Lighten up would you!

October 19, 2008 at 9:05 pm | In Entertainment, Television, news | 2 Comments
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Catch a glimpse of Amy Poehler rapping while Seth Meyers and Sarah Palin get into the groove on SNL: http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/?last_story=/opinion/walsh/election_2008/2008/10/19/palin_snl

Finished watching Saturday Night Live just now. I’d put it on download today afternoon as a matter of routine and forgotten about it , but got very excited after coming to know that Sarah Palin was going to be on the show. If you’ve been following the show, SNL has been poking quite a lot of fun at her expense. Tina Fey who has an uncanny resemblance to the vice-presidential nominee does a killing impression of Palin which by now has become famous on YouTube and other places on the net. Her “I can see Russia from my window” bit alone has had everyone talking. E News (yes they talk about things like that sometimes, . Hollywood gossip is not just about celebrity babies!) actually did a bit on whether Hollywood with its liberal leanings and Obama fan following was taking the vitriol against Sarah Palin too far.

 

I wasn’t very surprised to know she’d be on the show. They did have McCain on too, a few weeks ago when Ashton Kutcher was the host. So my verdict, did she impress. Yes and no. Sarah Palin the concept hit the nail through and through. Sarah Palin the person, err… a different story all together.

 

The cast and guest stars did a wonderful job. Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Alec Baldwin-  all of them. Amy Poehler’s rap song where she’s pretending to be Palin is so completely hillarious. Tina Fey’s signature impression of course did not disappoint. The sketch of her as Palin addresing a press conference where she says how nice it is to be talking to both the ‘liberal media elite’ and the ‘media regular elite’ was classic.

 

But the lady in question came across as stiff, insipid and pointedly uncomfortable, a contradiction for a woman who prides herself on being all folksy and regular, just like Joe the Plumber, her Frankenstein creation. McCain had been more likable on his old man sketch, funnier and more natural. But as Sarah Palin chimed and grooved along with Seth Meyers on the Weekend Update segment, it seemed like she was trying hard to fit in with ‘all the cool kids’.

 

But what I really admire was the ability on both ends to have a laugh at their own expense without taking it to heart. It is gratifying for me to know maybe freedom of expression still has a chance in a world where people’s patience is very short with personal jabs. It is getting worse in India where the slightest attempt at satire on part of the media threatens to spew into violence and retribution. It happened in 1999 when the body of a senior cartoonist from Outlook was found dumped by a highway. All over some unflattering caricatures of Shivsena Supremo, Bal Thakarey in the magazine.

 

That being the extreme of course, I find an over sensitivity among Indian audiences and opinion leaders today that sometimes reminds me of whiny children who complain to their parents about someone picking on them. Humour is a far stretch, innocuous comments taken in the wrong spirit have led to some bottle smashing and mud slinging and heated letter writing before you can say ‘what just happened?’ The case of the Saamana feature which made fun of  Maharashtrian politician Narayan Rane’s status in the Congress likening him to a new bride is perhaps the most recent example. A caricature along side showed him in bridal attire. The paper’s office was attacked and vandalized and some signature Indian effigy burning took place, all this over a badly done Photoshop job.

 

Yes, it is wrong to make racist, sexist or castiest jokes, and maybe its impolite to get very personal about public figures. But there is also some genuine comedy to be found in this conflict that is not always offensive and certainly doesn’t trivialize the issue. It is not easy to be laughed at.  But just because someone fails to see the humour in a situation, is it fair to deny others the right to do so. I would simply say, lighten up people- either grow a sense of humour, or a thicker hide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New media is the place to be

October 19, 2008 at 2:28 pm | In Media, New Media, journalism | 1 Comment
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What would my ideal journalism job be? The question takes me back to elementary school composition exercises. What do you want to be when you grow up? I pretty much knew I wanted to be a journalist for most of my life. There was a period when I thought I wanted to venture into genetics or architecture but my less than stellar aptitude in Science, Physics and Math pretty much negated those options.

 

I never gave much thought about what kind of journalism I wanted to pursue till a few years ago. If you’re English educated in India, the only place you can be is in the national press. For those who get their liberal higher education in the metros of the nation, writing in local vernacular papers or magazines is unthinkable. It’s not something we do. So we slog away in colleges and journalism schools hoping to say someday that I am from Times of India or The Hindu or some other equally illustrious metro based national daily which is read by about 3-4% of the country. The phenomenal growth of 24×7 news channels in India in all the Indian languages and especially in English and Hindi changed to a great degree. Aspiring journalists switched their preferences over to television which is currently, more prominent and better paying. Not me though. I can’t think of a job in television. It’s repetitive, highly monotonous and limits creativity.

 

Like most aspiring journalists, I do have the one paper or magazine I absolutely must work for before I die and that is The Hindu one of the finest newspapers in the country. But it doesn’t have to be a long gig; a brief internship stint would be just fine. I want to be on the inside of a newspaper that I love and admire and see why they are the way they are. If I could stretch my imagination and my capabilities, I guess being part of the foreign correspondence bureau of The Hindu would be awesome. 

 

On a more long term basis, I think web journalism is where I truly want to be. Like most people of my generation, I think New Media is where the future lies. It’s nascent and not institutionalized in the way print or television has been. That is what makes it so much more exciting to work with. It’s a chance for one to change traditional ideas about how journalism should be. To break down the old understandings about news value or narratives, to maybe invent new ones. My ideal job would be having my own website with maybe a small scale staff and finding that middle path between news and feature writing .To achieve the balance between hard hitting stuff and infotainment like Salon.

 

But on the whole, it’s not something I plan on doing right after college. Ideal jobs are ideal when you get them at a stage in your life when you feel you’re ready. Before that you must pay your dues, gather experience, take what comes your way and branch out into different fields before settling where you think you belong. I believe that any job in journalism has a lot to teach us – about good and bad content, about principles, about realizing what we’re good at and zoning into what we really want to be doing. To be steadfast to an immature dream that we chart out at 16 or 18 and not let the profession change us for the better is a great disservice we do to ourselves. We shouldn’t be putting up with a job but rather try and enjoy it , do our best with it and take from it whatever we can to something better as when the opportunities come along. 

Will I ever catch up?

October 18, 2008 at 2:32 pm | In Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
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The desire to know is agonizing even while it is a commendable quality. I often wonder, will it ever be enough? How many plays, books, movies, artists, musicians and  websites must I know about before I can finally go through a conversation without feeling like I missed out on something somewhere. It happens to all of us, all the time. There is always something or the other that went by us and we forgot to realize its importance. We then beat ourselves over not having known about it all this while, and immediately do damage control by googling about it and consuming the first wikipedia article that comes our way on the same subject.

I can’ t make any claims to being well-read, I’d say far from it. But I try and keep up with everything that happens around me, simply because I can’t afford not to. Not if I hope to be a journalist with even a shred of competence. Even as I click on the many newsletters and RSS feeds in my inbox from Hindustan Times, Salon, NY times, The New Yorker, TNR, Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, Pew research centre and keep subscribing to more all the time ( my latest additions being Granta and The Daily Beast ), there are so many more that I can’t track or know about.

The intellectual  demands of this field  are challenging  and limiting in the same breath. As a journalist I am expected to be and forgive me the cliche ‘a jack of all trades.’  While on one hand this serves as a mandate for one to expand horizons and compels us to be aware, It also discourages us to probe deep and instead gather working surface knowledge. However,  even being superficially aware  is proving to be increasingly difficult. Its perhaps in this context that a website like The Daily Beast recently started by  former editor of Vanity Fair , Tina Brown makes a lot of sense.  While the obvious Western bias towards news from the US and UK  is caught by my over developed orientalist bias catching metal apparatus, it is more of the underlying concept that I find intriguing.  Read this, Skip that is the tag line of The Daily Beast. Basically what the site does is to cull and curate news from important news sources from all over and put them at one place. There is original content as well in the form of commentary, blogs and features by the in house staff. The purpose of the site as Brown explained on The Colbert Report  is for one to know everything there is to know without going very deep into it. 

Though I have never been a fan of surface scratching. I can see the point of bringing in a filter to help one navigate the bottomless abyss of information that we unsuccessfully try to stay afloat in. It is rather frustrating to know that while the information overload has given us access to knowledge about pretty much anything and everything, we really can only do so much with it.  We need the filters somewhere, those which tease us to probe further without leaving us unsatisfied and those which educate us adequately without quelling the desire to know more.

I finally did my own commuting story…

October 18, 2008 at 9:41 am | In Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
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 I remember when BBC correspondent Andrew Whitehead in a talk to the Journalism Class at LSR way back in 2006 told us about how foriegn journalists almost always end up doing a story on the ovecrowded DTC buses when they start out in Delhi. It strikes them as particularly exotic and incomprehensible. Probably since I’ve lived here all my life and have seen enough overcrowded buses, It never occured to me as meriting news value. But one harrowing commute after the other, and gradually  I see their point. There is an inherent despair in the situation that is almost like something out of Kafka…

The Indian public transport service is one of the most fascinating systems I have ever come across. It truly embodies the expression ‘there’s always room for more’. No wonder, a seven seater in Hyderabad accommodates 15 people and at least eight people seem to clamber out of an auto which says ‘to seat 4 only’. Don’t even get me started on the buses and trains. Its like being caught in one of those machines at the junkyards which crush old car metal into boxes of scrap.

If one should have the inclination to observe one’s fellow commuters on the bus or local train like I do, it’s interesting all the random thoughts that run through one’s mind. People hanging onto the loops and bars at the top of the bus, they sometimes  remind me of puppets, suspended by strings and squashed together in a a large storage box. A morbid performance in the theatre of cruelty.

I ask myself, why we insist on being jammed into dangeroulsy overcrowded buses?  Why do we push and pull and shove our way, in and out of these deathtraps? It reminds me a little about the world in large. The earth seems to be this large over crowded bus, low on resource and bearing the burden of so many of us. We’re all really suspended puppets aren’t we? Hanging onto our loops and making the best of it.

I guess I understand why foriegn journalists feel like doing stories on the overcrowded buses right at the beginning of their time here. To them it probably is the most stark and realistic picture of this nation that is so new to them and different from everything they know and understand about civic society. Of course in time, the shock wears off, and they move onto bigger things. I mean don’t we?

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