[Reader-list] Varun's speech blues

[M Javed]

Dear Rakesh
You are right, everyone wants to save his/her skin, and to heck with
democracy and the larger interest of the nation.

But my question about the recordings was not only for the slippery
politician. I was asking more about the impact of (recording) media on
people's lives today (something that Sarai is also interested in
discussing). I think that after watching hours and hours of news
channels' stupidity about an "evidence" to prove a news item, we seem
to be losing touch with our human-ness. Every time something happens,
our first instinct is to look for the telecast of what the
surveillance cameras recorded or what the TV grab shows in a
newspaper. We forget (or ignore, or mistrust) the presence of real
people at the scene. The cameras and recording machines decide whether
our nation is under siege or not. Although at one level, these
recordings are also a great advantage - they archive (and transmit)
what we could not see just 20 or 50 years ago. But 20-50 years ago, we
also depended more on people's eyewitness accounts.

Any way, the important question is not what Varun Gandhi said or did
not say in his speeches, but what he truly is in real life. For many
people (who have seen him grow from a baby to an adult) it is still
difficult to come to terms that someone from the Gandhi-Nehru family
could take such a sharp turn (not that the Nehru-Gandhi family
consists of angels any way).

Javed

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Rakesh Iyer <rakesh.rnbdj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Javed ji (and all)
>
> I think one must look at this from the perspective of those onlookers who
> may have heard the speech. While what you had said is one brave point, the
> fact is that for every person (except today's suicide bombers), the utmost
> respect is for one's own life. And while it is true that everybody wants the
> law to function properly in principle, in reality everybody tries to save
> their own skin, life and sometimes reputation. And those people won't be
> protected by your or mine brave points, for this is how our democracy works.
>
> As for hypocrisy, who cares? The UPA and the NDA will break today and will
> come back again tomorrow; SP can support or not support the UPA as and when
> it wishes; and other things can also happen or not happen depending on the
> politicians' importance to it; they have already accepted they are
> hypocritic, and when one looks at them, one realizes Indian democracy is at
> a stage where the politicians are indirectly saying: 'Do what you can, it
> hardly matters'.
>
> It's an absolutely depressing situation to look at where we have reached in
> our 60 years of independence, with very few achievements, and huge disasters
> in democratic functioning. And when the people know the system will never
> work properly, by stating the truth, they would only be doing what failed
> suicide bombers do: just die themselves. And the cost of a life in their
> eyes, is more than the cost of obtaining justice.
>
> After all, 'jaan bachchi to laakhon paaye'. And not for nothing, are movies
> like 'Gulaal' true.
>
> So any attempt at improving the system can't be introduced through
> encouraging suicidal tendencies of people (where they disregard their lives
> in order to obtain justice), but would have to come by providing incentives
> to politicians to work towards reform of politics and Indian democracy.
>
> And so in todays' case, we would have to go with these recordings,
> unfortunately, instead of evidences by people themselves, in order to take
> justice. It's these which could begin a set of good practices to be followed
> up during election speeches, though I agree that this is not the way things
> should go.
>
> Regards
>
> Rakesh
>