One of the minor attractions of a foreign hotel room is the chance to switch on a strange television channel. The field is open; any country with a reasonable budget and a desire to be seen as an international player now has a state channel airing its version of events.
Predictably, the British thought of this wheeze first: Very few know that 50 percent of the BBC’s expenses are still paid by the British Foreign Office. To its credit, the BBC was never as obedient as the government would have liked, which is why it discovered an international audience. There was a time when BBC radio was perhaps the most important source of news for much of the world. The BBC could even dare the government in wartime.
What is good about European news channels broadcasting in English is that they offer you a different dimension of war zones like Iraq or Palestine. The American coverage, including that of nongovernment media, tends to follow some invisible consensus in which, for example, Israel can do little wrong and the Palestinians little right.
The great effort to take independent coverage to an international audience was made, of course, by Al Jazeera when it followed up its hugely successful Arab channels with an English version. The effort is brave; but the jury is still out on the quality of its impact. There is a sense of discomfort in English Al Jazeera, or perhaps the more accurate term would be uncertainty. It is never sure which note to hit. This gray confusion does not exist in Arabic, because it was always certain what it wanted to do. It was the first channel to report the Arab street, even when this caused great discomfiture to Arab governments. Although Al Jazeera is owned by Qatar’s rulers, they have wisely kept a distance between their channel and their foreign policy. Al Jazeera is hated by more Arab regimes that it would care to count. That is its strength. Perhaps its problem in English is that it wants to pander to its claimed audience, even when it claims the high ground of neutrality, instead of letting the news speak for itself. All audiences have biases, and it would be a foolish media person who ignored these biases completely; but media’s true worth is tested only when it rises above the clamor of the audience on the few occasions when this is essential.
Perhaps the most interesting channel I have come across is the Chinese English channel. The last time I watched it, in a Singapore hotel, it was going on and on about the “indomitable” will of the Chinese people. It is a phrase that makes me nostalgic, almost taking me back to college and the good old days when anyone in Kolkata with any sense of adventure had Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in his pocket. They did go on a bit about the indomitable will of the Chinese people, and how it would inspire revolutions everywhere. India was reserved by Chairman Mao for a prairie fire that would light up in different spots and then slowly join up to set this uppity, half-baked nation ablaze with red flames.
Hearing about the indestructible indomitable will of the Chinese, in the solitude of my Singapore hotel, set me thinking about the kind of will we humble Indians have. Is our will, in comparison, highly domitable? What does domitable mean? Is it the opposite of indomitable? Is there a word called domitable? There should be, logically, but anyone who knows English also knows that logic has nothing to do with its grammar and phraseology.
I suppose only a very domitable people accept the conditions we do. The news is that our deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a protégé of the prime minister, finally discovered the state of Delhi airport and has called a meeting to find why this experiment in state-private sector partnership has become one unholy mess. It has taken Ahluwalia time, not because he does not travel abroad, but because all high officials are taken through a gilded route when they traverse through airports. High Cabinet ministers of course have their own airport. They just don’t tell anyone about this. But we must give credit to Montek: He could have behaved like others, ignored the punishment that is inflicted on ordinary passengers and gone back to his desk. He could have scratched the back of the Civil Aviations Ministry and lived happily ever after. He took some action. We shall see if anything comes out of it.
Carry on, Montek. Maybe one day you shall make us Indians indomitable as well.
— M.J.Akbar is director, publications of Covert magazine.
