What ails breaking news?

Paromita Vohra’s new documentary dares question the media’s relationship with ‘breaking news’

One of the funniest — and most outrageous — moments in filmmaker-writer Paromita Vohra’s new documentary, Morality TV Aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani, is when VHP leader Sandeep Pahal talks about love in the Hindi heartland. It’s a conspiracy by the Muslim boys, he says, to entice and trap young Hindu girls in a web of intimacy and illicit pleasures. “It’s a loving jehad,” he says, totally deadpan.

Pahal’s statement provides the most innovative and intriguing part to the title of a film that touches on several important things: Moral policing, the idea of love and the language (and, by extension, agenda) of reportage today.

The incident central to the film is Operation Majnu in Meerut, the December 2005 case where some policewomen swooped down on couples in the park and began (for the benefit of the TV cameras and reporters they had brought along) to slap and shove around the young people they found there.

“The film is about the language of morality and news, and how it shapes our idea of the world, freedom and what we can or cannot do,” says Vohra, who has made other award-winning documentaries like Q2P and Where’s Sandra. “News is completely subjective. Someone chooses to see certain things and then shows it in a certain way.”

Manipulation by the media is an idea that deeply disturbs Vohra, which led her to make this film. The TV channels’ desire for profits has led to them to blatantly sensationalise and sex up people’s lives (including their sex lives, of course). “One channel does it and everyone else gets into the game,” says Vohra.

“We live in a time where we supposedly have choice, but we see exactly the same things on all the channels. This narrow choice is making people narrow-minded and provincialised in their thinking.”

The apogee of all of this is, of course, the more recent cases playing out on TV. The Arushi murder, for instance, where the media “already speaks of the people involved as perpetrators before actually knowing this”, and passes judgment on the character of the girl, her parents and their friends, pushing the police towards a (possibly premature) resolution.

“The media does not have the right to do this,” says Vohra. “News, which is an important part of democracy, does not fulfill any of the roles it’s supposed to. It doesn’t fight for the weak, it falsifies stories and isn’t in the least bothered about poor and marginal groups.”

Vohra hopes that her film can at least raise these questions among people - especially the young people who want to join the media.

“I want young media students to think about their job to bring some meaning to their task,” she adds. “They need to come into news for something else besides looking glamorous.” Morality TV is certainly likely to make them think about this.
(Morality TV Aur Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani will be screened at the NCPA at 6.30pm)
l_ghosh@dnaindia.net