new Tantrum Test for news. Or ought to at any rate.
The first is: will the news event occur without the camera or page 1?:
It is like this. Bears hibernate whether you know it or not. Gorillas mate. The Olive Ridley returns to Orissa's shores. Bombay makes Pav Bhajji long after foreign travel writers are inured to it. And the CBI will botch up cases long after and long before Aarushi, whether or not you write books or put them in bleak bleak films made by sad sad looking people. And rape, like that tree that falls in the forest with no one to witness it, still occurs. Chetan Bhagat jokes would exist if there was no Twitter to RT it. They'd be on toilet walls as graffiti. And AIB would be telling each other funny jokes in a parking lot in Versova without YouTube. These would exist irrespective of how they are seen.
Will the Sena ink people if there is no coverage guaranteed? Will authors resign if there is no op-ed explaining what a loss it is? And will an award be returned if there was no press conference, no trending hashtag and no rival author to seem more magnanimous? Unlikely. Often within the act of martyrdom is its own tantrum. Will a farmer die and create and innovate without Sainath visiting him? Most likely, because his survival depends on it. The best news is always the one that exists irrespective of us.
The second is: if you can wash it off but still don't, who keeps it there put it there.
It is like this. Will the ink wash off? Do you own soap? Have you running water? The privacy of a bathroom? Of course, after giving suitable evidence and recording the fact that it occurred, are you able to make the statements you want to make in a dignified fashion even without the ink on your face? And are you deliberately inking earsets that the rest of us may someday have to use ...(over my dead body buddy)... If the answer to any two or more of the above is "yes", you are pretty much taking over orchestrating the spectacle and this is not about what anything stood for anymore. This is about my photograph having more pixels than yours, you cctv vandals. A self perpetuating cycle. This also applies to film stars who won't take off their sunglasses at night indoors (Rahul Bose) and who won't wash the weird hairstyle out of their hair from set to page 3 parties (Aamir Khan) or who carry towels when towelettes will do, or women who wear their maternity prosthetics to trailer launches... Oh sorry Vidya Balan... No no, someone else... And PM Modi's weird turbanisms that are camera-only occurrences. For Pete's sake, unless he has a walk-in closet full of 'em that he wears for a different dandiya secretly every night, there's probably a species being driven to extinction that could use that space.
Third: what replaces it when the journalist is off duty on that beat?
If it's just chai and brainstorming, we probably didn't miss the news story of the decade. The languorous what-do-we-knows of people who need to claim relevance fill beautiful summer days, but achieve nothing as much as those who put out their shoulder to the till and work the systems. The System Doesn't Work And We Don't Know Who Broke It brigade can get itself a statue in the park to sit under.
Fourth: Can you unstuck the protest or is it self propelling? Can you take it to a logical conclusion? Any conclusion will do.
Can FTII students go back to the classroom and finish their year? But then what if someone asks them what they were protesting for since their films weren't being interfered with anyway and the film industry is anyway not opting to lead them and anyway the mainstream they hope to join is not making countercurrent films...? Or worse, asks them to show them their best work? Best to remain seated under this tree .... Why did the entire censor board resign? So better films would be made? Did they believe it would be made without them? So worse films would be made? So they, in national interest, resigned en mass in the faith that things would improve? I'm still confused at what that achieved.
What do tantrum throwers want? Nobody can decipher what the authors want. It's like a book they're writing and they haven't gotten to writing the end yet. The Sena just doesn't want Pakistan. Period. That it doesn't have Pakistan is another matter. That Pakistan should not exist be considered or mentioned somehow, it believes, will win it the all powerful municipal council elections. Because all of Mumbai will vote, it assumes, on the basis of whether Pakistan, notionally, exists or not... Right. Because that's what is putting craters in our roads, cutting off water supply and forcing us to paint shop and road signs in five different languages. Foreign hand.
See Rahul Gandhi. I bet he makes stupid statements even without a camera to report it. That is true integrity of a news story.