Apparently today is ‘No TV Day’. According to whom? According to Hindustan Times. I’m not sure if this is happening around the country, but here in Mumbai, according to Hindustan Times this means that we have to switch off our televisions and get in touch with the city, with ourselves, with our partners, families, friends, whoever. To help us in this undoubtedly difficult task, Hindustan Times has been providing little tips all week on what to do on the 29th of Jan, culminating in a glossy supplement on the 28th called “No TV Day: Things To Do”.
I went through the list, being relatively new to the city. No big surprises there – the usual combination of shopping, restaurant-hopping, heritage walking, street-food tasting, beach bumming, nature trail-ing, hobby class-ing and pub crawling was suggested to help us conquer our love for the idiot box. One particularly creative suggestion, put together by a star-struck intern no doubt, listed the number of places the recent film Dhobi Ghat was shot in, along with sound bytes from the director on the shooting process. As I wrote in an earlier post on Kafila, Bollywood keeps producing new pilgrimages within Mumbai; we are intensely homage-oriented beings here. Through this week, various minor celebrities were interviewed on what they would be doing on No TV Day, and they offered their own combination from the activities listed above, all the while commending Hindustan Times on its noble endeavour. Nobody seemed particularly worried that most of the activities required a fat pay cheque and proximity to the posh areas of Town, not to mention a Saturday holiday. In fact one enthusiastic shopper who was described as wearing designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s creations hot off the ramp on any given day, assured us that we should feel no shame in showing off shoes bought in Bandra’s Linking Road if we managed to get a good bargain.
No shame in shopping at Bandra! Bandra’s not cheap, by my standards at least, so I ruled it out; in fact I found most of the activities would require me to take exhausting train rides or exorbitant raxi rides. In Mumbai (like all our urban spaces) most residents turn to TV because it’s the cheapest form of entertainment they can find, with the gentrification of movie halls and the creeping takeover of public spaces in a city notoriously stingy on space. Television, for all the snooty condemnation, allows those without bank balances and social capital in this tough urban space to participate in their own pilgrimages and homages, in the relative privacy and security of their homes – no worrying about the bill, no chance of getting thrown out by a bouncer. So what is going on with No TV Day then? Some combination of new marketing strategy and holier-than-thou sermonising, garnished with celebrity endorsement (but of course) to invent a new language of urban leisure for yuppie Mumbaikars, create a hip, peppy image for a third world city groaning under its contradictions, and subliminally legitimate Hindustan Times in readers’ minds as a slightly hatke paper (brand differentiation its called, apparently). Isn’t the irony a bit much, even in our cynical times? Not only are many of those endorsing celebs depend on television for their stardom, but No TV Day is the idea of a big media establishment whose sales-boosting supplement not to mention much of its main news is entirely parasitic on the media industry. Remember when lots of people discovered the shady connection between the global cosmetics industry and the sudden increase in Indian beauty queens? Or the connection between De Beers diamonds and the ‘tradition’ of the diamond engagement ring? Or the invention of Mothers’ Day, Father’s Day and Second Cousins Third Removed Day because of Archies Cards? At least there was a reassuringly straightforward greed equation there. How is one supposed to take this ‘initiative’ seriously? How does one respond to this bizarre tokenism? I responded by switching on the TV early in the morning and giving all the papers (including today’s) to the kabadiwala.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
TV is cheap for the viewer because the airing costs are paid for by the advertisers. The advertisers take their pound of flesh by enticing the viewers to buy various unnecessary things. TV and video viewing of pirated cassettes has so gripped the minds of the people that it is difficult to get them to sit down to seriously contemplate mass action against the perfidies of the corporate world and its lackeys in the state system. When I started out in grassroots activism twenty five years ago the night meeting in the villages used to be the main mode of political mobilisation. These days it is difficult to get people to attend such meetings because of the soaps, reality shows and ads on TV and video viewing on DVD players. Thus, while the HT initiative is obviously a marketing gimmick the answer is not to switch on the TV.
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@Rahul, With all due respect, your comment says more about the state of activism than the state of television.
If people think would rather watch TV than attend a mobilization meeting, this could be a moment to introspect on the forms and idea of grass root mobilization and “mass action”.
If read together, the comments to Sunalini’s excellent post can be summed up thus: “People who have a problem with a newspaper telling them what to do, have no problems with organizing nightly meetings to tell other people what to do.”
TV may not be the answer Rahul, but what is the question?
PC
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It was precisely an exercise in sweeping comparisons that I did NOT want my post to open up. Newspapers vs. TV, and now TV vs. grassroots mobilisation. I was rather trying to point to the multiple ironies in the media habitus that we find ourselves in. Having said that, if somebody pushed me into a corner and/or held a gun to my head I would throw my vote with grassroots mobilisation.
@ Perfidious corporate, yes, much introspection is required by activists who hold nightly meetings, but NO, nightly meetings telling other people what to do is not in itself a problem if it emerges out of a vibrant grassroots movement. In any case, what do you think nightly television channel meetings are like? They tell people (show producers) what to do, so that other people (audience) may be told what to like. In other words, what I find most abhorrent about television nowadays is the continual shaping of taste by shadowy powers that are out of the reach of the consumers. An intimate nightly meeting of activists and say, villagers or slum dwellers may often get it wrong, but the people would be able to communicate their disappointment or disagreement more immediately. Further, the nicest thing about a non-television world is the opportunity for people to create their own modes of entertainment, drawing upon their own creative resources and imagination. Television tells you that you no longer need to bother; you can be force fed the equivalent of junk food 24 hours a day. And its cheap, like junk food. Stretching the analogy, I was trying to point to the hypocrisy in those who can afford to eat healthy, expensive organic food taking over public space to lecture those who can’t, all the while participating in a system that actually sanctions the production of junk food. To me, that reeks of bad faith.
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Sunalini,
Perhaps I have phrased this sloppily – but my point is not a comparison between TV and mobilization; my point is that you cannot blame the television for the lack of participation in nightly mobilization meetings.
You may choose a nightly meeting over TV, but clearly the villagers in Rahul’s comment have chosen TV. Again, it possible that they havent even chosen TV – they have simply ignored the meeting.
Further, I think you attribute far more power to the television than it really has. I am really bored of this “TV dumbing people down so that they cant protest” argument. A quick examination of the Middle East suggests the opposite.
Though the media has been quick to hype up Al Jazeera’s role in the spreading the so-called contagion of revolution, I think the deliberations on Al Jazeera need to be seen in the context of the media’s tendency to put itself in the centre of most events.
No one is “force-fed” television – particularly at a time when the future of the television model itself is uncertain. Very few large TV channels are consistently profitable and the nightly pyrotechnics on our screens could be seen as the death-throes of a medium struggling to connect with its audiences.
To then imbue TV with evil totemic powers and blame it for the dismantling of a mode of activism that has probably run its course (after many years of sterling service to be sure) reeks of “Naach na Jaane – Jab Chidya Chugh Gayi Khet” to mangle two over-used lokoktis
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Well, no one is ‘force-fed’ junk food either! What usually happens is that a series of decisions taken by people who wield power (both in government and the private sector) all add up to ‘produce’ unhealthy, processed, artificially flavoured and potentially dangerous food as a cheaper option than healthy food. On the one hand, junk food producers capture the market through cheap pricing and massive advertising – forces that ordinary consumers have no control/say over. On the other hand, consumers, who in the modern economy are entirely dependent on market forces for food (without the option of growing their own) will consume the cheapest option if they are at the bottom of the economic ladder. Behind all this is the structure of modern agriculture, wherein mono-cropping, genetic modification and artificial/processed foods have become more profitable for producers, nevermind what’s good for consumers. It’s lazy social science to attribute concreteness to this creature called ‘consumer demand’ (talk of totemic powers!). I mean, I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember a mass democratic uprising asking for burgers and chips; can you? So yes, nobody is force-fed television either, but it becomes the only option given the narrowing range of entertainment options that especially afflict the poor (no open spaces for children to play, no money or energy to go out and meet friends after a hard day’s work, lack of security for women or older people outside the house, a general fragmentation of solidarity as collective spaces of work or play no longer exist – do read the literature on how unions acted as spaces of leisure and socialisation for workers in the past). Plus, the forces that produce television – both as a material, technological artefact and as a financial and creative enterprise – are undemocratic forces simply because as I said, they are out of the hands of the ordinary viewer. I’m also interested in the question of what has faded/died for television to flourish. Alternate forms of creativity/entertainment…?
Having said that, I don’t believe TV ‘dumbs down’ people in any simplistic way and/or makes them a priori unfit/unwilling to protest. That’s too much of a generalisation and there is no clear relationship to be made regarding protest and any form of media. However, if you are going to argue that the millions and billions of viewers of soaps, advertisements, religious and nonsense news channels add up to nothing more than a ‘medium struggling to connect with its audience’ then I can only respond with the glazed look of a regular television viewer.
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I watched more TV today than i do in an entire week. It was crap, but why on earth is a newspaper telling me what to do?
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@ Rahul, I couldn’t agree with you more; my tongue was firmly in cheek when I made the last statement. Although I did in fact watch TV that day just out of rebellion, I had the same experience as Ankit above – it was mindless crap, the whole day long. TV is certainly not the answer to big media, it IS the big media, of which HT is very much part – that being my point. In fact in my earlier post on the labour movement – http://kafila.org/2011/01/26/the-republic-of-exploitation/ I’ve spoken of television sets and newspapers in the same breath…my problem, as Ankit has pointed to too is about the condescension and the irony in HT asking us to switch off TV.
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well written, witty and revealing . Keep writing Sunalini Kumar . Took the liberty of sharing it on fb.
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Thanks Mini :)
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