From Rohtak to Ferguson: Viewer's discretion advised

When it first came to light that Pooja and Aarti Kumar, the two sisters from Rohtak who thrashed a group of leering, lecherous boys on a bus, had, in fact, done this before, you could sense some confusion amidst the generally assured outrage that characterises social media today. This was just after a second video was “leaked”, one that showed them thrashing up a separate group of errant boys, this time in a park. Were Pooja and Aarti, god forbid, filming their exploits to earn their fifteen minutes of fame? Some even went as far as to say that the boys being thrashed in the park video could be innocent, that the girls had been dishonest and that their version of the events wasn't a fair representation of the events. 

To put it simply, out of all the people who watched Pooja and Aarti's exploits on the bus, a significant percentage felt cheated when the second video was unveiled. As long as the bus video was organic and spontaneous, the sisters' heroism had plenty of cheerleaders. But when the act of filming was revealed to be pre-planned, the episode lost a bit of its sheen (unfairly, according to this writer) in the eyes of these viewers.

There is a reason behind the criticism directed at Pooja and Aarti. That reason is our insatiable appetite for “the complete picture”.  As pop culture becomes more and more visual in nature (this is the entire reason why “book trailers” are a thing now), the amount of video content consumed by the average internet user rises steeply. But this is the paradoxical nature of the camera: the more of the world it captures, the more we feel that we are missing out on the bits that go unrecorded. This is also why “behind the scenes” footage of movie stars, politicians and sportspeople are seen as television gold.

All of us remember Dr Manmohan Singh's "Theek Hai" moment. Another recent leaked video that has gone viral shows choreographer and director Farah Khan cursing like a sailor on the sets of The Bench, an online show hosted by Cyrus Sahukar. Khan’s comments about the fiasco are telling. In a statement, she said: “It (the clip) has gone viral and people have it on their phones now. I sound like a mad person. I am sane and rational, and not someone who would do something like this. I just have to be careful next time.” Even Khan, who makes a living behind the camera, was like a deer caught in the headlights.

The funniest part of this entire phenomenon is that at some level, we are all aware that this “selective realism” of the camera is hoodwinking us. We just cloak this awareness through our outrage, through an exaggerated sense of betrayal; like Khan, for example. The truth is that the betrayal happens the moment we look at an image and use it as a crutch to hobble towards reality.

People who have been following the Ferguson protests will remember a touching photograph featuring 12-year-old African-American protester Devonte Hart, who is clicked hugging white police officer Bret Barnum, who appears to be sympathetic to the disturbed young boy. It was recently discovered that Barnum had expressed his support for Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown and was acquitted in the subsequent trial. Immediately, we saw a slew of headlines that basically went “Ferguson photograph is a lie!”. A photograph turned out to be deceptive; one can imagine Susan Sontag rolling her eyes at this and saying, “How original...” with a straight face.

As early as 1977, Sontag, in her landmark essay On Photography, had warned us about the dangers of viewing the world as an unbroken, infinite series of images. In a particularly prescient passage, she had said: “The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself — so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.” 

In both the Rohtak and the Ferguson cases, the narrative created by the preliminary photographs — an underdog pair fighting back against molesters, a black kid and a white cop taking a step towards understanding each other — was the only one people felt should be “allowed to complete itself”. But life seldom stops to pose for the cameras. It’s time we all made our peace with that.