Hand of God

Sasikala’s thumping would’ve shaken more political ground, but a media used to reading Tamil politics as cinema missed this high-strung theatre act

HOW REASSURING it is to see that the question of whether Rohith Veluma was victimised has permanently turned into the question of whether he was a Dalit. Just like the question of whether Akhlaq was lynched had automagically transformed into the issue of the genetic origin of the meat in his freezer. Humans value continuity and consistency. Civilisations are built on these pillars.

Historically, Tamil politics has underscored the distinction between north and south, but seen through the lens of the media, the national fabric is seamlessly consistent and continuous. When VK Sasikala was to go to jail, everyone reached for the macro lens. It was gleefully reported that she would sleep on the floor, eat jail food and make candles for a meagre living. This celebration of the fall of the powerful at the hands of retributive justice is as medieval as the laying on of hands which Sasikala inflicted upon the sands of the Marina. It is a national characteristic. When Mrs Gandhi went to jail, her diet and schedule had become a national obsession. This was before TV became pervasive, and people had to get their cheap thrills from black-and-white newspaper pictures.

Earlier, the media had been so touched by the sudden late-night epiphany of O Panneerselvam on Marina Beach that it was caught flat-footed by the equally sudden drama which followed the court ruling. The excitement about MLAS being corralled in the Golden Bay beach resort by Chinnamma, which spun off lurid stories of coercion, had been contagious. The news fed public curiosity so forcefully that by midweek, the resort’s website had crossed the bandwidth limit and gone down. And no one could predict the second epiphany on the Marina, when Sasikala smote the earth, the earth shook, and her proxy Edappadi Palanisami was sworn in forthwith, with ministers being processed in batches to save time, as seen in footage courtesy Jaya Plus. While cinema is integral to Tamil politics, theatre is an entirely different art form, and the media failed to get it.

Newsx has helped a Bangladeshi with an unexpected problem. He had brought his mother over for treatment and admitted her to a hospital with a local address. When she died, he found himself unable to take her body back to Bangladesh. The story apparently caught the attention of a district magistrate and the Bangladesh High Commission, who have committed to help unravel this international incident.

But this feelgood story was poisoned by the ‘related story’ bug, the thing that leaps out of the margins of computer and TV screens and pulls up every story on the system with a common tag. In this case, the ticker pulled up the story of the BSF near the Bangladesh border picking up new Rs 2,000 notes printed from perfect dies. The anchor gloomily concluded that everyone’s hopes from demonetisation had been dashed (by Bangladeshis, maybe?). Whose hopes? Everyone except the promoters of demonetisation knew that counterfeiters would not be inconvenienced. The two stories seemed to run together, one positive and the other negative, connected by only one word: Bangladesh. There has to be a better way of tagging the news.

The video selfie taken by ISRO’S rocket as it hurled 104 satellites into orbit, like a torpedo boat slinging depth charges at a submarine, didn’t get half the push from NDTV as the news that Vishnu Som is the world’s first journalist to fly on the Tejas. But it was a much bigger achievement than developing a light combat aircraft and putting a journalist in it. Besides, this is probably the first video showing nano-satellites. The way concerns about data privacy and trust deficits are increasing, many of us might have personal nanos in orbit quite soon, and it’s interesting to see what the little beasts look like. A bit like walkie-talkies, it turns out.

Speaking of information security, a feature in Wired by Samanth Subramanian reported from Veles, Macedonia has cut to the heart of the fake news crisis which beset the American election, and could afflict others. The issue is not the ease with which fake news swung the voters’ discourse, for that implies some sort of political plot powered by ideology, which spread across borders. The real story concerns the motive of fake news entrepreneurs — in a country with a serious unemployment problem, the motive turns out to be just money and the good life.

Like pornography, fake news feeds off automated advertising networks. In this case, it was Google’s Adsense. Here, a school dropout made 10 times the national average wage with two pro-trump fake news sites. The fake news entrepreneur’s objective was a BMW 4 Series. While the world has woken up to the seriousness of the fake news problem, the idea that an election may have been skewed by a distant teen’s need to own some smart wheels is still staggering.

The media was so touched by the sudden late-night epiphany of O Panneerselvam on Marina Beach that it was caught flat-footed by the equally sudden drama which followed the court ruling