[Reader-list] 'Striking AIIMS docs live in a glass house'

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Shivam,

Thanks for your response. I agree with you that there needs to be a much 
greater degree of sophistication and intelligence in the way in which 
different social movements engage with the media. An awareness of the 
'visual' and the 'aural' is no doubt crucial, and for too long has the 
left in India suffered from a priggish aniconism, and a general lack of 
style (not that it made up for it in substance :)).

However, a tactical, agile, flexible attitude to the question of 
representation does not necessarily mean that we play the parts written 
in for us by the script that the 'big' media hands out. Clearly, it 
would be difficult to endorse a situation where, just because 
anti-reservationists find their self-immolator (and it makes for great 
'news'), anti-anti-reservationists should go about looking for their own 
'self immolators'.

Nor am I entirely comfortable with the suggestion that the language of 
protest has to be spectacular in order to fit the 'TV Bill'. It could be 
viral, insiduous and quietly subversive, instead, as you were when you 
used the option to be a 'citizen journalist' on CNN-IBN on the medias 
non coverage of medicos for equal opportunity, when you took the media's 
claims to democratic representation, tested it, and put it to good use. 
Or, it could create a counter public sphere of sorts, through a barrage 
of blogs, and mobile messages, which makes what is meaningful to you, to 
us, visible, ubiquitous and 'outside' the big media, so that it 
'becomes' news, rather than merely being something that'feeds' news.

I am not being able to spell out the distinction here very clearly, 
because I am sort of thinking on my feet, but what I basically mean is, 
the difference between being quoted as an alternative voice on a given 
issue - like the token maverick dissident in every episode on Barkha 
Dutt's 'We the People' and in creating an alternative frame of discourse 
and action so clearly different that it 'becomes' news because everyone 
is talking about it.

Take the demolitions in Delhi for instance, when the demolitions of the 
slums were going on, hardly any reporters were interested, but when a 
critical mass of postings on the Nangla Machi blog were virally 
dispersed, through this, and other lists (and the odd phone call, 
exactly as has been suggested by you) and by a variety of quiet 
strategies, the demolition issue came back on the radar, through a big 
tehelka story, through a considered mention in Siddharth Varadarajan's 
piece on caste and the media, and I am sure that we have not heard the 
end of it.

Could we begin to think of this strategy, and others like it, as one way 
of thinking about the way forward.Meaning can 'letting a million 
whispers speak' have a cumulative effect that can be interesting.

Meanwhile, dissident social movements had better get cracking on how to 
make blogs, podcasts, stickers, attractive posters, and start thinking 
seriuously about radio, or using flash-mob like strategies for 
unexpected gatherings and dispersals in public spaces, and other 
creative and imaginatively performative strategies that are as far away 
from street theatre as possible.

But for starters, maybe someone should collect and put up a directory of 
the emails and mobile phone numbers of the correspondents and editors of 
the most important English and Hindi newspapers, news magazines and 
channels (beginning with Delhi) that can be available as a kind of easy 
to use 'activists directory'. I know for certain that handing or faxing 
press releases to newspaper and media offices just  does not work. It is 
that crucial phone call, or that e mail that reaches the personal inbox 
of a person who would be interested that makes the difference.

All we need is a blog or something that centralizes this information. 
Someone could say that it represents an unwarranted intrusion into a 
journalists privacy. i dont buy that argument. I think that a journalist 
is a public person, the nature of their vocation requires them to be 
open to story ideas that can come from the unlikeliest of places, and if 
they are so bothered about privacy, they could always buy that handy 
second mobile phone. It is time that they got as used to being called up 
as they expect people to be when they call people up.

looking forward to more discussion on this issue

regards

Shuddha