The Week That Was takes a contrarian and nonsensical take on the events of the last seven days.
This week's main event saw the declassification of the Netaji files to address one of the biggest conspiracies that haunt our nation. There was also the minor matter of a scholar taking his life, another speech about intolerance and an Orwellian show coming to an end. The Week That Was takes a contrarian and nonsensical view of the events of the past week.
The Main Event: The Netaji Files
So finally after much dithering, and 10,000 sessions of tea with the Bose family members, whose sole reason for existence seems to be that they are Bose’s descendants, the government declassified over a hundred files about the freedom fighter. Seriously, they were so enthusiastic about the event that one of them was even cosplaying Netaji. It makes me wonder, would a comic-con for freedom fighters work? Oh wait, they already exist and are called fancy dress competitions! Imagine how Bose would have felt, that his own family members have spent the better part of their lives acting like conspiracy theorists instead of doing anything productive for the nation.
The sudden information overload from the declassification was too much for some journalists who went to town harping about a letter that Nehru allegedly wrote to Clement Attlee in which he calls Subhash Chandra Bose a 'war criminal'. This was enough to cause a meltdown as all the Nehru-Gandhi family haters crawled out of their holes and, backed by half-baked facts, painted Nehru as an insidious monster who hated our greatest freedom fighter.
As lurid as that sounds, the truth is a tad more complex and requires one to use their brain cells. The ‘letter’ is not so much a letter but a Nolansque Inception-like dream within a dream— a figment of one person's imagination about another person's memory.
The contents of the letter are what Pradip Bose wrote to Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1998, in which he claims this is what was said in front of the Khosla Commission by a stenographer named Shyam Lal Jain, who typed the letter based on his memory.
You’d think senior journalists would need a little more proof, but hey, who needs proof when the information matches your pre-conceived bias.
And let’s just leave our heroes alone. The more we pry, the more we realise that all of them were mortal men whose rise to greatness cannot whitewash their flaws. Nehru might have had an extra marital affair, Bose might have liked fascists and Gandhi might have laid down with young nubile girls to test himself. If we were going to measure our heroes based on moral yardsticks of 2016, they will come out looking like Bhupendra Chaubey.
(Read: The real story behind Nehru's letter)
Outrage of the Week: The Worst Interview of All Time
We don’t know who thought it was a good idea to let a hardcore political editor interview Sunny Leone, but Chaubey came across as the stereotypical male chauvinist pig who couldn’t get over the fact that a former porn star could be accepted as a mainstream Bollywood star.
He was creepy, he was crass and he just confirmed everyone’s bias about the hypocritical Indian male who will jerk off with one hand to a porn video while tweeting about how porn is destroying our society’s moral fabric with the other.
The event also sort of displayed Bollywood’s hypocrisy with major stars including Aamir Khan standing up for Sunny Leone. But one wonder if this is just to stay relevant with the times, because I distinctly remember there was a time even a B-grade actress wouldn’t be caught dead standing next to Sunny at an awards ceremony. Chaubey’s interview also allowed us to admire Sunny Leone’s grace, charm and intellect, which begs the question— why the hell is she doing a movie like Mastizaade whose sole prerogative is to exploit her former porn star career and keep Tusshar Kapoor relevant.
(Read: When Sunny Leone gracefully dealt with a mainstream journalist's misogynist )
Bigg Boss winner Prince Narula: How is this news?
George Orwell, the king of creating fictional dystopian worlds, would’ve been amused that the concept of his Big Brother was used to create a real-life version of prolefeed that’d be the most-talked about event of all time.
Simply put, if we were to base the importance of news items based on viewership and interest, Bigg Boss would be considered more important than the Netaji files, Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula's suicide, ISIS’ latest act of cruelty, Trump’s most recent gaffe, Modi’s Mann Ki Baat and even the intolerance debate. All this despite the fact that it has been years since any real celebrity participated in the event. Imagine if we could have a politician version of Bigg Boss with the likes of Arvind Kejriwal, Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi, Asauddin Owaisi, Mamata Banerjee, Amit Shah and Subramanian Swamy stuck together in a house. That’d be a great show for TRP. Oh and in the real world someone called Prince Narula won the show, and we’re still trying to figure out who he was, why he won it and why the award wasn't given to Mandana Karimi. #TeamMandanaTillWeDie
(Read: Meet George Orwell, the author whose book inspired Bigg Boss)
Argumentum Ad Hominem — Return of Intolerance: The Awards Strike Back
Since the Modi government came to power, the word ‘intolerance’ has been abused so much that Oxford dictionary is considering dropping it and keeping Aamir Khan’s picture there instead. The latest person to join the debate is Karan Johar who spoke about intolerance at the Jaipur Literature Festival. This is ironic on so many different levels. This is a man who has been the standard bearer of heteronormativity and joint families for the better part of the last decade.
Karan, here’s a hint about intolerance. In places that are actually headed by intolerant regimes, like Saudi Arabia, North Korea or China, there are no debates around it. The ones who dare speak up either find themselves behind bars or dead, or if they are lucky, exiled to foreign nations. Of course, if it’s Putin’s Russia, you can end up dead if you’re in exile in a different nation.
Meanwhile, there was some confusion about the awards that were returned in protest earlier. Someone at the Sahitya Akademi just woke up and realised, 'You know what, we can’t take back awards' and decided to return all the returned awards. This led Sahitya to claim that the writers have agreed to take back their awards, which led writer Nayantara Sahgal to deny that she was taking back the returned award.
To be fair, the intolerance debate has reached the 'flogging a dead horse stage' similar to Ram Gopal Verma's filmmaking career right now, and most sane people hope it'd just stop.
Dalit student’s suicide: Here come the vultures
The saddest news of the week was Rohith Vemula's suicide. Almost every party involved in the incident has come out looking rather bad. The ABVP come across as goons putting pressure on an innocent boy, while the BJP including the HRD Minister Smriti Irani's high-handed approach and trying to prove Rohith wasn't a Dalit was an extremely atrocious move. Even trigger-happy Twitter aficionado PM Modi's elongated silence for five days drew derision as evidenced by this brilliant front page on the Telegraph.
Not that the anti-BJP brigade came out looking good. While politics is often about perception, the speed at which the anti-BJP brigade, including Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal, arrived to milk the tragedy made the news anchors who show up to prod family members of martyred jawans look good in comparison.
All in all it was a depressing week, just like any other where news was dominated by sad events, reality TV shows and 24/7 outrages which suggest that we, the media fraternity, need to introspect about what qualifies as news and what doesn't.
(Read: Four things we learnt from Rohith's death)
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