Column

The media has been in the thick of news — and controversy — lately. And so has Bollywood. With the dust having finally settled on Shah Rukh Khan’s film My Name Is Khan, allow me to tune in to Rann, the latest flick from filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma’s stable. Watching the film was an exercise in tolerance as it derided, lampooned and vilified the media at large as being corrupt, Machiavellian and ruled by barons given to degenerate love for lucre. Not to speak of journalists who are mostly buffoons (represented by actor Rajpal Yadav playing a bumbling scribe). The few good men in the film are delineated as being marionettes in the hands of opportunists-that-be.

Ram Gopal Varma (RGV), who? Is he the person who made some forgettable horror films now lecturing us on journalistic ethics? Balderdash! That’s the first thought that crossed my mind and I could hardly camouflage my discontentment to those who kept raving about Amitabh Bachchan and the rest of the cast.
Media, press, fourth estate — call it by any name — is an inseparable part of our lives, not by dint of the fact that it’s news or conscience-keeper or anything, but because it serves as the eyes and ears of the masses and lets them into things which would otherwise remain under wraps. Courage and integrity underline the very functioning of the media which all are well aware of. Take your mind back to the days when Arun Shourie of The Indian Express brought to light the cement scandal.

A DNA scribe now based in Mumbai and who was then working for
The Daily exposed former prime minister Chandrashekhar’s decision to mortgage India’s gold reserves. Further, closer home in Mumbai, another young DNA reporter, Preety Acharya who was inside the Taj during the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, watched terrorist Ajmal Kasab shoot people and reported live from the spot.

Has RGV the knowledge of such courage where journalists have risen above self-concern?

Remember the infamous Jessica Lal case? When perpetrators of the crime were acquitted in the case, one screaming headline in a leading national daily ‘No one killed Jessica Lal’ created such a furore on the national circuit that it forced the court to re-investigate the case all over again. On the international front, one needn’t be reminded of the expose of Watergate scandal in the US which saw President Richard Nixon bite the dust in 1974.

At this point, let me make it clear that this is no treatise to run down RGV. He is an independent filmmaker and has the cinematic licence to interpret things his way. Why I have taken up the pen is because cinema is an immensely powerful medium and the way RGV has portrayed the media as a crumbling institution is outright derogatory. Yes, money is important to keep the publishing machinery running just as in any other field. That doesn’t mean the media is sold out to nefarious elements. It doesn’t mean the media is motivated only by lucre. Most of all, the media, by and large, is dispassionate. It doesn’t ‘create’ news as RGV suggests. It simply reports the happenings and allows people draw inferences. And telling the truth isn’t easy as the instances quoted amply validate. More than the media sensationalising news, RGV has sensationalised the media.