SIGHT & SOUND
Drama on your doorstep
Amita Malik

THOSE who live in the Capital tend to think that it is the centre of the universe. This especially goes for TV channels which shun rural areas and their problems. And, the bureaucrats too who find when they are transferred to Mumbai that no one gives them even a second glance. So when Delhi’s complacence is shattered, it is quite soothing. An attack on Parliament, two well-known markets bombed with dreadful loss of life and limb. Yes, but the great monuments of Delhi have been sacrosanct so far. No one in their wildest dreams would have imagined an attack on one of the Capital’s proudest landmarks, the 17^th century Jama Masjid built by Shah Jahan.

The late Dr John Grierson, who invented the term "documentary" and is fondly referred to as "The Father of Documentary", once defined it as "drama on your doorstep". And on that black Friday that is precisely what the worshippers at Jama Masjid, and those who live near it, encountered—drama on their doorstep.

For those of us who sometimes go to that area mostly for shopping—the Bengalis for the freshest fish and gourmets for ishtoo at Karim’s and biryani at Jawahar’s—it was unbelievable. "These wretched terrorists will next attack the Taj Mahal," said one shocked Delhiite. Which is why it was a blessing that the channels by and large treated the Jama Masjid attack with sobriety, which must have encouraged those who were attacked to react with as much calm as those who were attacked in a temple in Varanasi.

The innate culture of these two great cities, and this was amply portrayed on TV, came to the rescue.

Not quite the same applied to the Medha Patkar, Narendra Modi fasts. If Medha fasted with dignity and then disappeared in the portals of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Modi went to town with fiery bhashans duly carried on TV before and after he broke his fast. Where Mahatma Gandhi’s voice reached India’s millions without any help from radio, our netas certainly enjoy their moments on TV. The quiet observations of Arundhati Roy and Aamir Khan impressed more and in the end it was people like Rahul Bose who spoke sense on TV and seemed more to the point.

Meanwhile, the last cricket match in Indore showed the inane ways of Nimbus, which treated us to four balls an over so quick were they to cut off even a ball reaching the boundary or a catch landing in the wicketkeeper’s hands. Really, so eager are they to push in ads. The BCCI would be better employed checking these excesses than allegedly censoring the commentators.

Meanwhile, election fever was upon us and it was interesting to see how different channels tackled the different states. True to form, the more urbanised channels preferred to install experts in the studios, with their charts and speculation. Rajdeep Sardesai even asked with glee why were the other channels doing nothing? Actually, they were doing a lot and at the more important grassroots level.

I cannot claim to have watched all the channels, but out of those that I did watch, two programmes stood out. I admired the enterprise and commitment of a girl from Star News, Ms Choudhury (Sorry, I missed her first name) who went to one of the literally starving villages of Bankura in West Bengal and did heart-rending close-ups of the inedible leaves boiled in a pot and eaten with a handful of rotten rice by a family of six and a starving child which was not expected to live.

Radhika Bordia of NDTV, on the other hand, went across the length and breadth of Assam, an area where I was born and brought up. She started with the village of Stalkuchi, famous for its weavers of muga silks, then captured tea gardens of Assam, its rural poor, its mians (immigrants) and its activists high-lighting the woes of voters across party lines.

These were ordinary people who said they were taken for a ride after the elections were over and they were left with nothing but a chain of broken promises.

I found those down-to-earth reports by dedicated reporters far more interesting than the statistics of studio pundits, who are so anxious to be first that they usually end up as second.