AIDS and the Media

AIDS and the Media

This attitude in India, that it does not happen to us, is perhaps what makes people in the media too respond with certain insensitivity to HIV.

AIDS AND THE MEDIA

Kalpana Jain

He died a few minutes before my last call to him on April 19th. As I called up the office of the Indian Network of Positive people, INP plus, at 4 p.m, the response on the other side was brief: `Ashok died a few minutes ago.¿ The 34-year-old activist, Ashok Pillai, who had been relentlessly battling the AIDS virus for over 12 years while showing others how life could go on, as actively as ever even after the infection, had finally succumbed to it. Few knew him as he lived to work for people he grew to care-- those living with HIV-- and fewer still learnt about his death. For the media, he was no headline-grabbing personality. If at all, Ashok only added one more to the AIDS statistics that the government releases every year.

I had a close association with Ashok-- his years of coping with HIV-- became, for me, a complete book, which I believed could help countless others. His life represented so much: he was a hero for the thousands of infected people who came to look up to him as a symbol of hope. Through a well-publicised poster, he cheerfully proclaimed : ``I sing, I dance, I even miss my flights. I am HIV positive,’’ all of which helped change the image of death that had been built around the infection through government-run campaigns till then.

His battle with HIV continued for almost 12 years during which he set up the largest national network of positive people and helped changed certain mindsets which viewed AIDS as only a problem of sex workers and truck drivers. He was the first person in the country to allow the use of his photograph, in a genuine effort to prove that a person with HIV looks healthy and normal, just as everyone else. He wanted to remove the fear as well as the acute stigma around the infection that he knew too well, for he lived with it for years. Ashok played an important as well as a courageous role in Indian society, where despite 20 years of HIV, attitudes even amongst the informed have not changed. An HIV status can lead to worst possible ostracisation.

Few knew that even Ashok¿s announcement of his status was done at an enormous cost to his family, who, living in a small town in north India, had to live through harassment by neighbours and friends. For the media, however, with its obsession for politicians, entertainers and lately even designers , Ashok was not a personality. His death barely received any notice. His funeral in Chennai was attended by only a handful of close friends who performed the last rites as well.

Compare this with the response of the western media, to the death of Nkosi Johnson a young boy from South Africa, who moved everyone by making an impassioned speech during an international AIDS conference at Durban. Nkosi was a little hero. He symbolised what was going wrong with policies as well as insensitive attitudes of governments. Even our own national dailies had no qualms in carrying the news on international pages.

Ashok¿s death reflected much more -- the handful of people at his funeral emphasised the loneliness of one who lives and dies with HIV, the stigma was evident in the absence of any family members even at his deathbed. The fact that Ashok could not even get a ventilator as he gasped for breath spoke volumes about medical professionals and the health system as it exists. The faces of his young positive friends as they clasped each other to seek solace said so much about the lack of sexual awareness amongst adolescents which exposes them to so many risks. Aand finally Ashok¿s life, as well as his death was about the social conditioning of all of us which makes us view those with HIV as being the other.