Ajeeb dastaan hai yeh: learning from Mary

Ajeeb dastaan hain ye, sang the small, slim figure, while her husband accompanied her on the guitar.  She was in casuals, jeans and shirt; he was in a dark suit as were many of the men at the dinner although the women from the North-east were clad in their colourful best, many in their traditional dresses.

The diminutive singer was Mary Kom, endowed with a beautiful voice, who has become a national heroine – apart from her iconic status in Manipur – for her courageous battles in the boxing ring at the Olympics in the 51 kg category and a five-time World Women’s boxing champion in her weight, 48 kgs.

In London, she was fighting opponents who were heavier, taller and stronger but managed to best and oust them until her battle with the British boxer who eventually took the gold. In Delhi, the other evening, at a reception hosted by DP Singh, the chairman of the Punjab National Bank and his wife, Dingi Sailo, daughter of the former (and first non-Congress) Chief Minister of Mizoram Brig. T. Sailo, Mary sang magnificently.

Earlier, she had admonished her husband who wasn’t keeping pace on the guitar, much to the amusement of the large gathering, but then choked when she spoke of how much she had wanted to win gold but had to bring home a bronze. I’m sorry I let you down she said, her voice breaking.

Everyone was moved. No, no, came many voices – you’re our champion, we are all proud of you and so is the country.  I think that everyone was moved by the simple and unaffected honesty of Mary and her ability to share her difficulties.  The evening belong to Mary, who held her own, despite speeches by others, both long and short, and who received a shower of gifts and presents with grace, including a silk gamosa that I presented her.

During her remarks, I was wishing that our governing political class and the permanent executive (read bureaucracy) as well as our talking heads (read anchors) could have shown some of that humility: would the first have ever apologized for letting down the people who had elected them; after all, the first mandate of an elected government is to provide law and order and a sense of security to the ordinary citizens.  Would the bureaucrats have bowed their heads in collective shame for not moving in time?  Would the talking heads reduced their rhetoric and kept quiet for a little while instead of going on and on unendingly about what was happening.  The right to information does not mean saturation of networks and viewers with repetitive hype, approaching hysteria and playing on the emotions of people.

As far as the politician class is concerned and the bureaucracy, they need to act and demonstrate the capacity to act against those who are involved in criminal attacks and conspiracies. Merely saying sorry is not good enough. The media needs to function especially in the region with greater responsibility – although this may be a contradiction in terms as most people seem to think that the media by its very presence means and promotes irresponsible conduct (both visual media as well as print).  This may not be the case but unfortunately this has become the overwhelming impression.

In addition to this is the impact of new media – mobile phone technology has brought the world even closer to our doorsteps, no matter how far or isolated a settlement in which we may live. Should the connection be there — and it may be a shared connection in a family or in the privileged power space of the village head or teacher – information is shared and disseminated widely and swiftly.  The question often is: what kind of information is being transmitted and shared?  If it correct, could it lead to incitement, the conduct of crime (s) or the spread of fear through hate speech/messages?  How much of a control or restraint should be exercised on such new media and who should exercise that control/restraint?

The Government of India tried ham-handedly to control the spiraling wave of messages and fear targeting groups from the North-east in different parts of the country by coming down with a heavy hand on various websites, social networking sites including a few Twitter accounts.  It blocked the use of bulk SMS’ for some time but now it’s back to usual for those who flood our phones with calls to invest in fancy apartments that we are ever unlikely to see or in fancier sculpted bodies through jaccuzis, spas and gyms.

The key Central Ministry for such action is not the Ministry for Information Technology or even the Law Ministry but the Ministry of Home Affairs which sanctions the tapping of phones, goes after ‘enemies’ (perceived and read) of the State and so on.  Its job is that of Big Brother, as Super Snoop, and its personnel are not trained to look at issues in the long term or particularly at the nuances of possible strategies but largely, I believe, to fix problems.

Perhaps it all becomes a bit too much for the Ministry of Home Affairs when it has, in addition to dealing with national security issues and other ‘normal issues’ such as insurgency and radical threats from clerics, ethnic groups and Maoists, also have to handle the promoters of hate emails and messages.  The latter is seen as a process which can lead to rioting and fear-fuelled exoduses as we saw in July and August from the Southern States and Pune.  But clearly, it is not equipped to do so – this is more than cyber crime, it is using simple existing technology and providing it the opportunism of extremism. As I have said before, it was the cheapest and perhaps the least physically violent way of terrorizing large groups of people.

But it also tells us three other things:  one is that those who worked and lived in those areas before fleeing and then quietly returning were blue collar workers who had not ‘integrated’ or been able to understand the local social milieu of their work places, nor perhaps have the ‘local residents’ and local leaders made much of an effort to make them feel secure, if not at home.  The second thing that the profile of those who left and returned reflects is the desperate economic conditions in Assam and other parts of the North-east – despite the tom-toming by the Assam state government of how conditions have improved and we are the state with the seventh best Human Development Index in the country: in that case why would tens of thousands of youth go to work as security guards, cooks, front office staff and other non-technical, non-specialized jobs? Would they go and work in Guwahati, Imphal or elsewhere for Rs 5,000 or Rs 6,000 as they are over there: from the remarks they made to reporters, apparently they are able to save and send money back home but also live with a modicum of dignity and safety.  Our talking heads in the North-east and elsewhere, on news channels and print media, would do well to take the trains to these areas and report and write about the conditions in which our rural jobless (at home) youth live in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad and why they would still choose to live there and not their home states.

And it provides a great opportunity for local media in their area of settlement, civil society organizations, bureaucrats, police and politicians to meet and talk with them, open dialogues, open the minds sets.  We have to break mindsets, not heads.

Finally, in all that has been said about the social media or social networking sites, we forget one absolutely fundamental fact:  if the ‘old’ media wasn’t around to report the kind of content on these sites on news channels and widely circulated newspapers and magazine, if they hadn’t run with the story or carried it in such detail, the blocking of content would not become such an issue.  So, the ‘old’ media – those dinosaurs – are not going extinct soon: they’re around and robustly so, in the age of digital divides and connectivity.

But, in closing, let’s go back to Mary Kom: the reason I opened this column with her was that meeting made me feel very humble, it made me amazed at the quality of our real heroes who are modest and kind, that they have fought the system all the way to get to where they are, without big bucks (our pampered cricketers) or big government (fat babus and fatter politicos) but on their own and despite the horrible conditions in which they live.  And they shine, despite all these challenges and crisis: that gives me hope for those in even out the schools converted into refugee camps of Bodoland and elsewhere, the work places of Bangalore and Pune, that Mary Koms and Sunil Chetris may rise too from there, despite the trauma, terror, prejudice and violence. They’re the champions.

Kyu ki … Ajeeb Daastan Hain Yeh.

 

By the Brahmaputra / By Sanjoy Hazarika