[Reader-list] EACH NIGHT(Jamia Shootings)

[Aditya Raj Kaul]

Interestingly, majority of these "media persons" who have become the enemies
of a few are pass out from Jamia MCRC. I think Ambreen, Shohini and Sabina
would agree with me. Here they learnt the art to capture, visualise, story
angle and depth.

Love
Aditya Raj Kaul

On 9/26/08, shakeb ahmed <ahmed_shakeb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> EACH NIGHT
> Each night when the time to go to bed comes it becomes almost a trial. Each
> night there is a rage inside me…not against the nameless perpetrators of a
> heinous crime maybe, but against my own self: am I doing enough to scream
> against something maybe surely bordering on injustice? Am I? I no more can
> easily return to my bedside readings of J M Coetzee novels and Ian Farell
> digital photography guides, they both mock me…can I write what madness
> Coetzee shaped into a Waiting for the Barbarians, can I not take pictures
> anymore, something I make my living from and now when the whole of that life
> is under an overstretched shadow of suspicion, my finger seems perennially
> seized, there is no easy shutter release anymore!
> Not anymore can I doubt what trauma is?
> We saw how a decorated policeman dying (in whatsoever mysterious
> circumstances) can completely sanctify a gory event replete with bullets and
> blood. If he would not have died could we as a people, as a nation, had more
> permissible courage to question this Encounter (all puns intended!). What
> enrages me and many more out here is: we then saw the watchdog of democracy
> then really proving itself to be just that - a watching dog without a
> question leashed to its master.
> Is it really so hard to shake away the infantile druggedness of the twenty
> somethings thrown down on the ground zero. We hear their lousy attempts at
> bad poetry, their facts thrown into some nauseous verse, while scampering
> like parakeets squelching without a shame to get another soundbyte from the
> only people not too shocked with the proceedings yet – the Special Cell. Are
> we not a mature enough nation able to sift through this infantile babble
> issued from our television sets. How loudly proud I am in these moments that
> I don't work for a television news channel! Shame on them and their
> ludicrous graphics and sfx jamboree!
> It at one time looked as if they can have the tongue enough to ask some
> uncomfortable questions off the state, but they all fell in line once
> comfortably swamped by the police reeling out information floods. Do we
> understand with our healthy democratic grown up minds that if you want to
> undercut an argument, any argument, the best recourse you have to help
> yourself is to release a barrage of information right/wrong/good/bad or
> whatever, and then the heads fall so confused under this system overload
> that they successfully fail to answer even the maiden names of their
> mothers…that's how you hack the password to sanity! So do you see this
> happening, the unreeling of a mammoth spool here?
> Another fact that lied like a lump in my throats: For days since 19th
> September the neighborhoods are inundated with television crews numbered
> crazy by these very young footsoldiers. Who are these media techies, the
> mouthpieces of India's newfound scintillating prosperity and the freedom of
> its expression?  They are the happy lot whose steadily though very slowly
> increasing paychecks make it finally possible for them at last to buy their
> long desired denim and cool T's, and my god they would have killed to get to
> them; they are often those finally able to take their mommy-daddy to that
> aggressively seductive shopping mall they would have maybe not missed having
> died before ever setting their foots inside; these are the proud lot whose
> auto and house loans are finally getting approved without any pressing need
> for much paperwork….what would these kids not do to stomp upon their own
> kinds and inch their head a few further inches more high on the
>   gargantuan impartial ladder of success!!! Its dog eats dog mister! Its
> cut-throat all the way dear sir!
> You might find it offensive the stating of this banal obvious or biased
> diatribe depending on where you come from or where you want to go my friend
> - but that's what becomes the addiction and lure that catches them quite
> young and maybe never leaves them till their hourly demise! And then they
> are quite well guided missiles in the arsenal of their elderly, very well
> meaning business bosses These elders well these are very wise in their
> economics as well as politics rooted deep in the knowledge of how powerful a
> bearing they can have on their brothers sitting in the parliament benches,
> and what goods-of-heaven can flow from the portals of governance if forced
> to do the occasional golden handshake! So you see these very hardworking
> missives of these very well meaning elders all around, and they smilingly
> 'extract the trust' from you - they interview you for nearly half an hour,
> they film your narrow alleys, they make their busy notes and promise to
>   tell your side of story! But then you sit in front of your television
> sets and suddenly wonder if maybe that fateful interview-day you
> hallucinated, you merely conjured up this Reporter in the confused
> helplessness your circumstances made you fall into, and otherwise you
> actually took a trip to the outer space that day missing the appointment
> totally: what it all adds up to is that you are nowhere in the news story
> running on your screen. Or if you are really lucky,  your witness to a tv
> camera finally is hacked down, tailored to a different cut, stitched into a
> pattern which fits to a totally different trend of the holy news making.
>
> What everybody in the neighborhoods should ask any television crew asking
> them for an appearance is…how would you edit the material – my interview,
> pictures of my street, the seemingly innocent pointing of camera at that
> bicycle riding skull capped Maulana, or the bearded three friends just
> standing around the corner…would you be putting soft music in the back
> ground, or loud one beaming a sense of danger and trepidation; would you be
> picture-aspect squeezing these images of us, running unsaid tickers down
> below, then suddenly resizing the picture as you violently solarize them
> while the very next moment generously splashing them with the color of
> mayhem, the vermilion red!
> My humble request then to everybody requested to come to the camera is that
> they must demand a partnered ownership of his or her story trying to
> understand the concept with a ferocious rigor. They must surely make it
> their duty to ask how their lines to camera and the pictures of their
> neighborhood would be edited together even in the case that they don't
> understand what technical News Editing means!
> Even if I seem a little partisan let me still put in what at one time some
> black American filmmakers like Spike Lee and others did: at times they
> simply tried making it impossible for any white American at that time to
> make films on the blacks…our stories, only we would tell was the motto!
>
> Let me end at this cruel light note:
> Today amidst unprecedented almost surreal presence of police the students,
> faculty, and the like-minded liberal sympathizers of Jamia University
> carried out a peace march. I was talking to some of the friends who live at
> Zakir Nagar and find themselves caught leftrightcenter in this maelstrom
> …one of them related this: when police was asked why Inspector Mohan Chand
> was not wearing a bullet proof vest when he went upto L18, they gave the
> lame excuse that many in the special cell are such marksmen as would not
> miss a target once even when blindfolded, and Sharma deemed in his judgment
> therefore maybe not to wear one (even if these are most dreaded terrorists
> he was about to take up one on one)…this friend then delivers the punch – so
> shouldn't we then send these guys to Olympics, what a ruckus it would be to
> win some more gold's, and nobody needs to die too!
>
>
>
>
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