By Shailesh Kapoor
Pointless controversies have kept our media buzzing for about a decade now. When Indian celebrities started taking to Twitter a few years ago, using social media as a source of news collection and reporting became an acceptable proposition. Slowly but surely, such news made its way into the primetime and on the first page. Then, it became a topic of news debates.
But nothing beats the silliness of the ‘non-troversy’ of this week. The Tanmay Bhatt Snapchat video spoofing Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin Tendulkar offended many Indians. Being allowed to take offence is a sign of a thriving democracy. But calling for arrests and giving primetime importance to something that shouldn’t have made it to television in the first place is a sign of our times.
It’s a sign of how news-starved our channels are, and how publicity-hungry several celebrities, starlets and politicians are. What’s there to even debate on the said video? It’s a piece of humour with no social or national security ramifications. And this is not the first time we have seen celebrities been spoofed. Why should the idea of a whether a spoof is acceptable or not depend on who’s being spoofed? The constant use of ‘Bharat Ratna’ in the argument made us non-Bharat Ratna-winners seem like worthless algae.
In a mature society that respects its art, the response of an artist who felt disgusted at the video would have been to put up a piece of work (a Snapchat repartee or an open letter, perhaps) to counter the one that offended him or her. But we have no such luck, do we? Our model is simple enough. Our ‘celebrities’ will tweet their disgust against something like the video in question. News channels, forever on a Twitter prowl, will handpick the most interesting tweets, and a taskforce will be put to get them to appear on the primetime show. Not that it’s a challenge. The other side is ever eager anyway.
Yet, there are some appearances that can perplex you. How would Rakesh Bedi, an actor who’s largely inactive now and hasn’t tweeted for two months, make it to a primetime debate? Who would even come up with the idea? Answers to questions like these can make for fascinating reading in a book called “How TV Channels Runâ€.
If you thought this was a controversy big enough, brace yourself for what’s to follow over the next three weeks. Udta Punjab is coming up, but a messy mix of certification board, courts, state governments and religious-cum-political ‘activists’ will thwart its flight. And Udta Punjab’s battle to get a fair release will only be a trailer to what is likely to happen to Dangal later this year.
Enjoy the chaos. For it is a reflection of what we have become.