Narendra Modi had the drop on India?s angrez elite on Monday as the PSLV lifted off from Sriharikota. While Doordarshan reported the launch in chaste Hindi ? and we learned, inter alia, that a rocket stage is a charan and its burn a dahan ? he spoke in English. At length, and without notes or a teleprompter. But we elites are amnesiac, or we would have remembered that long ago, a decade before he was projected as a chaiwalla, Narendra Modi used to hold his own on English TV channels.
Modi turned Sriharikota into a great video-op, though it also revealed that he is no Abdul Kalam. For instance, he called for a SAARC satellite that would serve all the needs of the region, a job that would need at least one satellite per role. He also said that science would have dropped dead if Indians had not discovered zero, a popular myth which sounds compelling only if you don?t know the difference between zero as placeholder and zero as number.
The picture of the week: Dr Subodh Gupta, the AIIMS forensic specialist who has rekindled the controversy over the death of Sunanda Pushkar, browsing Dead Men Do Tell Tales, the 1994 bestseller by forensic anthropologist William R Maples. The man who wrote of holding in his hands the skull of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, with all its dead ?dreams of gold, blood and empire?. The investigator who was drawn to death in his childhood when a cop in Dallas County let him see the autopsy photographs of Bonnie and Clyde. And now, some CNN-IBN guy has used his book as a prop, to be moodily browsed by a forensic doctor in Delhi for an eloquently silent visual.
The English channels have picked up last week?s trending story on the Hindi channels ? the trouble with Shankaracharya Swaroopanand, who has been preaching expiation to the venerators of the Shirdi Sai Baba so forcefully that a war of cultural insult and hurt sentiments has broken out within the Hindu fold. Of course, the Shankaracharya argues that Sai Baba was Muslim, and that worshipping him amounts to venerating Islam. But Sai Baba?s followers don?t care about his birth religion, and the man himself was above such pettiness. CNN-IBN predicts a showdown, with Naga sadhus issuing from their caves to launch a general mobilisation supporting Shirdi.
But that wouldn?t be half as violent as the worthies of the Trinamool Congress like Tapas Pal, seen in cellphone videos on the Bengali channels. Two continents away, even the BBC is carrying the story, in which the former actor is seen suggesting that the throats of rivals should be slit with a bonti, a traditional kitchen implement, and threatening to have women raped.
For total calm, on the other hand, you should have seen the business channels on Thursday morning. Yes, the morning the BSE went belly up due to a system glitch. One was looking forward to seeing how a programme called Traders Only would telecast with the most important market flatlined, but HCL booted up BSE just before transmission. Spoilsports.
While Modi is rumoured to have asked Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg?to replace the friend request button with a mitron button, NDTV quizzed her about social engineering, Facebook?s political influence, and what it feels like when posts trigger offline violence, like in Pune. The response was that Facebook hates violence, takes privacy ?incredibly seriously? and ?will continue doing those things (social engineering?) globally? to offer users ?the best possible experience?. This is a language designed to baffle and enrage, and its use at a time when people are enraged because Facebook has admitted to baffling them is doubly baffling.
(pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com)
