>
>
>
>
>
> http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081204/jsp/opinion/story_10201347.jsp
>
> WE, THE PEOPLE
> - The Mumbai tragedy and the English language news media
> Mukul Kesavan
>
> "Go to the Four Seasons and look down from the top floor at the slums
> around you. Do you know what flags you will see? Not the Congress's,
> not the BJP's, not the Shiv Sena's. Pakistan! Pakistani flags fly
> high!... You know what I think? We should carpet-bomb Pakistan. That's
> the only way we can give a clear message."
>
> Simi Garewal later apologized for this little outburst on the
> television show, We, the People. She said she had mistaken Muslim
> flags for Pakistani ones. She had a harder time explaining away her
> 'carpet bombing' prescription. She claimed that she had meant to
> suggest a covert attack like the below-the-radar missions Americans so
> often undertake in Pakistan's borderlands. Carpet-bombing is hard to
> do discreetly, but we shouldn't make too much of this because the
> point isn't Simi Garewal and her gaffe: it's the way the English
> language news media covered the Mumbai tragedy.
>
> The idiom of the coverage of the terror attack on Mumbai was in part
> shaped by the need to say something, anything, in the face of horror
> and evil. The need to voice not just their own feelings but the need
> to be a proxy for the People, to anticipate and echo a public
> revulsion, seemed to overwhelm reporters and studio anchors.
>
> The wild-eyed animation with which they spoke seemed prompted by the
> belief that calm, even lucidity, was an inappropriate response to
> tragedy. Barkha Dutt's agitation as she reported from sites attacked
> by the terrorists was so extreme that on occasion she seemed to
> hyper-ventilate on camera. Further away from the tragedy, in a studio,
> Arnab Goswami ratcheted up the hectoring self-righteousness that has
> come to define his manner, as he and Times TV seek to position the
> channel as India's answer to Fox News.
>
> Rajdeep Sardesai managed to be composed, compassionate and
> knowledgeable at Hemant Karkare's funeral, but CNN IBN made up for
> that later by framing their reports on the terror strikes in gory
> graphics that could have been borrowed from the credits of a Ramsay
> Brothers horror movie. With the reporters, the excitement was
> understandable: it's hard to be calm with bombs going off, bullets
> flying about and a landmark building burning in front of you. But
> there were aspects of the coverage that didn't deserve the benefit of
> the doubt.
>
> During the crisis, the foregrounding of the Taj was inevitable. It was
> the site of the longest battle and the hideous drama of its
> near-destruction was bound to be framed by any sensible cameraman. But
> it's still worth making the point Shyam Benegal made, that the dozens
> of people killed in VT (or CST) station and their grieving relatives
> and friends got very little screen time. When VT figured in the
> coverage, it was there for CCTV grabs of the T-shirted terrorist.
>
> The Taj, we were told over and over again, is an 'iconic'
building. I
> think we can say without controversy that Victoria Terminus is much
> the greater landmark both architecturally and in terms of the number
> of people who pass through it. It may not be 'home' to them, in
the
> way that the Taj clearly was for the many fluent habitués of South
> Mumbai who filed past the cameras of the English news channels, but
> more Mumbaikars have taken trains to and from VT than have sampled the
> hospitality of the Taj. And yet we didn't have people on television
> reminiscing about the station and what it meant to them, that storied
> building that has been the beginning and the end of a billion
> journeys. Even the details of the killing, the alertness of the public
> address system operator who had platforms cleared and thus minimized
> the carnage, trickled out later, as the platform tragedy that had
> happened was eclipsed by the hotel tragedy that was still 'breaking
> news'.
>
> I can't remember the last time that social class so clearly defined
> the coverage of a public event, or one in which people spoke so
> unselfconsciously from their class positions. The English news
> channels became mega-churches in which hotel-going Indians found
> catharsis and communion. Person after person claimed the Taj as home.
> Memories of courtship, marriage, celebration, friendship, the quick
> coffee, the saved-up-for snack, the sneaked lavatory visit, came
> together to frame the burning Taj in a halo of affection.
>
> The novelist, Aravind Adiga, said in an interview with the BBC: "One
> of the differences between India and other countries is that a lot of
> our civic space is contained within the five-star hotels. They have a
> different function here for us, they are places where marriages
> happen, where people of all economic backgrounds go for a coffee. For
> the Taj Mahal to be attacked is somewhat like the town hall being
> attacked in some other place... ." I'd wager that 99 per cent of
VT's
> commuters haven't seen the inside of the Sea Lounge. Whatever else
> they are, five-star establishments in India are not democratic civic
> spaces. Few Mumbaikars think the Taj Mahal Hotel is their city's
hôtel
> de ville.
>
> The Trident, being less 'iconic', didn't get quite the same
attention
> as the Taj, but it wasn't left out. Shekhar Gupta used his column on
> the edit-page of the Indian Express to write a thousand-word homage to
> the Trident. This included descriptions of his sleeping preferences,
> the number of nights he had logged at the Trident and the
> considerateness of the hotel staff.
>
> This takes us back to that third hotel, the one we began with, back to
> Simi Garewal on the top floor of the Four Seasons, looking down at the
> slums below her, aflutter with sinister flags. Forget the fact that
> she mistook Islamic flags for Pakistani ones; anyone can make a
> mistake, and she's apologized for hers. What's interesting here is
the
> lack of embarrassment with which she pictures herself and
> people-like-her staring down disapprovingly from a great,
> air-conditioned height at hovels and squalor.
>
> Usually, privileged English-speaking Indians have the tact to be
> politically correct in their public statements; but in the middle of
> terror and tragedy, the sense of social self-preservation that keeps
> them from crassness, disappears. "Go to the Four Seasons and look
down
> from the top floor at the slums around you." That 'you' is
us:
> Telegraph-reading, hotel-going people, who, in the heat of the moment
> and because of the death of people we know (or know of), become the
> world.
>
> English and American papers treated the terror attack as an assault on
> the West. The terrorists had, after all, specifically looked for
> American and British citizens to murder. Ironically, even as NDTV,
> CNN-IBN and Times Now put hotel guests at the heart of the horror and
> bumped train commuters to its periphery, older English-speaking
> peoples counted their dead and dimly regretted all Indian casualties
> as collateral damage. In that residual category, if nowhere else, the
> Indian dead remained one People.
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