Shall we have a mature television?

The electronic media has gone berserk. The television anchors are getting hysterical trying to bringing to our drawing rooms the Anna Hazare phase of post-independent India. The sound bites were flying back and forth; political temperatures went soaring with camera-friendly spokespersons of parties ripping one another apart; and there was a fair sprinkling of familiar Bollywood voices too. But what could not be swallowed was the mindless adrenaline rush of our anchors and their sense of having achieved this possibility of bringing the drama “live” on to our flat screens; their senseless holler drowned the scream of politicians and even became more prominent than the UPA government’s apparent gaffe. Is it Peepli going live again?
The print media, too, is at a loss for words. Most of their headlines have the UPA government eating “humble pie” in the wake of Anna’s fast. And, the urban middle-class is feasting on the fasting capsules and is lovin’ it. Anna is hogging the elite drawing room limelight, leaving the i-pad2 behind.
The Congress is indeed in a corner, and seems to have lost its marbles in this show of strength by civil rights activists and their swelling support base. The movement against corruption has reached a stage of a virtual revolution, with Facebook pledges and text messages pitching in for the cause. The Right and Left twain also met to corner the “undemocratic hand of the Congress”.
Whoever said the Gandhian method of fasting had worked in the colonial era, but would not work now? Who said it needs an audience to carry forward Bapu’s method of non-violence? Sorry Ms Arundhati Roy, it seems to be working big time. When one of the civil rights activists, Manoj Sisodia, was released, he told the waiting television crew that he came out of Tihar to convey to millions of Indians watching television, that’s right, television, that Anna would remain in jail despite his release orders till the government gave him unconditional permission to hold his hunger-strike at JP Park. Our electronic media has created the new, post-colonial audience. It does have a potential to carry forward this anti-corruption revolution. We are lucky to have a fairly free media, unlike Egypt, which still managed with an active virtual participation.
This movement has the potential of giving lessons on maturity to our television journalists. The medium is explosive, and this is the right time to fine-tune the mechanisms and let the medium ripen and mellow. It has to become wiser and stress more on content than voice culture, or howl culture. The audience is waiting to take on the corrupt; a little help from an adult television presentation would go a long way into stirring up this audience further. Let the people in power and aspiring for power get the jitters next time they extend their hands for kickbacks; let the next generation understand politics as a serious cause and not use it as a five-year recurring deposit scheme; let the audience turn out in large numbers at poll booths and decimate the men in white with dark skeletons in their fancy cupboards.