The discussion was about political corruption. And the Yaksha Prashna (read as: million dollar question) was that given the corrupt political system that we Indians have, should one vote or not?

I was very vehement in stating that since everybody is corrupt, it is a good idea not to vote. At least, at the end of the day you would have the satisfaction of saying that I was no way a part of something that will eventually do much wrong.

Most of us agreed that the only solution was a focus on ethics…a system of education wherein one can understand the significance of values. And the hope rests in our generation…seeing more integrity of character enter into politics rather than being absorbed by the IIMs and IITs.

But the question still held. The change can’t come overnight; and the returns can only come in the future. So what should one do now? Vote or stay away?

One of the perspectives that surfaced was that we should all support the mission of values, which will be a continuous process; and as of now, vote for somebody who’s less corrupt. It sounded like a reasonable solution to me. It seemed like an answer. End of the day, I forgot about the whole discussion.

But today, as I was riding to appear in my exam, the thought came up again. The question felt sharper. Now the question was: HOW CAN ONE FIND OUT WHO IS LESS CORRUPT ?

Apart from being  very politically aware, there is no other way to uncover reality. And even then, the doubts may still linger. Are the media reporting facts or are they opinionated & biased?

Often, the choice is not – whether to vote for Madhu Koda or not? Those are high profile cases. In general we have lesser known candidates to choose from. One way to make up your mind is go by the political party’s name, make the inference based on its image. Another important question is that what is the standing of the candidate within the party? He may be a mere instruction follower (I refrain from using the word “puppet”).

I mean I can go on & on about the questions that the situation poses.

Also, corruption has no absolutes. Finding out who is less corrupt is almost impossible, and it is a very relative concept. Who’s better…the guy who ate a pie worth Rs. XXX crore out of the funds allocated for public welfare…or the guy whose negligence led to a mishap which killed XXX number of people? Mind you, the Rs. XXX crore also kills relentlessly;one can check the statistics on the number of deaths due to poverty and hunger; a glimpse:

I’m in a dilemma; I must admit. How do I carry out my responsibility and keep my conscience clear at the same time?  Hence, I beckon you all to come up with a solution.

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Here is something that I wrote for a class assignment. I thought it may be worthwhile to let people on the blog read it. Well, there is one caution: what I’ve written may just go over the heads of many a reader! I sincerely hope that it won’t.

But if it does become hard to comprehend, I’ll be more than happy to clarify. Needless to say, comments are welcome. Also, it is important for me to know readers’ perspectives and opinions in order to do justice to the issue of media effects.

Here goes…

Does the society have the power to exercise judgment over media messages as the media has to send messages and influence the former?

There can be no objective, yes or no kind of answer to this question. In fact, before giving any answer to the above question, one needs to dig deep into the literature of media effects. One also needs to ask questions like, ‘who are we referring to when we talk about ‘society’?’, ‘what is the meaning of ‘the power to exercise judgment’? What are its implications?’

I shall state two perspectives as an attempt to answer the above questions.

The first perspective is called the ‘direct effects’ perspective and it postulates that mass media are powerful agents of change which can influence the society. It gives an understanding that the society is defenseless against the power of mass media and is likely to get uniformly affected by whatever media content is targeted at them. In essence, this point of view suggests that the society does not have the power to exercise judgment over media content.

The second perspective is a sociopath-psychological perspective which borrows heavily from the disciplines of psychology and sociology so as to alter the equation between media and society suggested by the ‘direct effects’ perspective. It suggests that people have certain selective processes by means of which they can select or reject media content. People are psychologically predisposed to be attentive to only certain media messages and may ignore a lot of the media content that is targeted at them. For instance, people may want to watch, read or hear only that media content that is aligned with their belief system or with the existing norms of the society. Social factors such as gender and economic class may play an important role in the selection process. Individuals may ignore media content which conflicts their values, attitudes and beliefs.

The two perspectives differ not only in what they state, but also in their understanding of the society. The first perspective regards society as a single, undifferentiated entity while the second perspective negates this point of view. One may decide on his own as to which perspective is correct, but the second perspective makes more sense to me. Society also implies diversity to some extent. It can’t be regarded as a homogeneous entity as individuals or groups within the society differ in their values, attitudes, beliefs, cultures and socio-economic status. Therefore, it would not be logical to assume that their media preferences or media consumption habits would be the same.

The Indian society in particular represents diversity of culture, value systems and socio-economic backgrounds. Thus, media power is not uniform across the society. A lot of people in India have specific preferences as to what they want to watch, hear and read. For example, gadget crazy people may have no business watching daily soaps or news channels, or even reading newspapers. Discussions on news channels and articles in the print media regarding the current trends in the news media are indicative of the fact that a part of our society is critical of the current state of news media and are concerned about its future. People having moralistic stands may even protest against objectionable media content. The question-‘How and in what ways do media affect us?’- that the community of communication and media scholars has been trying to address is itself an evidence that the society has intervention in the shaping of mass media.

However, within the society, there are certain groups that are particularly vulnerable to the power of media. These groups may lack the mental capability to analyse media content critically and are highly susceptible to media influence. Examples of such groups are children and the people living in the villages who lack the shields of knowledge and reasoning to protect them from the influences of mass media, meaning that they take media content at face value.

If an individual is unable to assess the validity of media content, then his or her worldview may be directly affected by media. Hence, most children consider what they watch on television to be real. Also, some adults fail to take note of the disclaimer which is displayed at the start of fictional television programs. To this end, it would not be wrong to say that the power to exercise judgment over media content is determined by the extent to which one’s critical reasoning and logical faculty is developed and what the level of awareness about media effects is.

However, these are not the only exceptions. The power of media has been greatly boosted by the technological innovations of the recent years. A significant percentage of media content especially films utilize graphics, special effects and various other technologies to enhance the overall impact of the content. Individuals consuming such media content register such stimuli unconsciously. The effects of these technologies on an individual’s psyche are something that is still under research and study. It is interesting to know that even an elementary variable such as a camera angle in television and films can orient responses in the viewers, that is, different camera angles lead to different perceptions of the same object. By my own experience, graphical illustrations such bar graphs showing the results of an opinion poll have a much greater impact than words spoken by a news anchor. Conclusively, there are some aspects of media presentation that can cause audiences to react involuntarily. Since this process happens subconsciously, individuals can’t exercise judgment in the same way as they can over the subject matter of the media message.

Thus, on the one hand, individuals in a society can avoid exposure to media content and thus reject its influence; on the other hand they can’t escape some of the effects if they consume particular media. Also, since the society is complex and heterogeneous, one can’t claim or dismiss its power to exercise judgment over mass media content altogether.

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In my opinion, starting 2010 on a positive note would be a better choice than to be indifferent and think …Oh…it’s just another year… (I hope nobody thinks like that !).

It is for this reason, I’ve decided to post an article and it hasn’t been written by me.

The aricle was published in TOI on the 1st…I guess.  This article makes for  light reading  and I sincerely hope that readers would like it.

A New Year and more of prosperity and peace

Welcome the New Year with a genuine smile. As you flip the calendar, keep flipping your mind as well. Don’t fill your future dates with past events. Learn and unlearn from the past, and move on.

You want to be free of greed, hatred, jealousy and all such imperfections. Understand that negative emotions are due to the past. Do not let the past affect your life in the present. If you cannot forgive the past, then your future will be miserable. This New Year make up with someone with whom you are not on good terms. Start life afresh.

In the New Year, wish peace and prosperity for all. Do selfless service. Live your life well. Realise that your priority is to check violence in the world, free of domestic and societal violence. Make a resolution to do more good, help people in need and bring solace to those suffering.

Whenever you are useful to people, merit will never be lost. Any good gesture or action of yours will always come back to you. Today you have the whole world for a family. That’s what you need to feel, that everybody is part of your own family. Take responsibility. Then there is no suffering.

The spiritual dimension of life brings a great sense of belongingness, responsibility, compassion and caring for the whole world, for all life. In its truest form spirituality helps us overcome narrow boundaries of caste, creed, religion and nationality and give you a broader awareness of life everywhere.

Open your eyes and see how much you have been given. Focus on what you have rather than what you don’t have. The more grateful you are, the more will be given to you.

With gratitude, reach out and help those who are less endowed. You will get much contentment when you serve selflessly. Then you realise that your problems aren’t so big after all. The biggest reason for mental depression is the constant refrain of the mind that says, “What about me?” This is a sign of lack of prosperity.

Become free like a bird. Open your wings and learn to fly. This is something you have to experience within yourself. If you think you are in bondage, you will remain bound here. Be free. When will you experience freedom? After you die? Become free right now. Sit down and become contented. This not only calms your mind, your inner self becomes strong enough to deal with challenges.

When the mind relaxes, the intellect becomes sharp. When the mind is loaded with ambitions and feverish desires, then the intellect loses its keenness. When intellect and observation are not sharp, life does not express itself fully. Ideas don’t flow properly and abilities diminish day by day. With this understanding, you step out of your narrow confines and that will solve many of the problems in your life. When you are centred, there is happiness always. With this calmness, talents arise naturally. Intuition comes, beauty comes, peace comes; Love springs up. Prosperity comes.

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Before I proceed, I’d like to state that my argument would be limited to only a few films, though it is applicable to almost all the Bollywood films released in October. The films under my scanner are the ones with the bigger budgets & major star casts. Let’s first talk about Blue which was widely promoted as the most expensive Bollywood film till date. It turned out to be a “clichéd underwater thriller” wherein the protagonists get to find a lost treasure. Now that is a sort of story for which one doesn’t need to look for a film from the west, from which the story may have been ‘inspired’. If the producers are to be believed, then it took over Rs. 100 crore to make Blue, which becomes somewhat evident after seeing the number of underwater stunts & action sequences in the film. Unfortunately the 100 crores did little for the script, which seems to have been written to somehow accommodate the idea of finding some treasure. Despite a large number of sharks guarding it, the treasure is found almost effortlessly; but what happens before, during and after the treasure hunt is something that film critic Sonia Chopra (of Sify) describes as “a ruined affair….wasting all the moolah its producers pumped in.”

So, Blue turns out to be a film which manages to lure the viewer to buy a ticket, mainly because of the way it has been promoted; but fails to leave any impact which is evident from the fact that after an impressive opening collection of 32 crores in the first week, the collections have dropped by 50% in the second week itself.  Sonia Chopra sums it up by saying, “A shoddy script and corny dialogues leave ‘Blue’ in all despair… In totality, ‘Blue’ is a damp squib that fails to live up to the expectations it had raised.”

Acid Factory was another highly stylized action-flick which was released in the month of October. It is a little known fact that this film is a remake of a lesser known Hollywood movie called Unknown. However, it is very much in line with producer Sanjay Gupta’s style of film-making which usually includes men in black, women in high heels, bikes, cars, industrial settings and above all, storylines that are brazenly lifted from Hollywood. Acid factory is a story about a motley group comprising an undercover cop, a bunch of crooks and two hostages who find themselves locked inside an acid factory, suffering from partial amnesia. Before the faceless gangster, plaguing them on the phone, reaches them, they must find out their forgotten identities and loyalties. Doesn’t this narrative sound familiar? It surely does to me, for it’s a formula that has been utilized in Hollywood films and American T.V. series time and again. Moreover, ‘partial amnesia’ seems to be on the way of becoming the most popular mental ailment in Hindi cinema, especially after being shown in the Aamir Khan starrer Ghajini (a big budget, action flick) last year and Acid Factory this year. Keeping the ‘remake’ aspect of Acid Factory aside, the film also couldn’t click at the box office. According to Box Office of India it was a disaster, with a final gross of Rs. 3,83,00,000. This amount is nothing compared to the film’s budget of Rs. 25 crore, including print and publicity. In a slightly different way of saying the same thing, the problem with Acid Factory seems to be that it scores high in “edgy violence” & style but falls short on drama. Film critic Mihir Fadnavis of India.com, who gave the film 1 and a half star out of 5, dismisses the film by saying that “Acid Factory is a deluge of bullets and chop-socky madness devoid of style or purpose.”

The month of October also witnessed the release of London Dreams, a Bollywood flick ‘inspired’ from the legendary film Amadeus which won 8 Oscars  in 1984. Amadeus was based on the rivalry of music composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. Similarly London Dreams sees a lesser talented Ajay Devgan articulating a similar angst against his gifted friend, Salman Khan, who steals the thunder, despite his disinterest in super stardom. However, the similarity ends here because London Dreams has a plot that often borders on the implausible. For instance, Ajay Devgan’s journey from Bhatinda to London, his growing up in an alien country on his own by playing flute at street corners, his forming a band with a group of stagglers, his instantaneous rise to popularity by singing songs in Hindi in front of an English audience, and his sudden emotional outburst to a 90,000-strong crowd in the Wembley stadium, all lack depth. The effortless spontaneity with which the story unfolds makes the script writer’s imagination somewhat unrealistic. Noted film critic Rajeev Masand made a scathing review of the movie, describing it as a “frustratingly foolish film about foolish people”. Rediff.com goes onto slam the remake quotient of the film by writing – “And while London Dreams may have liberally borrowed from the classic Amadeus, it comes across as one of those ‘Made-in-China’ copies. There’s nothing inside.” The 70 crore budget of London Dreams provide it technical flourish and the lavish canvas, but the script writing of Suresh Nair has been graded as “poor and dim-witted” by the critics. All in all, London Dreams comes across as a borrowed idea which is also low on IQ.

The abbreviation IQ which stands for intelligence quotient, also reminds of a host of October releases that seem to be completely deprived of it. All The Best, Fruit & Nut and Aladin all fall under this category. Out of these three films, All The Best has the biggest budget, of around Rs. 35 crore. Devgn Productions, under whose banner this film has been made, claim they’ve spent Rs 5 crore on publicity while sources say they have actually spent double of that. Notwithstanding this huge amount, the storyline of this film is probably the lamest among all the releases mentioned so far. Inspired by the play Right Bed, Wrong Husband, it’s a star-studded affair, featuring seasoned actors like Sanjay Dutt and Ajay Devgan. The star cast was utilized to its fullest during the promotion of the film, appearing even during commercial breaks on sports channels, wishing the Indian Cricket team ‘All the best’ for an upcoming cricket tournament. However, using the media is just a means to bring people to the cinema halls.  It doesn’t prevent the viewers and reviewers from speaking their mind. “There’s no real plot to speak of. Basically, anything and everything in All The Best happens with the sole aim of generating a joke. Try and make sense of this and you will end up giving yourself a headache.” , is how Rediff.com describes All The Best.

I do not feel the need, nor am I motivated to exemplify the crisis of originality and sense any more. So the end result of this diagnosis is that the crores of rupees invested in developing expensive sets, star casts, styling, stunts and promotion have gone to a waste, primarily because the script writing was paid the least attention among all the aspects. As a reminder, India is a country where a vast majority of the citizens don’t even know the number of zeroes in a 100 crore or even a 50 crore for that matter. It is a fact that the people go to the cinemas for entertainment, but it is also true that they expect value for their money. The Bollywood films released this October certainly disappoint the viewers and give nothing in return, apart from making them pay out of their recession-hit-hard-earned money. I’d like to end my argument by stating a remark from my software engineer brother whose main source of recreation are the films that he watches on saturdays & sundays when he doesn’t have any work. He says, “I think I’ve wasted all my weekends in October.”

- GIRIJA

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