The similarities between WWF bouts and TV debates

Every now and then I find myself obsessively pursuing a new interest like a schoolboy. The habit is unhealthy but it helps me with my work. My obsession initially presents itself as an idea promising the illicit and slowly takes over the productive chunks of my working day.

Once my distracting obsession, which could be anything about everything or everything about nothing, turns into my principal daily task, the psychotic aspect of my mind starts craving the illicit again and I have no other option but to write illicitly. It is only by turning my occupation into a distraction that I can get my job done. It is a tragedy which is doubly tragic because it pays my bills and perpetuates itself.

These days I am consuming television like an opium addict. And after almost a week of watching nothing but news debates and WWF wrestling, I have had a breakthrough: there is no difference between the two.

WWF usually throws up the same wrestlers fighting each other every week or twice a week in rings across the country and television throws up the same participants across different channels indulging in the intellectualised version of WWF.

Both the television debate and the WWF bout are scripted without actually being scripted. They are staged but not staged at the same time in the sense that we never see a fight get over as soon as it starts (knockout) and we never expect anyone to ever concede their position or tear apart his opponent to the point of submission in a TV debate, leave alone finishing the debate as soon as it begins. All we have been trained to expect is entertainment and that’s what we get without fail. If the experts weren’t shelling out mediocrity why would we watch them?

In exchange of entertainment nothing is expected from us. Not even attention. In fact, TV debates reward us for having a short attention span by constructing their content in such a way that we can leave or join the debate as and when we like without missing anything at all. Just like a WWF fight.

We don’t watch Arnab Goswami and Barkha Dutt or Rajdeep Sardesai because they are great journalists; we watch them because they have finally been able to reduce journalism to entertainment just the way Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior or the Undertaker are not wrestlers but entertainers who have created a vulgar performance art out of brutal violence. We don’t ever learn anything from a TV debate just the way we don’t learn any murderous moves from a WWF fight.

We deeply understand that it’s all a show and people don’t really mean what they say or do. In fact, all of us can teach most of the participants a thing or two about their self-professed field of expertise and that belief adds to our pleasure. If people actually start speaking their minds on TV or WWF goes real, our capitalist society will completely break down, for television would then be an agent of revolution and not entertainment. Which brings me to the only difference I could find between TV debates and WWF: to the best of my knowledge, television news channels do not pay TV debate participants the way wrestlers are paid or the way newspapers pay independent observers who express their views on the opinion pages. Paying their contributors is a matter of pride for newspapers who keep the money flowing even during hard times. In a sense, a newspaper treats the opinions of the participants with some value while the television news debate values nothing other than itself. Which is fine by all of us since it is so entertaining and so very addictive.