LOVE, HATE & FUNERAL!

SUNNY THOMAS

Was it the funeral of love or was it the funeral of hate that Mumbai just witnessed? Your answer would depend on which part of India you belong to! Understandably, a Bihari’s or Kashmir’s verdict will contradict a middle class Maharashtrian’s verdict, especially if the latter has benefited from the elimination of competition in employment and the former disadvantaged because of lack of level playing field.  

Hitler had a story to tell which most of us may have forgotten by now. When Hitler’s mother was gravely ill, a Jewish doctor refused to treat her because they were poor, and she died. The consequence was half a million Jews were exterminated in Germany. The darling daughter of a former Maharashtra chief minister committed suicide in the 1960s because she was jilted by a young Merchant Navy officer from Kerala. Sukarno of Indonesia and Mao Zedong of China’s Long March fame were denied permission to take the hands of the girls they loved by their parents. Personal insults often spark political movements. There is always an untold story behind hate. There is nothing called pure hate! 

For our television channels, funerals are grand opportunities for sprucing up TRPs. Some channels were treating us with `Kejriwal and nothing but Kejriwal; the whole Kejriwal and nothing but the whole Kejriwal`! The same channels were focusing on the crowds and the VIPs who descended on the scene, showing the same footage of crowds and VIPs again and again, insulting the intelligence of the viewers.  

The remote is the best friend of the television viewer because when insulted beyond measure, he could always find liberation in some intelligent channels. Rahul Kanwal’s Headlines Today stole the march over other channels in interpreting, with a cerebral touch, the exit of a phenomenon, by an eminent panel whose views merit attention.  Panel discussions are a humbug in most channels and there comes frequently one Miss Vanity who is an insult to the intelligence of the 1.2 billion people of India, whose main job is to shout down other panelists! In contrast, Headlines Today panelists (in subsequent days) consisted of Vir Sangvi, Dipankar Gupta, Alyque Padamsee, Sudhir Telang, and others.  

   

How would Indian television journalists fare in comparison with their global counterparts? Tim Sebastin of Dhoha Debates, BBC’s own David Frost and the late Italian sensation Oriana Fallaci have created a genre with inimitable personality touch. Their prodigious homework turned their interviews into world-class products viewed by millions.  

Fallaci who started as a celebrity interviewer at the age of 16 to help pay her college fee, finally ended up interviewing Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi, the Shah of Iran. The La Fallaci style of interview became something of a cult in North America — adversarial, emotional and extremely lengthy. She described her interviews as "coitus" and "a seduction" and spoke English, French and Spanish, as well as Italian to circumvent interpreters. 

In 1968, she was shot and seriously wounded, and wrote several bestselling books. Oriana Fallaci, died of cancer aged 77, the cancer that had killed her father, mother and one sister.

David Frost started when he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge and hosted top-rated shows on both sides of the Atlantic. British politicians were incensed when BBC’s That Was The Week That Was was aired in 1962-63 but soon it achieved cult status. David Frost has written 15 books and produced eight films.  

The legendary BBC journalist Tim Sebastian is the founder and chairman of the Doha Debates. The Bloomberg TV India broadcasts every Saturday The Outsider With Tim Sebastian. He is the moderator of the New Arab Debates the Doha Debates, and the The Outsider Debates, and was the first presenter of BBC's HARDtalk. An Oxford graduate, he is the author of eight novels and two non-fiction titles. 

Television journalism is a field that attracts young talent. Perhaps Rahul Kanwal’s generation can do a lot produce Tim Sebastians and David Frosts and Oriana Fallacies!  

NOSTALGIA, UTOPIA & OBAMA!

SUNNY THOMAS

Elections are mostly about mood swings. Mitt Romney tried his best to swing the mood of America by his money power, making the 2012 Presidential election the costliest in history. He tried working on racial prejudice and even religious prejudice and proved how vulnerable are democracies to prejudices! Prejudices work not only in America but elsewhere in the absence of a strong leader.   

`He is an illegal immigrant from Nigeria, and what’s more, he is a Muslim’ – the term almost synonymous with a traitor after 9/11. Some evangelists were working overtime with all their missionary zeal to defeat the demon called Obama! 

Unfortunately, the White man’s prejudice ruled supreme, turning it into a racial contest. But the women of America, who proved wiser when it comes to voting, stonewalled the democracy, not to let it be subverted by prejudice.  It is often the nameless, faceless, powerless millions who tilt the balance of power and create history.  

The happiest because of an Obama win are the poorest of the poor who do not have to subsidise the richest of the rich who want to discontinue the health benefits of the poor. So many of the poor Americans will be driven to despair if the health benefits are snatched from them, which Romney would have done to let the rich enjoy their opulent living on the empty stomachs of the poor.  

  

In the last 60 years, America has changed so drastically that the political and social landscape that once existed is beyond recognition today. In the conservative 1950s, a few political families ruled the country and it was oligarchy unchallenged in democratic garb. Today high-technology driven America of Silicon Valley, Microsoft and Apple has redefined the nation, talent-scouting Chinese, Indian, Hispanic immigrants in their thousands. Add to that the educated Blacks coming out of their ghettos to claim their pride of place.

       

 The Republicans are a bunch of conservatives who live in the nostalgia of the 50’s and want very much to turn the clock back, jettisoning illegal immigrants like Obama! The Democrats, in contrast, offer a Utopia of the Great American Dream. It’s much like the India scenario where Congress and BJP offer Utopia and Nostalgia respectively. But it’s the narrative that matters or how effective is your story-telling. 

As for the American republic, nothing much is going to change because of an Obama victory. The Republican-dominated House of Representatives will block with a vengeance any social benefits that the Administration will be planning. 

The America President’s free domain, constitutionally, is in the foreign policy – to decide how many more civilians should be killed by US drones and when to call the American troops home. Most Presidents tend to be aggressive because Arab countries and Afghanistan are their only theatre of action (Arabs have oil and Afghanistan is strategic). A peacenik President is often criticized as a weak President, and a globe-trotting President, as a talking shop President.   

   

 Armageddon could be only months away if Israel plans an adventurous strike on Iran’s nuclear installations! Then it could be third world war, fulfiling Einstein’s prophecy: ``I do not know what the third world war will be fought with, but the fourth world war will be fought with sticks and stones.’’

Obama saved capitalism with history’s greatest bail-out, he saved American honour by Osama bin Laden’s head; and now he could banish American unemployment to a great degree. In the campaign, America saw his determination, strategy, intelligence, communicative skill and team building in defeating American prejudice, which could have cost his job. 

Three cheers to President Obama, and good luck on his second term!  

SCAMA SUTRA FOR TRP HIKE!

SUNNY THOMAS

Congress is BJP, and BJP Congress, judging from the Kejri Fare! In princely times, rival Kings married from rival families to establish peace and prosperity. If Congress and BJP form a united front, we will be back to Jawaharlal Nehru’s days when the opposition was miniscule because it was almost impossible to beat a ruling party candidate. In the bargain, BJP will gain a secular image and Congress, a deeper root in Indian culture. If the twain will not meet on their own volition, Kejri will force them! 

Anna Hazare is doing a dressed rehearsal not to let Kejri steal the thunder. Election time is show biz time for political tycoons, and what better show biz than street shows and comedy shows! Jantar Mantar should be renamed Charlie Chaplin Mantar to woo more crowds and business.  

  

To assume that in a country of 1.2 billion, only one person makes all the news that deserves an hour of viewers’ time is grossing undermining the people’s intelligence and their discerning power. And to assume that the capital of the world’s malnourished nation, which is making headlines for gang rape and obscurantist’s remarks by politicians, and for schools that exist only on paper, has just one issue to address is the tyranny of the trivia that television viewers have to grin and bear.   

 

Not to be outdone, all television channels practise Scama Sutra, some judiciously and to palatable degree while the TRP-crazy go for the whole hog! Certain channels produced incriminating documents, clinching evidence, and irrefutable facts to put some VVIPs behind the bars; but they are all free birds now! But, alas, the incriminating, clinching ad irrefutable material failed judicial scrutiny. So they are after fresh villains – Suresh Kalmadi, Spectrum Raja and Ashok Chavan are discarded. Fortunately for them, there are any number of people who become rich overnight, milking the system. But Television Studios have become the ultimate refuge of these scam patriots!   

Since Barak Obama cannot be given one more Nobel Peace Prize, the committee decided to award it to Angela Merkel, indirectly, of course. The European Union is a euphemism for Angela, who controls its destiny and whose austerity is hurting the Greeks and the Portuguese to unbearable levels. Frankly, Nobel Peace has outlived its utility and global terrorism has made it anachronistic! But other Nobel endeavors significantly point to the giant leap human civilization is taking. 

 

This year’s Nobel for Physics went to scientists for path-breaking experiments in quantum system, the very foundation of the digital world. Said the wag if you are not confused reading quantum physics, you haven’t understood it. The quest for eternal youth and anti-aging gets highlighted in studies in G-protein, which won two scientists Nobel in Chemistry. Reprogramming cells seems the ultimate in medicine today, for which two won Nobel. Game-theory-applied market design won two professors Economics Nobel. The Nobel in Literature gets widely talked about, especially in the absence of a credible candidate for Nobel Peace Prize, and the Chinese author Mo Yan’s hallucinatory realism has caught on the imagination of the world.  

A playboy sitting in the cockpit can be too dangerous for the passengers. But this time around, it was the life of his employees that he has put at risk – the entire staff of Kingfisher Airlines, not paid salaries for six months!  

 

RAPE, SCAM & CAMERA!

SUNNY THOMAS

Mercifully, Om Prakash Chautala the former king of Haryana, did not suggest female feticide as a solution to gang rape. The pure logic that rape exists because women exist does not cross his mind!

In India, we have three classes of politicians: the anachronistic school, the professional school, and the die-hard ideologue school. Narendra Modi and L K Advani, for whom means are less important than the goals for which they are admired or hated, belong to the ideologue school.

Prime ministerial material Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, or Architect material P Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal belong to the professional class, who are qualified to lead a meritorious Cabinet of professionals to give India a new vision.    

Baba Ramdev, Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, who want to eliminate corruption from one party but maintains a dignified silence over corruption in other parties, represent the 19^th century blinkered vision of blatant partisanship. The newspapers of this period blacked out news about their political rivals but found themselves isolated in the end, the phase which Anna Hazare team found themselves in. Politicians of UP, Haryana and Bihar en masse belong to this group.    

A television anchor reporting scam has three options: treat scam as scam, treat scam as news, treat scam as truth (TRP). Most television channels gleefully treat scam as truth and turn the whole news hour into a scam mongering session. Scam is news but treated with circumspection (like reporting sex and crime) remains scam shorn of the respectability of news. Once the canons of professional Journalism are violated, broadcasting becomes voyeurism. 

  

For a scam-shy television viewer, much relief came from CNN-IBN’s anchor Sagarika Ghosh, whose cerebral approach turned a panel discussion into a lesson in contemporary history – the (de facto) first family has to learn to live with prying eyes and intrusion into their private lives.  Srinivasan Jain of NDTV (Profit) anchored a remarkable panel discussion with a unique sense of direction. Most panel discussions end up in a mayhem, which some anchors believe is the ultimate in debate, though the truth signals to the contrary.  

Both Sagarika Ghose  and Sreenivasan Jain started with the print media, which teaches the basics of Journalism, namely what is news. Some of the anchors who start straight on television master histrionics but know nothing about the fundamentals. Except that they are seen, they sound like announcers at airports and railway stations!  

Capitalism would have been history but for Barack Obama’s historic ($85 billion) bail out of the beleaguered American economy. State subsidy is the antithesis of capitalism and state intervention is the biggest sin against capitalism. Yet President Obama had to resort to it to prevent America becoming another Soviet Union. Bush the father and Bush the son could not catch the trophy of Osama bin Laden’s head, the symbolic enemy of America who symbolically chose to destroy the Twin Trade Tower.

Yet there is a conspiracy by the super rich to defeat Obama, who will not grant them tax concessions that Mit Romney will. If robbing the poor to help the rich is unethical, that suits the selfish interests of the super rich who are withholding investments that can generate jobs which will help Obama win. The whole world knows how Ronald Reagan won against President Jimmy Carter by having a secret deal with Iran to hold on to the American prisoners till the election is over to embarrass the incumbent. Capitalism breeds unmitigated self-interest, the same self-interest with which some greedy Realtor and unethical bankers in America created a global meltdown in which millions across the globe lost their jobs.  

Up for auction is capitalism in the November election, and at stake is the future of America as a Super Power. Another global meltdown, and you can write America off!    

MONKEY POLITICS AND 

MONKEY DEBATES! 

SUNNY THOMAS

A monkey gives amusement to his spectators. After Anna Hazare, the Charlie Chaplin of Indian politics, it’s the turn of Arvind Kejriwal to entertain his spectators. While Charlie Chaplin’s trademark was his ill-fitting dresses, Anna’s incongruity lies in the grotesque mismatch between the ground reality of thinning crowds (to a handful) and his pretensions to being the father of the nation!  After his honest friends deserted him, Kejriwal started a political party to cleanse the system of corruption, for which he has neither the caliber nor the character. 

If Kejriwal loses his deposit in the next election and Suresh Kalmadi of Commonwealth Games fame wins with a record margin, whom will you blame? The Indian Constitution, the Commonwealth, or his own dismal record? Diabolical games will always end in a fiasco, it might amuse some for a while, though.  

After losing its relevance in the national gladiator show, the all-India Mamata party has decided to have a conclave with the all-India Jayalalithaa party and the all-India Mulayam party and the all-India Naveen party to roadblock multinationals from entering retail trade that might end farmers’ committing suicide.   

The all-Sri Lanka Karuna party and the all-India cyber party of Chandu Babu, and even the Iceland party of Marxists are not invited, for they are unlikely to support a no-confidence motion against the Manmohan Singh government. Even if they do, there are reasons of animosity.  

Once bitten twice shy, BJP has become wiser. It knows that no-confidence motion only strengthens Congress – this time a no-confidence motion may even double the Congress majority! Just think of it, with all the coalmines under its thump, and the purchasing power of MPs almost at the same rate as last time, the astute floor managers of Congress will ensure its resounding victory. But it’s all right for all-India Mamata party to whine and moan!!   

And every time there is a monkey show, our television channels vie with each other to give a full coverage, followed by a monkey debate where the most intelligent is hardly given time to speak and the brainless buffoons dominate the show. In fact, these political shows are exclusively designed for the TV cameras, and will come to an end once the cameras shun the show.  

Can a government of liars, for liars and by liars do any good for a country of 1.2 billion? By constantly vituperating against a government that has taxed the people beyond the endurance level, the Opposition parties are creating UPA III indispensible!    

American democracy is tilting towards Plutocracy where the poor subsidise the rich! The rich invest and create jobs – at least, that’s what the Republicans believe. The Democrats tax the rich and bring the much needed social security and health care. But not all federal funds are wisely spent, creating discontent. The outcome of an American election much depends on the business cycle of boom and bust. That explains why some mediocre Presidents get two terms while some more deserving ones wilt after one term. Bill Clinton has managed the economy so well, and kept the unemployment rate so low that his Presidency is fondly remembered.  

After Abe Lincoln, Barak Obama is the only President to have risen from such humble origin.  Many White Americans felt during the last election that it was their duty to right the wrong by electing a Blackman in the White House. But the Obama magic has waned – notwithstanding his Nobel Prize and His prized trophy, Osama Bin Laden’s head. What is surprising is that a political lightweight like Mitt Romney is running neck and neck with the President who deserves a second term. Will the anger of the unemployed tip the scale of the verdict? Come November, things could change!