Bollywood-tinged live coverage

I was going to write about something totally different from what’s just happened in Mumbai. After an ocean of newsprint and images what more could I say. But my fingers froze over the keyboard. My brain scuttled into hung mode.

It wasn’t just the fact that I had been in the city by the sea that I love during those very hellish, tragic days. (I live in New Delhi.) It wasn’t because the footage of bodies continuously being brought out — as well as the sound of exploding grenades — kept surfacing in my mind.

It was the image of the 21-year-old captured terrorist Kasab — those eyes with a truly evil glint, so full of hatred and so incongruous with his gauchely cut Beatle mop — that kept returning to haunt me. I couldn’t help but think of Chucky the doll from the horror-slasher series of films.

In these films the spirit of an evil dead man is transferred to a “good guy” doll — innocence defiled and made evil, and in our real-life case through brainwashing. Chucky was also accorded an afterlife in a series of video games.

Eerily enough, the concealed camera footage of Kasab and the other terrorist moving through a dark street of Mumbai, after carrying out the brutal massacre at CST, looked like a scene out of a violent video game. The two, with guns in hand, had the same jerky movements — stop-and-start, stop-and-start.

The pair did not look like human beings but wound-up humanoids taking carefully calibrated steps. They even reminded me of a High Art installation I once saw in an avant-garde New York gallery that had toy soldiers all wired up to kill.

Somehow, the line between what is real and what is simulated had blurred.

It was much the same feeling I had while watching television. Like everybody else I was glued to the television set in a friend’s home in Mumbai for three days. In the room were four young women too frightened to return home.

We watched, like zombies, the endlessly repetitive images, switching channels restlessly. On almost all of them there were the same images, the same hype, and the same hysterical commentary. Yet, addicted, we could not tear ourselves away from the continuous stream of images. I then realised the hypnotic power of repetition. We were also too afraid to be alone, with our anxieties.

I couldn’t put my finger on it then but I sensed that there was something terribly wrong about much of the coverage — something that was making voyeurs of us all. A friend who used to edit films put her finger on it. “I am really shocked by the way the media is covering this on television,” she said, adding, “After 9/11 it was Hollywood on American television. And after 11/26, it is Bollywood on Indian television.”

The Bollywoodisation of our electronic media is truly on its way, and not just on the Hindi channels: the English channels have also been melodramatic and over-the-top, with hysterical anchors. It was the choppy editing of the images and the overly-dramatic, synthesiser-loud music “put” on these images that made the television coverage look like a B-grade Bollywood film.

No wonder, our very own Ram Gopal Varma went about the devastated Taj Mahal hotel as if he were sniffing around for an idea, or scouting a location for his next slice-of-life film.

While watching the ill-equipped but brave policemen trying to take on the terrorists in the two hotels I could not help but hope that a Bruce Willis-type of figure (circa Die Hard when he single-handedly takes on a host of men who have taken over an entire building and many hostages) would suddenly materialise and save the day. I know, I know this only happens in the movies.

Well, we did have our brave saviours, our men-in-black commandos. But I just wish the media had left them alone, instead of chasing them for sound bytes.  We should salute them—not try to make celebrities of them. Their survival — and ours — depends on their anonymity.  Let’s not turn everything into Page 3.

Email:jain_madhu@hotmail.com