So what do we watch?

BY Namitha Dipak| IN Opinion | 01/03/2009

MEDIA AND PARENTING

Namitha Dipak

The verdict for the Nithari case came in a couple of weeks ago.

I still remember the gnawing horror that many of us in East Delhi felt when each day brought new and disturbing revelations. This was closer home than any thing else at that time and we took increased steps to ensure the safety of our young children, becoming more restrictive of their freedom at least till there were some arrests made. With hindsight this might now seem like an illogical knee-jerk reaction. How could an incident that happened several kilometers away lead us to worry about who might be lurking in the stairwell when our children went down to play here in East Delhi? But then again, parents will be parents, and first-time parents are perhaps extra reactive to such events.  Incidentally, this case also contributed in no small measure to our decision to move our child from the NOIDA branch of his school to the one in Delhi when he had to move to the next class. 

With the judgement channels reran the Nithari footage, reminding us of the details of that case and others that happened later like the Aarushi case. Days before this, we had the Mangalore pub incident with its looping reruns of footage of young women being chased by a mob, and a little later it was the footage of a child being assaulted by a policeman. Somewhere in between was the horrifying incident of babies being killed in the incubators at a hospital in Punjab that was given some space in newspapers and on TV, but shockingly did not receive much attention otherwise.

With the success of the movie Slumdog Millionaire at international award ceremonies, there was also a focus on children in slums and the young actors in the movie. On the Internet, headlines on Yahoo continue to be about the mom with the octuplets and the ramifications for the state in these days of recession. Earlier, much attention was focused on the Obamas, including detailed descriptions of the outfits his young daughters Malia and Sasha wore to the inauguration, and how they are expected to lead very normal lives at the White House.

So who says we don¿t pay attention to children?

Children and children¿s issues seem to be a big draw at times for the news media, but unfortunately there is little on the news channels that I would want to watch as a family even at prime time. Leave alone the content in itself, why would I want to subject my child and ourselves to the incessant coverage of a single topic for days, reruns within short spans of time of the same video clips which distinctly contribute a sense of anxiety, reconstructions, and lengthy panel discussions with much hypothesis, much name-calling, and little perceptible result? Besides the general negative feeling that results, at the end of such "news" inputs a young viewer could easily develop a sense of cynicism about life itself with the constant focus on crime, terror and street violence (or the alternative of celebrities and movies)…not to mention the sense of unfairness when events that deserve equal if not more coverage are given short shrift by the media.

Where are the programmes that give a world view,  programmes that could give a sense of adventure and simple joy to the child? Where do other parents go in their quest for family viewing on television? I asked a few people about this in a tiny informal survey of people in the neighbourhood with children below 12 years. Pooja Srivastava,  a PR professional and mother of two children, said that they like watching the progamme Shararat (Disney), while Parul Mathur said that she and her kids liked to watch Backyard Science on Hungama. Archana Gupta, an architect, said that the programme Hole in the Wall was something that she and her kids aged 11 and 8 loved to watch together. Sheela, who does the dishes in our house and several others in the neighbourhood, is the person with whom I probably have the most conversations about life over hot cups of tea, especially when the timing is right and both of us are pensive about something or the other. She said that she and her three children (two of whom are below 12 years) like to watch Kiran ki Kacheri these days even though it is broadcast really late at 10.30 pm. Interestingly, none of them mentioned a news  programme that they like to watch with their children.

Our own quest for prime-time family programming has led us to channels like Animal Planet and National Geographic lately. A recent ground rule that there shall be no television viewing during meals at the Dipak household has led to a sudden spurt in conversations centred around animals thanks to these new viewing habits; over dinner you will find us debating about the prowess of a cassowary or the sheer scariness of a mamba as seen on television or recounting the story of the sleepy python at Bharatpur or the vine snake that I touched when I was in college. 

All that is very well, but what a shocking change there is in the format of some wildlife programmes these days! Frankly, they are a real eye-opener for me, used as I was to the 1980s type of natural history documentaries that were gently paced and with limited camera angles.  I am amazed at the camera angles and speed, the background music, and the computer-aided graphics in these present-day programmes. Many shots looked like they had been taken under controlled conditions, and it was so fast-paced that I felt I was watching an animation movie.

As for the themes – they left me dumb-founded. The first series we saw a month ago was Snake Week on Nat Geo, which was some kind of rating contest of different snake species in the world: at the end of each segment, each snake species was given points for different parameters. More recently, another programme on 11^th February 2009  on Animal Planet rated the animal which was the best defender. The anchor went appropriately equipped to test the defending skills when possible of five animal species: the cassowary, the elephant, rhino, pit viper and the killer bee. The last-mentioned was found to be the best defender… in the words of the anchor it was because the bee dies after it stings the attacker and gives up its life in the defence of the colony.  Can the script get any more dramatic than that?

When this programme concluded, I felt quite faint with the realization that nothing seemed to be as I remembered, and unlike Benjamin Button, I was still aging forwards and rapidly at that.  I had just encountered the mother of all reality shows – this was REAL reality, packaged and delivered to us with easy-to-remember facts, magnification of relevant body parts, and even a rating chart…and at the end of it, a result. Technically, apart from the fact that the protagonists didn¿t speak for themselves, was there really any difference between the controlled format of these programmes and, say, one of those psephological discussions that Prannoy Roy and company have in the studio, or those reality contests, or even for that matter those political discussions about who is defending what, whether it is people or land or ideals? Is reality always about results and comparisons and power and abilities? Is there anything naturally real on TV any more?

My quest continues.

Contact:Namitha Dipak

ndind@lycos.com