If it were not for the gripping affairs of clan Mukerjea and the gun-toting swagger of all-new Gujarat model Hardik Patel, the Assam channel Pratidin Time, which stalked women in shorts with its cameras and declared them a “seasonal nuisance”, would have kept studio talking head studios in a febrile state all week. The channel’s story was slightly less shocking but slightly more icky than the incident of 2012, when a girl stepping out of a Guwahati pub was abused by some men outside, and a reporter of the News Live channel escalated the attack into flashmob drama by calling in a camera crew instead of the police. Even so, the Pratidin Time story is making the headlines as far away as Connecticut, and in venues as diverse as the International Business Times and The American Bazaar. Guess the channel’s headline was aggregator bait: “Even monkeys in the jungle are better clad,” roughly translated. It’s one-way traffic, though. Similarly stirring US stories, like The New York Times expose of allegedly gruelling work conditions at Amazon, do not generally reach Indian readers. But in the US, the story has set off so many bush fires that Jeff Bezos has sent out an internal memo asking staffers to snitch directly and urgently to him if they encounter cruel workplace practices such as those enumerated in the story. These include setting impossible targets which cause executives to weep copiously at their desks, and putting them on watch with the implicit threat of firing if they have setbacks such as illnesses or miscarriages. Several former and serving Amazon staffers have responded to the story, insisting that they were perfectly comfortable there. Reading them, a pattern seems to emerge which foretells an impending crisis in the IT sector, where the finest minds will find themselves facing the devil’s alternative: job satisfaction can be secured only at the expense of quality of life. Amazon’s defendants said that they were happy because they were focused on professional achievement in an organisation which was obsessed about it. If it were otherwise, like if they wanted to have families, their accounts seemed to tacitly admit, they too could have been weeping at their desks. The most interesting revelation in the story was that Amazon has an internal electronic snitch system by which employees are encouraged to rat anonymously on colleagues. Stalinist Russia relocated in Seattle? Push a button, hear a denunciation? That’s even more dystopian than the coverage of the Indrani Mukerjea affair. Which is boisterously pushing the sections of the media envelope that the coverage of the Aarushi case and the Nithari killings had negligently left unpushed. The sanctimonious bilge emanating from the privileged classes in TV studios has crossed the danger mark. Apparently healthy individuals have suggested that small town India is in the throes of a morality crisis. What’s this, deep metropolitan anxieties about little people running out of control in the boonies? The press could have spared us the details of the victim’s medical history. They are irrelevant now that she is dead. And why is TV so interested in what Indrani Mukerjea had for lunch in custody? Only the last meal of an inmate on death row attracts such ghoulish attention. This is one of those cases which seize the popular imagination powerfully but are rapidly forgotten. All that remains in memory is some peculiar, peripheral detail. Like Mikhail Bora meeting the Mumbai police in a T-shirt featuring a foaming mug of beer with the slogan: ‘Pitcher abhi baaki hai, mere dost.’ In a judgemental nation with a judgemental police force, a nation which insists it wants to know, his sartorial choice is plain perplexing. pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com
