Where's the meat?

Someone asked me after reading this space , where is the meat in your writing on media? I thought and thought and thought more. Where is the meat in media? It made me wonder. So I browsed through the Television channels , kept surfing through radio channels , browsed through couple of magazines and tried hard , harder. There are scoops , sting operations and soundbytes. But even in all this I guess the meat is lacking.

If we look at it medium by medium may be we might be able to spot some bits of interesting pieces but they are so few and far in between that the effort would be tremendous and results only dismal I wonder what should I do? May be go further under the skin of things and look beyond the obvious.

I also happen to be reading Einstein at this stage and that's where I see a stark comparison. The old timers book called "Ideas and Opinion" is excerpts of his speeches and writing put together and its a wonderful piece of writing. That's meat for sure. So its not the medium but the content as has been said again and again and again.

Compared to the writing, would a docu-drama on Einstein sound as interesting? I guess not. I think as mass media and the masses consuming them explodes it is somewhere losing out on what some great media analysts like Ephron call engagement.

This is how I see it. Media presence is becoming ubiquitous. In turn it is becoming a part of our setting. So breakfast is served with radio, lunch with internet at office and dinner with television is so much given that we don't even pay attention to it. We don't consciously observe /curb it. And somehow when something is routine we also loose interest in it. So its just another show , one after another, just another piece of music and just another piece of writing.

But do we really need to look at the extra-ordinary when the ordinary that seems ordinary is not really so. At an extremely high pace things seem static and I guess so is the case with the mediated world but slow down and you might see it all.

As for my friend well his journalistic self can keep looking for meat and stories but I guess there is one everywhere. You just need to see it.

Salaam Bapu

Gandhiji’s birthday had gained special significance this year. It wasn’t anything special except the fact that just a few weeks before this day there was a bollywood release that talked of Gandhian values. The values of truth and non violence that Gandhi advocated so strongly, that his personality seemed to epitomize the same. He always stood for it and yet he was pretty much forgotten and buried with his values. Suddenly the revival of the same courtesy bollywood.

As we talk of fragmentation and fewer viewers we also see mass media resulting in mass movements shaping opinions and ideologies. It’s happening more so as media becomes omnipresent at least in the bigger cities and town. So we all are served the same messages across channels at dinner table. And like food we are almost swallowing it , without chewing it , giving it any thought at all.

“Lagey Raho Munna Bhai” has suddenly made Gandhi relevant and contemporary, even timeless. To comment on the merits of the movie may not be correct as I haven’t seen it yet but what surprises me is how media is shaping us. Gandhi was there, his values have been known and yet it didn’t matter much hitherto. But the power of Bollywood is something else. It has been generating mass hysteria of late.


The message may be good or bad but I guess each one of us have a right to decide for ourselves. Or do we? Aren’t we influenced with the way information is provided to us? The right to free opinion also embodies within itself the right to free thought. But are my thoughts free really?

After watching show after show on Gandhigiri it is not out of free choice that I sit down to put my thoughts together about it. It is a compulsion to say something. I haven’t seen the movie and I had respected Gandhiji’s ideology irrespective of Munna bhai. And I am not against the use of bollywood for the same, just awestruck.

On Bapu’s bday I wonder what to say – salaam babu or salaam bollywood?