The audiences’ attention was being sought and split between the live performance and on the widescreen of rioters captured by police in North East India. The young men are rounded up and abused, both verbally and physically.
With their hands up in surrender the police surely did not have to resort to such violence - as batons go charging down the back of men standing in line, a few kicks are thrown in for good measure. Neither displayed for shock value or in the name of entertainment, it was harder to digest. The audience winced and some of us turned our attention back to the performer, it was easier that way.
Perhaps the artist Mukherjee was prodding his audience to mull over state and society where there is tension of power and control, of manipulation and humanity. But, as the police began to have the men somersault their way down the muddied road and order one youth to beat his comrade, a sickening feel bellowed in my stomach. Watching a policeman play mind games with the young men was repulsive.
For someone who finds any movie ranked above PG-13 difficult, this sort of violence - especially consciously inflicted by one to another, where power is exploited and humanity mocked - was something else. I contemplated excusing myself and wondered if Mukherjee would think me rude, but the room was too crowded and it would have been more of a scene to exit than sit still.
While not all scout slasher movies in the gullies of New Road to take to Rukum or Dharan where they are wildly popular, not everyone was outraged that Delhi Belly had been banned. Surely but a few perceive violence, crass words and gory crucial elements of quality entertainment. Indeed, the directions being barked by the police in Manipur and the humiliation and pain the protestors were subject to were not for entertainment’s sake, it was a real event, a piece of news, even a bit of world history.
Simply because violence, gory and crass language are found aplenty in private media, it would be a silly argument to claim the same belong in the public news. However, it is perhaps less than silly to consider how protected we are from the truth.
So, I wondered if this was something a young adult such as myself could afford to restrain from watching. When such truths were unfolding in time, it was delegated few inches in papers and a couple of seconds on television and barely my moments’ notice, but when presented here in such form, must I once again turn my face away because it leaves me feeling unsettled?
Perhaps you recall the 2004 incident of the Nepali man being beheaded in Iraq that was aired on Kantipur Television. Studying in America then where anything close to graphic would be preceded only by something along the lines of, “what you are about to view may not be suitable for all ages,” to indicate the more sensitive best switch channels, Nepal’s strategy was an unpleasant surprise. It seemed insensitive but also dangerous to play us such graphic and emotionally charged videos with so little discretion.
Perhaps the video being played and then going viral on the internet, rather than the event having occurred earlier that week, sparked the communal violence against Muslims in the country. (The angry youth’s vandalizing the Kantipur office was something else – were they so offended to have been shown such material when least expected?) Maybe reading about it, with limited vivid descriptions, would have made the beheading more digest-able to the public and the backlash would not have occurred.
However, there is a point when the public is perhaps much too protected.
This isn’t to suggest that the picture of the bandaged seven-year-old Netra Bahadur Magar (from Republica July 12, 2011) being comforted by nurses be replaced with ones that show in great detail the deep khukuri cuts he barely survived. Simply flashing such scenes would sooner reduce a paper to a tabloid.
It is only to suggest that the readership is kept in mind, by writer, designer and editor to ensure that the event is covered, but that the reader is not made too uncomfortable and, surely, never scarred.
Maybe it is cruel to claim the average reader will sooner forget Netra’s bandaged head than the images concocted of a khukuri attempting to slash the head of a child - just as I would have sooner dismissed the Manipur clash I’d skimmed over online than the video recordings.
Simply because violence, gory and crass language are found aplenty in private media, it would be a silly argument to claim the same belong in the public news. However, it is perhaps less than silly to consider how protected we are from the truth. How much our undisturbed conscience, sleep and bearing is something cherished and prioritized.
It isn’t so much this medium’s fault as much as what we the public probably could do little without. If human beings are good at anything, it is at adapting. Netra’s head and Manipur’s boys will linger in our minds for the sharp images now etched in memory. Were similar issues – say a picture of the unconscious nun recently raped in a bus or that of the woman attacked for being a witch- the norm rather than the exception, we may quickly forget.
Why? Because in being master adaptors, we have the ability to just as quickly be desensitized. But, desensitization isn’t the objective of stories, news and information – it is in pursuing the truths, and one truth is perhaps that we readers are shielded from degrees of reality.
sradda.thapa@gmail.com
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