Your coffee and your conscience

When you are in a coffee shop, a cup of latte and a wedge of blueberry pie keeping you company, where do you keep your social conscience?

When you are in a coffee shop, a cup of latte and a wedge of blueberry pie keeping you company, where do you keep your social conscience? Clearly visible on the tabletop, so the TV reporter doing a special story can spot it? You don8217;t? Don8217;t have a social conscience? Or you think you have it, but can8217;t convince interlocutors? You could be in trouble the next time TV news takes a guilt trip across the country.

I am sure NDTV8217;s special on Vidarbha farmers wasn8217;t conceived as journalism preoccupied with supremely superficial symbolism. After all, NDTV gave its reporter a few days as opposed to 15 minutes to try and understand what was happening in Vidarbha. That8217;s not the kind of editorial priority you get to see too frequently on TV. It would have given me special pleasure to be able to say that the special report was substantive.

But there was NDTV asking young men in a Nagpur Barista what they felt about farmers committing suicides only a few kilometers away? True, the reporter solemnly clarified that no suggestions of personal responsibility on the part of Nagpur8217;s consuming classes were being made. But that made no difference to the question I wanted to ask: was that relevant? Nagpur may be close to ground zero of farmer8217;s suicides, as NDTV8217;s story reported. It may be bustling. I am prepared to stretch a point when the voiceover with the visuals of a staggeringly staid office party at a Nagpur disco says corporate types are burning up the dance floor. I can ignore the observation that the introduction of hookahs in a Nagpur Barista represents a significant upgrade in consumerist culture. But I can8217;t fathom what the Nagpur versus Vidarbha bit added to NDTV8217;s story.

Or may be I am missing something. Nagpur versus Vidarbha is a subset of Bharat versus India journalism TV does every now and then. It was on show during the Narmada Bachao Andolan8217;s sit-in in Delhi. TV reporters, especially in English language channels, couldn8217;t say enough to get across just how brutally indifferent metropolitan India was to dispossessed citizens in the countryside. In this variety of journalism, their 8220;deprivation8221; is only about our 8220;guilt8221;. Facts and economic calculus aren8217;t the point. Many Narmada oustees were quite happy to take the money. They never made it to TV. Many Vidarbha farmers, I am sure, are far more concerned about effective irrigation and better markets for their crops than Nagpur living it up.

That other channels didn8217;t make the Nagpur-Vidarbha connection was, I suppose, a small mercy. That none got down to even analysing farmer suicide figures from easily available data was no surprise at all.

TV news, it seems, is like that only. It wants the world to be simple. Which is probably why even though religions, and their foundational myths, tend to be complicated, there was, in CNN-IBN8217;s evening discussion on Puri8217;s big rath yatra, this earnest insistence that the ceremony represents something lovably broadminded and modern. Faith, sadly, isn8217;t always faithful to our notions of what is right. But gods were kind to CNN-IBN this week. Sabarimala8212;a simple story of outrageous tradition8212;happened and the channel was convincingly robust in its inquisition of religious custom.