The accompanying image might elicit varied reactions…from giggles to utter disbelief at the sheer “stupidity” of the journalist. But the questions it raises are far from comfortable for any of us. Monidipa Mondal contemplates about the state of the Indian media and its audience..
The day this news went viral, there was a round of giggles at the office. Quite aside from the horrifying violation of human dignity, it was the utter absurdity of the situation that tickled us. How could that guy be so stupid, we wondered aloud. A journalist should certainly have known better?
The case of the journalist riding on a flood victim’s shoulders to report a “human interest” story about the Uttarakhand floods is a classic example of indiscretion. It is not inadvertent, just as a racist YouTube video put up in 2012 by the two white schoolgirls wasn’t an innocent mistake, or the photo posted online by a young woman who decided that dressing up as a Boston Marathon blast victim was a good idea for Halloween, wasn’t just a lapse in judgment. From this point, I can lead into a discussion of the moralising capacity of social media, but I would like you to consider another question—what, actually, goes on in the mind of a person who performs such an act and then shares it with the world?
Unlike the people in the other examples, Narayan Pargaein is a professional. What is common to all three examples, however, is the fact they were performed with the aim to get appreciation and ended up massively backfiring instead. More than the measures of chastisement available, I worry about the perverse nature of the original intention. These people aren’t villains. Nor are they morons. In their personal lives, they are often as intelligent and responsible as the next person. And these are not minor errors of impulsive thoughtlessness. Where are we going wrong, as a civilization, that such intentions are increasingly accepted as something worth giving voice to?
I do not believe Pargaein’s subsequent defence that the visual of him astride the shoulders of the flood victim was never meant to go on air, but I do see his motivation behind performing it. In the cut throat competition of today’s journalism, sillier (though perhaps less ethically suspect) antics are performed every day to make a news byte stand out from the rest. And this phenomenon is not limited to journalism. Every job interview, every college application, every threshold to cross is asking us how we are unique, what makes us better than the other hopefuls vying for the same position. It is no longer sufficient to do one’s work adequately; one must also brandish several other qualities that may not even be relevant to the job description; and one must brandish them higher than everyone else.
So what is the solution for those of us who aren’t born with the gift of genius? One of the wonders of my generation is the disappearance of the ordinary person. I look at my father, who seems to have led a comfortably ordinary life – he took up a job and stuck to it, provided for the family, fed the cat and held his own political opinions, personal biases and Mohun-Bagan loyalty close to his heart, and never suffered any angst strong enough to move him to greater (or stranger) action. Few people of my generation seem capable of surviving in such unperturbed ordinariness.
As we struggle to find newer ways to stand out from the crowd, the first thing that goes out of the window is the moral compass. While we agree it’s not ideal to cheat on an exam, we do it to get by, and we justify it to ourselves by saying that everyone else does it also. While we compete to get better at the methods of a profession, we are less concerned with the ethics of it. The question we ask is “Will this story get attention?” and we are satisfied if the answer is “Yes.” But “Should this story get attention” or “is it benefiting the world at large?” are questions for which we answer with “None of my business” –particularly when the ethics required to answer those questions meaningfully seem contrary to the requirements for success.
I have written so far in the first-person plural, implicating ourselves (you, my editors, and of course, myself ), in the same broad stroke with Pargaein, because I believe that the difference between him and those of us who got a laugh out of his career-destroying antics is not a stronger moral fibre but merely a more refined sense of discretion and political correctness. We laughed precisely at that; it’s his “stupidity” which was funny, since the display of tastelessness and entitlement certainly wasn’t.
We, who are more Internet-savvy and aware of the repercussions of posting material online than the vernacular-language journalist from Dehradun, shook our heads in disbelief because his was an error that we would never have made ourselves. But as long as we keep using our social privilege to make inroads into places, or come home to treat our maids, drivers or garbage collectors as a kind of personal retinue, I’m not so sure we are better journalists – or better human beings, for that matter – than he is.
