It’s true that Indian media preys on the dead and the dying. The useful dead like Sridevi – multilingual female superstar dying suddenly at a time when “national media” is almost synonymous with a male, militaristic Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan narrative – is a ready meal for these TRP gluttons. The tricky dead – like Judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya – are set aside for an immediate burial, despite the unnatural death being directly related to the health of the public institutions, such as the judiciary, the legislature, the law enforcement agencies, as well as the ruling party at the Centre.
Excellent @indianexpress editorial on TV overkill of #SrideviDeath: “Mumbo-jumbo journalism in which Mumbo is trying to pull ahead of Jumbo…. Immersive journalism has gone down the tubes.” pic.twitter.com/6ZjhtuU552
— churumuri (@churumuri) February 28, 2018
It’s, therefore, very well to pronounce #NewsKiMaut, and capture the screenshots of bathtub journalism holding the decaying carcass of the Indian media with stinging captions, produce robust columns and edits to the same effect. In fact, it’s necessary for resuscitation of journalism as public service.
However, calling the TRP-greedy anchors and news channels “vultures”, critically endangered necrophagic birds performing a central ecological function, is not only silly, but it’s also downright unacceptable.
What’s the difference between vultures & Indian TV channels when it comes to a death?
There are things that vultures would be ashamed to do.
But not our TV channels…— vir sanghvi (@virsanghvi) February 26, 2018
The dignified manner in which the Kapoor family has requested for their privacy in this hour of grief is a reminder to the vultures in the media to stop hounding them. #Sridevi ji is a legend. She would have surely wanted that the ‘Show must go on’. So move on..n Pray for her!!
— Faridoon Shahryar (@iFaridoon) February 28, 2018
I’ll quote from Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness to make this unconventional point. [Though it baffles me that this point has to be made at all, even now.] The preface to Roy’s second novel is a haunting, melodious ode to the “friendly old birds”, now dying. She writes:
“Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing, and the old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years, that have been wiped out. The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac, cow-aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works – worked – like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture-bait. As cattle turned into better dairy machines, as the city ate more ice cream, butterscotch-crunch, nutty-buddy and chocolate-chip, as it drank more mango milkshake, vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were tired and simply couldn’t stay awake. Silver beards of saliva dripped from their beaks, and one by one they tumbled off their branches, dead. Not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds. There was so much else to look forward to.”
India has a grave “vulture crisis”, and no it’s not about its toxic media. Prerna Singh Bindra, one of the most caring voices documenting India’s immense ecological destructions and the precious little remaining that must be saved, has written extensively on vultures dying due to diclofenac poisoning, with a population of three of their species declining from a horrifying 97 to 99.9 percent from 1992-2007. Vultures were once ubiquitous – and the metaphors used by human beings, even writers and scholars, showed them as a portent of loss, death, decay. Why didn’t it occur to most that, in fact, the vultures did the opposite – removed the dead, ate the decaying flesh from animal and human carrions, ecologically absorbed the loss, completing the web of life, filling in the blanks of the foodchain? But then humans have always been self-centred, and the vulture metaphors have been almost always about human selfishness in life, language and literature.
The Towers of Silence in Bombay is a beautiful exception to the rule. The city’s Parsi community sticks to the three-millennia-old Zoroastrian tradition of feeding their dead to scavenger birds, in a hearty acknowledgement of human-animal relationship, in not wasting even the dead by denying them to the carrion-eaters. This is one of the most humbly philosophical positions ever taken by a set of people whose numbers might be dwindling, but who are challenging Indian courts and the entrenched patriarchy to remain loyal to this loving, compassionate ritual. As Bachi Karkaria wrote in 2015, even the Towers of Silence are now waking up to the lack of vultures in the vicinity, becoming a health hazard because not many scavenging birds would alight from the sky and eat the remains of their dearly departed.
Vultures perched on treetops or electric poles, mostly in packs, or circling the sky like cumulus and cirrus clouds, made the world whole again, even as humans only saw harbingers of death in them. However, environmentalists, wildlife protectionists, naturalists and bird lovers always intuited the opposite. A writer like Roy, whose authorial kindness and love hang from her eyes like vultures surveying a decaying civilisation such as ours, sees in the death of the birds the enormous cost of unfettered urbanisation. Like the displaced people of India’s “Dam/Age”, the vultures signaled the airbrushed, hushed up, the banished, upon whose invisible bodies the edifice of development has often been erected, becoming for Roy the powerful metaphor of civilisational toxicity. Vultures are the victims of such artifice, such toxins, such muscle relaxants. Then why would anyone in their right minds call the decaying Indian media and its representatives on TV screens “vultures”?
If vultures were not enough, a few among our conscientious and rebellious alt-media voices called the toxic TV media and social media hate-mongers: “AIDS-like pandemic that’s poisoning us”. Some have described corruption in the Nirav Modi-Punjab National Bank case as “cancer”. While their well-intentioned outrage and excellent journalistic record are beyond a shred of doubt, why would they not introspect the language of their just indignation at all that’s wrong in the media, the government of the day and the political-corporate nexus disembowelling Indian body politic from within?
Finally after immense pressure (& 12,000RTs) @virendersehwag deleted his communal tweet.
This is why fake news / paid hate-mongering needs to be called out.
Social Media Platforms / TV / Print all have a stake in rooting out this AIDS like pandemic that’s poisoning us. pic.twitter.com/4CUeaGlcin— Akash Banerjee (@akashbanerjee) February 25, 2018
Dr. V. Shanta, Chair of the Cancer Institute writes to CEO of #PNB. Please don’t associate corruption with cancer. “We do not want ‘cancer’ to be associated with guilt, hopelessness.. definitely not with shame”. Many patients are happy and proudly leading productive lives. pic.twitter.com/KBiv2TXkQZ
— Ajit Ranade (@ajit_ranade) March 1, 2018
As films like Philadelphia, My Brother Nikhil have poignantly portrayed, the stigma with AIDS was like late 20th-century untouchability of the urban kind, and the contagion of the mind was only contained somewhat after vigorous, government-driven campaigns from organisations like NACO (National Aids Control Organisation). Through 2014 to 2016, health budget saw a decline in India, and the HIV/AIDS control programmes took a major hit, not only in the public healthcare sector but also among advocacy groups that survived on grants and funding from the government. While 2017 saw minor gains, there’s desperation and despondence in India’s public healthcare sector, with an often unaware, uncooperative polity creating hurdles instead of removing them, associating the physiological condition with sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, Western decadence, among other alien “imports”.
Similarly, Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer-winning oncologist-author, has carefully narrated the medical history of cancer in The Emperor of All Maladies, all the while documenting the unimaginable fortitude of his patients in the face of near death. It’s that dignity, sense of privacy and compassion that the dead and dying most need from us – the living and the living dead. Denying the dead their due in the language of recall, the language of sombre grief, in the rituals of memorialising the bygones, whether on TV screens or in our everyday parlance, is really killing them once again.