“Everyone, including the children, should watch Bigg Boss and Rakhi ka insaaf,” thus spake the biggest boss of our country --- the media (and judiciary nodded in agreement).
The government cannot determine what children should see and what they should not, the media said. “Who can then?” one may ask. The answer, most definitely would be, us i.e. the media.
Call me dogmatic, call me fanatic, call me Stalinist or communist, I think the fourth estate trying to usurp the role of the other three estates is the worst thing that can happen to a democracy. Unfortunately, legislature and executive are so corrupt in India that the common man has lost faith in them. The judiciary is still held in high regard because people seldom get to know how corrupt some lawyers and judges are. As judiciary’s power is extremely limited outside the court, media has become the most revered estate. And the powers that be in the media have wasted no time in turning the “big daddy”, whose only concern is the well-being of the citizens.
The biggest responsibility of this big daddy is cleansing the system. “Politicians are so corrupt, my God! Politics should be banned in this country. The only thing politicians do is take bribes, waste taxpayers’ money and do nothing for those who make them leaders,” the newspapers write everyday in some way or the other.
They are lucky that there is nobody to expose them. Otherwise the general public could have known how many editors have reached their positions not because of their journalistic abilities but because of efficient sycophancy. One could have even written a research paper on the journalistic equivalent of the casting couch. Let somebody find out how many renowned journos are son of X, cousin of Y, nephew of Z and so on. The reams published on dynasty politics may then look like unfair criticism.
And bribes? Every second some journalist or the other is accepting a bribe in cash or in kind to malign A’s enemy or exalt B’s efforts. Even when an individual is working as an honest journalist, the owner of his channel or newspaper is making him do a story that will benefit some company or some politician who will arrange for huge ad revenue in the next fiscal. Some media houses have even institutionalised doing stories in return of something.
Having known all this, it hurts when the media criticizes the government for ordering two TV channels to telecast some programmes unsuitable for children late in the night so that least number of children get to see it. The logic behind the criticism?
a) The government cannot decide what is suitable for children and what is not.
b) Children anyway get to see a lot of vulgarity around them nowadays as a result of the moral fabric of society loosening.
Let’s discuss a) first:
Admittedly, the best judge of what is suitable for a child is its parents. But nobody’s parents are powerful enough to determine what is shown at prime time and they have every right to watch TV at prime time with their son/daughter. The people who have that power are those whom these parents have elected to the legislature. So why can’t they decide?
At this, the pundits would say: “You are defending censorship. There should not be any censorship in a progressive democracy.”
Rubbish.
There is no democracy in the world which is absolutely censorship-free. Even in the USA, if somebody is convicted of distributing “obscene” pornography, he can be sentenced to long prison term and forfeiture of assets. So which progressive democracy are you talking about?
The kind of things shown in the two programmes in question, may not amount to pornography but they will not be deemed fit for children in any civilized country.
Bigg Boss contestants hurl abuses at each other at will and the ugly fights they get involved into are mental violence at its worst.
What Rakhi Sawant does is, at times, adult content. Just the other day she called somebody “impotent” on air. The guy went home humiliated and committed suicide a few days later. Even if he had not done that, imagine your 7/8 year old daughter watching it even if you don’t watch it with her (nowadays there are times when children watch TV alone), and with the natural curiosity of that age, asking you: “What does impotent mean?”
Is that a word that should enrich her vocabulary at such an early age? If the government has said “no”, what is there to criticize? In fact, for the first time in free India, the government has not tried to ban something deemed offensive by it. It has not tried to determine what adults should see. Making certain programmes late night is as good (or as bad, if you think so) as marking a film PG (parental guidance). Why should that be regarded as an attack on the right to freedom of speech and expression?
To end this lengthy discussion, let me say that even if it is a decision the government should not take, the only possible loser are the two channels who might get less advertisements for those slots. What are the other media houses so concerned about? The answer is in my question.
Let’s come to b) now:
What a logic! My grandmom is 80 years old. She has got asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis. Everybody knows she can die any day. So let’s shoot her. What’s the big deal?
The moral fabric is loosening everyday. So let the children lose their morality asap, or better still, let’s ensure they don’t develop any by showing them foul-mouthed celebrities jostling to win a reality show, and somebody like Rakhi, whose only achievement in life is showing off her big breasts, ask people most personal questions and wash everybody’s dirty linen in public.
But let’s not lose hope, let’s rewrite what Rabindranath Tagore had written:
Where the mind is without media and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into revenues
By voracious media moghuls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dark lanes of profit and loss
Where journalism is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening action for welfare
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
