The rains may send raga-makers and pakora-eaters into raptures. For me, it is about nostalgia. And a recent good spell of raindrops send my mind thinking about watching television news in the good old days and now.
DD THEN: After two giant commas and a fullstop danced to funereal music and stopped only when 'Doordarshan' was spelt out, and two 'rukawat kay liye khed hai' messages later, a face remarkable for its lack of expression appeared on the black and white screen. In a voice that betrayed neither happy, sad or passionate undertones, the face spoke of the terrible events in Uttarakhand, of how mountains had crumbled, hundreds had been killed, swept away by water or buried under slush, how houses had disintegrated. At the right of the screen, in a small box, still images flicked in quick succession - a half-collapsed building along an angry river, a fractured road, a group of miserable pilgrims, an armyman helping a wizened sadhu into a helicopter and then of an old woman, identifiable as such from her sari and wrinkled hands and presumably in trouble, for nothing else could be told from the picture, the photographer - or the DD producer - having neatly cropped off the face and whatever expression it may have exhibited. The unflustered voice then stopped narrating, and a video sparked to life on the 14-inch screen. It was of a river in spate. And even as we watched, we saw a multi-storyed building starting to topple over. With bated breath we sat transfixed, as the building almost seemed to bend. With the falling building now at an angle of 88 degrees to the ground, and with the promise of hitherto unseen footage of mayhem about to unfold, the video abruptly cut back to the unflappable face with a voice bereft of intonation that carried on the description of the calamity as if reading from Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. This was a moment of catharsis for us news viewers.
DD NOW: Well, almost nobody watches news on Doordarshan these days, so the DD here stands for "Disaster Drama" on private news networks. We are watching the news on two channels that newspaper ads said had the highest TRP ratings in India (asterisks showed one was for all viewers in the P3 segment, and the other explained its ratings held good for the X7 segment). With Bollywoodsian fanfare, the words "Dooba dooba rahta hun" appear on the screen. Instead of the deadpan face, there appears a troupe of five animated, ferocious beings, snarling at each other and at the anchor, who passionately declares that the country has the right to know why such heavy rains had fallen in Uttarakhand. Clearly, the Met Dept is to blame, he screams. Can the country sit silent while the Met Dept fails to stop the rains, his indignant voice sears through the nation's conscience. Upon hearing this call to arms, five argumentative pairs of eyes light up more brightly than the television crew's Fresnel lights illuminating them in their gardens and studies. Even as the anchor commands, "You respond, Mr Ravi Shankar Tewari," the other worthies on the screen - politicians Manish Prasad, Baijayant Jay Singhvi and Ramgopal Karat and eco-activist Vandana Rudra - are up in arms, literally. Up shoot their arms like those of hyperactive kindergarten geniuses, and even as we watch -for that is all we can do since we can comprehend nothing in the cacophony with everyone shrieking, bellowing, barking, yelling, accusing, calling for resignations - the camera once again turns to the anchor, who, calm now that he has vented, announces that it is time for a commercial break but that we shouldn't go away. How can we, wouldn't we love to watch the panelists pierce each other's ear drums? Then just before a commercial of an ethereal beauty grasping a mango in the throes of ecstasy in an undeluged, uncrumbled, heaven-like garden rolls on screen, we glimpse on the 40-inch screen before us a turbid, roaring river slowly pulling a temple into its roiling waters. That is the closest we get to seeing something related to the calamity of Uttarakhand in the whole hour.
Free Run is a fortnightly look at alternate realities joel.rai@bsmail.in
