By Ranjona Banerji
I have written several times about my time on social media and how integral it is to my work and to some extent to my enjoyment of life.
And yet.
In a short span of time, my Father whom I lived with, fell ill and passed away quite suddenly. As his heart stopped, so did my mind. My need to consume news, to be part of the hurly-burly of political discussion, my intrinsic curiosity vanished.
And what have I missed now that I’m trying to get back?
I watched last night, again, the satirical film of our times, Don’t Look Up. And apart from the digs at politicians and business tycoons, the excoriation of the media stays the most in one’s mind. The nonsensical nature of the way news is presented, the instant reactions of the consuming public, the star value of TV presenters, the clickbait kneejerk reaction “stories”, the compulsive need to constantly assess public reactions and tailor your news content to suit whatever you come up with…
Where have we gone, as newsrooms and journalists?
“Plus ca change” is all very well, so are platitudes about life being an endless cycle. But for what it’s worth, are we any more than a series of pleasure trips for instant thrills as providers of “news”? Are we content to be tools in the hands of social media giants without whom we cannot wake up in the morning and by whose standards we must now judge ourselves?
I picked up a newspaper this morning and found myself in a miasma of horror and tedium. The attacks on schoolgirls in hijabs in Karnataka appears to have escalated into a massive assault on Muslims, with nothing about bleating from opponents and gloating from the ruling BJP and RSS. Nothing new there.
Election fever, the pursuit of power means the usual meaningless party-hopping, negotiation and our acceptance as citizens and the media of being ruled by rapacious cynicism. In a way, it’s like I never went away. Change the dates, change the place names and it’s all the same.
You can successfully argue that this is the cycle of life and news. And it’s hard to combat that. But for the fact that we appear to have lost both context and depth. The threats facing the nation today are lost in the hustle and the details have overtaken the painting itself. In the few weeks that I have been away, the situation appears to have become worse. The fact that these ongoing state elections are significant beyond party nitty-gritties is still not adequately reflected in the news.
Personality cults and their creators remain lauded by our public intellectuals and commentators who remain in thrall of who can fool and dupe us the best. The way we fall all over ourselves to congratulate all the richest men in the world who have reached that position by conquering our minds and scrambling over our bones. We have allowed them to get there and the media has its full role to play in building up charlatans posing as entrepreneurs. Cue in the character of Peter Isherwell in Don’t Look Up, so cruelly portrayed by the incredible Mark Rylance and then think about all those rich men who for no reason at all, in the middle of a global pandemic of incalculable loss, decided to fly to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.
And look at how the media applauded.
Welcome to hell.
I suppose I have to get used to being back here.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal