Ever since I got back from a Manthan lecture and discussion
led by Arun Shourie I’ve been wondering about the nature of participation in
such events: they are meant to make us think, open up lines of discussion and
explore ideas in a way that they are laid bare, making visible the spaces and
interconnections between them and the attitudes they lie/build upon. Mr Shourie, who,
I must confess, was one of the heroes of my early journalistic dreams. His
front pagers in the Indian Express of the immediate post-Emergency era fuelled my own
ambitions and made me feel really proud to be part of a tribe that seemingly
was out to catapult the country into a new era of honesty, transparency and
fair and clean governance. I was much younger then and could be forgiven for my
simple and uncomplicated faith in the power of the press.
Much water has passed under the many bridges that make up
our fragile polity and I have revised my ideas somewhat, although I try to keep
my ideals burnished and fresh.
But getting back to Mr Shourie and the discussion last
night. As always, he was an entertaining speaker, peppering his acerbic
comments with smart one-liners and punches aimed at the people we all love to
hate (including quite a few that delightfully found their target in the image of
Arnab Goswami). He trashed today’s media, hauled the politicians over hot
coals, and told us what to do about it all. In “one word” (sic) he said, “you
must read”. Go back to the original text, amass your own evidence from the
hundreds of documents available in the public domain, and then make up your
mind. That should be the stuff on which discourse is built. Not the inane panel
discussions on prime time television (“switch it off,” he said) and not the
repetitive headlines on our sold out newspapers. The smattering of journalists
in the audience took heed, as was evident in some of the questions that emerged
after he spoke.
At the end of it all, I realized, there wasn’t much that I
had not heard from him in some other form in some other forum. But then, one
has to recognize that being a public intellectual is hard work, and it is not
always possible to say something new every time, or even to say it in new ways.
To give Mr Shourie credit, he did follow his own advice to “be like a crocodile”--once
you get something between your jaws, don’t let go. So repetition is good. It’s
incumbent on those of us who want to bring about change to be persistent, and
not flit from one cause to another like the mainstream media.
What got me thinking really was the Q & A after the
talk. As in all such sessions, there were some “real” questions and some that
seemed to be more about marking one’s presence in a public space and saying
“listen, this is me, and I’m here, take note”. Which takes me to the point I
wish to make. Agreed, whenever one communicates, there is an element of
performance, of wanting to make one’s presence felt beyond just making a point
or contributing to a conversation in some meaningful way. If we get too self
conscious about it we end up retreating into total silence, and maybe missing
the opportunity to direct discussion in ways it may not have moved. So
participation is necessary. But what is (or should be) the nature and content
of this participation? How do we decide whether what we have to say is of value
in terms of information or perspective? How do we balance out the need to be
seen and to be counted (much of the reason we actually do participate in such
events) and the weight and value of what we have to say? Many of the questions/comments
from the audience were in the nature of affirmations, a sort of “I’m with you,
I hear you”. A few really did add a new dimension or raise a genuine doubt or
concern that had not been voiced already. And some (more than a few) were more
about self-affirmation than about discourse.
How then do we move beyond posturing and really engage in
the content and direction of an issue so that it becomes a serious and
dispassionate examination of its components? Can this really happen in a space where
there is a stage and an audience and all the accouterments for a performance
rather than a conversation? How do we remove the elements of staging and make
such “events” true opportunities for even and open discussion?
Can meaningful discourse
happen in public? How do we create public forums that are less theatrical and more participative?
Comments
Rangarajan