An associate of mine recently called to ask how one manages to hold a truly objective interview with the figurative man on the street.

She was going around with a video camera and a microphone trying to talk to people on the streets to gather their views on corruption, terrorism and the energy crisis for a research paper that she was working on. I asked her what problem she was facing. This is what the hapless researcher said:

‘They (the interviewees) all sound like the people we see on TV channels!’

She added that every time a man or a woman that she tried to interview saw the microphone and the camera, they would go off like angry robots using almost exactly the kind of monotonous rhetoric about corruption, crime and inflation that one hears on TV talk shows.

Her bout of frustration in this regard peaked while she was interviewing some middle-aged women at a shopping mall. Some were in niqabs, some in trendy dresses, but all were carrying huge shopping bags containing pricey products that they had bought at the mall.

However, once in front of a camera and a microphone, each one of them began bitterly complaining about inflation and how it was becoming almost impossible for poor folks (such as them?) to eke out a living.

‘Almost everyone I interviewed on the streets, shops and malls; working class people, middle-class aunties … they all seemed to have a top-of-the-head radical spiel ready,’ my associate complained.

‘The moment they saw the camera, off they went like radical Maoists of yore!’ She laughed.

Shoppers at a mall in Karachi: Very concerned about poverty.

I told her that I knew someone else who had faced a similar problem until he finally decided to do the interviews without a camera or a microphone.

‘That’s exactly what I ended up doing,’ she replied. ‘And though it became tougher for me to attract the interest of people to talk to me without my camera, I finally did manage to get a few interviews that sounded a lot more genuine than the speeches my camera was attracting.’

The red hot noise that emits from TVs

I remember how, in the 1990s, a Marxist journalist colleague cringed every time he saw a toothpaste ad using the word revolution (‘inqilaabi anti-plaque formula’). He used to complain: ‘This damn word (revolution) has completely lost its meaning …’

I’m sure by now the poor chap has lost all of his hair considering how these days everyone – from a well-paid TV anchor, to a middle-class housewife, to a televangelist – detonate the moment they come in front of a TV camera, rapidly spouting angry spiels about the plight of the ghareeb awam (poor masses) and the evils of feudalism, capitalism and western imperialism! And that too while being direct recipients of the juicy benefits of all that they were cursing and condemning!

I’m sure the ghareeb awam is not amused.

The ‘revolution’ will be televised.

A few years ago, Dawn ran a series of photographs that showed a reporter and a cameraman from a local TV channel getting hold of (an unrelated) working-class woman and child.

They handed them Rs100 each and asked them to pose as a hapless mother and child who had been roaming the streets without any work or roof over their heads.

The truth was, though poor, they were facing nothing of the sort. The woman worked at a textile mill and the child actually went to a government school.

The resultant news story (revolving around the choreographed shots of the woman and the child), had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the channel’s projected concern about the poverty-stricken and the homeless.

It was a case of sheer cynicism to cash in on the fact that things like misery and faith draw enthusiastic viewership and thus, high ratings.

From submissive women constantly shedding tears in soap operas; to heart-wrenching news reports with the sound of sad violins wailing in the background; to TV anchors raising and waving their fists at ‘Amreeki Samraj’ and ‘Dollar-Khor agents’ – all the while being on the payroll of amoral media tycoons – make engrossing and ratings-friendly viewing.

It is a rather contemptuous and largely choreographed gesture that is as genuine as a well-paid televangelist or a cooking oil commercial offering spiritual salvation in which faith becomes a product and the faithful become mere consumers.

Rent-a-rant …

... and some tears too – in fact, many.

Another friend of mine and a journalist, amused by the red hot noise that continues to emit from TV channels, noticed how even those discussing a cricket match on TV also end up sounding like angry, fist-waving Trotskyites!

'Why is everyone always shouting on TV?' He once asked.

‘Inquilaabi’ cricket analysts. The Trotskyite faction.

The friend then went on to give the example of a TV ad campaign of a telecom company in which it asked young Pakistanis to boycott silence (‘Khamoshi ka boycott’).

‘That’s all we need,’ said my friend, sarcastically. ‘Angry, incoherent chatter, when the need of the hour is for Pakistanis to keep quiet for a while and reflect. Everyone just seems to be talking. No one’s thinking,’ he lamented.

But thinking doesn’t sell, does it? Babbling does

Apparently freedom to speak out against injustice is more effective when done through a cell phone service.

In 2010, at the wedding ceremony of my younger brother, I was approached by a young man who was the son of the Pesh Imam of the mosque in our area of residence in Karachi.

He was my brother’s friend as both had played cricket together for many years for the area’s cricket team. After we got talking, he told me a rather amusing little tale.

He told me that in 2007, a group of people from a local TV news channel visited his college in Islamabad, where at the time he was studying for an MBA degree.

‘They only seemed to be interested in talking to female students in niqabs/burqas and male students like me (in long beards),’ he said.

This was also the time when Musharraf had ordered the military to storm the controversial Red Mosque in Islamabad, where religious militants were holed up along with one of the main clerics of the mosque.

Confusion had followed the operation as the militants were cut down to size by the soldiers. But many TV channels had begun to report that a number of male and female members of the mosque’s seminary too had been put down.

No such thing had happened.

At the college where my brother’s friend was studying, a group of women students in niqabs and young men with beards were selected by the personnel of the TV channel and invited to become guests at a talk show.

‘There were about six of us, four boys and two women,’ he told me. ‘We were driven to the studios of the channel in Islamabad. There we were given soft-drinks until the producer of the show arrived and told us that we were lucky to be part of a popular show where we could air our grievances against the government …’

The students all thought that the show was on education until finally told that it was on the military action against the Red Mosque clerics.

This left them confused because they had no clue what to say or do, so they went through the motions of quietly nodding their heads.

They were then sat down in the studio in front of the cameras and were received by the host of the show. He encouraged them to vent out their anger against the government and told them that he sympathised with their position.

‘The truth was that we had no position at all!’ He laughingly told me.

‘Yes, all of us there were very religious, but we were not political at all,’ he went on.

When they told this to the producer, he responded by asking, ‘being firm Muslims, aren’t you outraged by the action on your innocent brothers and sisters at the mosque?’

The group confusingly stumbled through the first half of the show (that was being aired live). Then during a commercial break, the host suddenly lost his cool and started to scold them.

‘He shouted, what sort of Muslims are you people?’ The Pesh Imam’s son told me.

‘Then he said that he wants us to curse the government in the second half of the show, despite us telling him that we had no inkling what was transpiring at the mosque. But he kept on scolding us and urging us to say how outraged and angry we were …’

The Pesh Imam’s son decided to walk out, along with two other students: ‘I never saw the show, so I don’t know what the students who had decided to stay back, said. None of them even talked about it afterwards. From that day, I try not to take talk shows very seriously. Sab drama hota hai (it’s all made up).’

The truth is, even if the talk shows are what he now believes they are, such televised spectacles and displays of choreographed rage, though done to cynically garner and grab ratings, can (and usually do) encourage acts of violence and bigotry among the more impressionable sections of the society.

There are enough examples in Pakistan in this context: Pseudo-scholars of religion triggering violence against a religious minority; a trendy morning show host encouraging action against couples in public by actually hiring actors to play immoral couples at a park who are then gallantly besieged by her and her gang of cameramen; a cranky bureaucrat being prompted to misquote portions from Malala’s book and label her as ‘enemy of her faith’; anchors accusing human rights organisations of working to forward ‘western agendas’ (without ever producing an iota of evidence); and as I have already mentioned, getting apolitical young people in beards and burqas to spout reactionary nonsense against governments …

This TV vigilante aunty doesn’t like transvestites.

Indeed, blabber sells.

And who cares, if to keep this trade alive, one may be putting the most vulnerable sections of the society at risk from the monsters such blabber has the potential of creating.

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