India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (32 page)

That two hundred students are becoming advocates for change – ‘in their families, among their relatives, on their campuses’ – marks one of his positive benchmarks. What gives Vivek most heart, however, is when politicians telephone to complain. ‘It shows what we’re doing bites.’ The thought that he might be getting under their skin brings a wry smile to his face.

‘What do they call to complain about?’

‘Oh all sort of things. Some object on principle to what we’re calling for,’ he says. ‘They claim that our demands are unrealistic. “Listening to voters is all very good,” they say, “but we have more urgent matters. There are slums to clear, poverty to alleviate and jobs to create.”’

For most, however, their chagrin is of a more personal nature. What riles politicians, he says, is the website’s publication of their criminal records. More than a third of Mumbai’s elected representatives are convicted felons or have criminal cases pending against them. One local legislator, a well-known gangster, even ran for national office from his prison cell. Rioting and causing injury comprise the most common allegations. But at least half a dozen current representatives are under investigation for murder. Like it or not, Vivek says, politicians can’t stop these facts seeping out. ‘Even in slums, people in cybercafes are Googling politicians’ names and this information comes up.’

Vivek pauses. He looks to the window, to the tangle of wires, to the empty bird feeder. ‘Of course, there’s a long way to go.’

For the first time, he sounds downbeat. India is not about to usher in an era of enlightened legislators. That’s a fact. Public good will only ever motivate the few. The rest will be lured by
the prospect of power and the trappings of office, as they always have been. Then his optimism returns. There is one sign of hope, he says. Not why people run for public office. Any change there lies outside the hands of man. It requires a ‘spiral revolution’, he maintains. Progress, instead, is revealing itself in the how: how politicians win power, how they use it and, ultimately, how they retain it. The key, according to Vivek, is information: finding it, organising it, spreading it.

I wish Vivek well and head up to the Indian capital for the final time.

There are two people I want to meet: Rajesh Jala, a documentary-maker, and Arjun Pandey, a conservationist and owner of a small media company.

I have met both before, on my earlier trips to the capital. This time, I return with a specific question for them. Ashish and Vivek had convinced me of the latent power of knowledge and information sharing. Ideas and facts, together they have the potential to transform minds and initiate change. My gut and my experience confirm this to be true.

The question I have for Rajesh and Arjun is one of access. Information needs to be transmitted for its power to be unlocked. Alone, it’s useless. How can they ensure that information reaches all Indians?

The issue of access marks the beginning of a journey, not the end. India is bubbling with talk of change. The twenty-first century is, potentially, there for the taking. Which way will it go, though? Who in India will decide? Right now information is controlled by a minority. Supposing that all one billion-plus Indians gain equal access. What destiny would they choose? What kind of country would they build for themselves? Such a prospect, the very opportunity to decide, would constitute a revolution in itself.

As my train rattles northwards, I realise that the question is as much about the message as the medium – and no message is
ideologically neutral. Few facts arrive without their accompanying arguments. In today’s India, as the billboards, cinema screens and TV channels profess, it is commercial interests that dominate. Are the streets of tomorrow’s India to be lined with Cafe Coffee Days and clothed in Levi’s? Are the voices of the elite – the business tycoons, the God Men, the cabinet ministers, the celebrities – to win out?

In a sense, that’s not my concern. It is for Indians themselves to decide their future course. Yet New India deserves a balance, a full spectrum of ideas from which to pick. Alternative messages do exist, but picking them out requires determined listening. Their proponents are sidelined, their arguments muted. Every now and then, a lone voice does break through the mesh of mainstream media. Well-known social activist Anna Hazare provides a celebrated case in point. His decision to go on hunger strike in early 2011 kicked off a nationwide debate about governmental corruption. Politicians were due to vote on a new corruption bill. Hazare feared it would be watered down. The public agreed. The protest call of ‘I Am Anna Hazare’ spread throughout the land. His fears were realised. Hazare went on hunger strike again, lasting two hundred and eighty-eight hours and causing him to lose seven and a half kilograms. The combination of man and message, timing and tactics, combined to force the issue onto the front pages. But Hazare is the exception. Search the airwaves for the voices of dispossessed tribals or indebted farmers and the silence is profound. Flick through the newspapers for the views of radical environmentalists or human-rights activists and the column inches are scant. So who exactly is bringing fresh perspectives to the ear of the masses? Too few, I fear.

In this context, schoolteachers are crucial conduits of information and ideas. Do enough have the vision to help their pupils probe and question? From what I’ve seen and heard, my confidence is low. Is the Internet the answer? Websites such as Vivek’s will no doubt contribute towards shaping the future, yet for the moment Web access remains limited. Mumbai Votes can count one hundred and twenty thousand unique visitors. That’s
impressive. Still, it’s less than one in every hundred of the city’s population. While people may well be Googling in the slums, my hunch is that most of Vivek’s visitors are educated, engaged citizens like him.

The battle for hearts and minds is being fought in the mainstream. Twenty years ago, India had five television channels. Today, it has more than five hundred. India’s newspaper readership is the only one in the world that is actually growing – a consequence in large part of the penetration of the local-language press. Over one hundred million newspaper copies circulate daily in India. But what messages are they bringing to the masses?

Flicking through the mainstream television channels leaves me despondent. Filling the breaks between the advertisements is a lacklustre diet of soaps, sport, film reruns and general daytime mediocrity. Not that TV listings elsewhere in the world are substantively different. All the same, it remains true that the content is primarily engineered for minds to vegetate, not to cogitate on. To their credit, the national news channels are constant and ubiquitous. Ultimately, however, they too are structured with ratings in mind. Run an in-depth story and viewers are as likely as not to switch over. Risk a hard-hitting exposé and the lawyers’ phones start ringing. As for local or regional stories, only the absurd or macabre find their way on to the national channels.

The newspaper industry is largely the same. Editors are as anxious to entertain as to inform. Easy targets are attacked as virulently as India’s sacred cows are protected. The lines between private and public interest are also blurring. Advertising in India’s printed press brings in just shy of three billion dollars a year. The
Hindustan Times
, for instance, openly admits that its journalists help write advertorials.
The Times of India
, meanwhile, has recently had to defend its practice of private treaties (essentially, strategic investments in mid-level companies that guarantee advertising and editorial exposure in return). Television majors like NDTV and CNBC reportedly have similar deals in place. Tellingly, the story broke on Doordarshan, India’s lone publicly funded channel.

Of course, there are exceptions. India has many visionary editors and courageous journalists. Abrasive political weeklies like
Tehelka
offer them a platform from which to be heard. Almost by definition, however, these are non-mainstream, minority mouthpieces geared towards challenging the voice of the established press.

Earlier in the year, I’d attended a prize-giving ceremony organised by broadcaster CNN-IBN. It provided me with an illuminating insight into how things stand.

We’d all gathered in suits and ties in the conference hall of a five-star Delhi hotel to celebrate the year’s top ‘Citizen Journalists’. I’d gone along full of hope. Citizenship journalism – everyday people voicing their concerns, reporting realities from street level, bringing the spotlight on injustices and wrong-doings – surely this was a route to change, a shot in the arm for the democratic process?

Admirably, CNN’s powerful Indian joint venture gives air-time to such amateur reporters. The winning clips, all shot on hand-held cameras, made for heart-rending, eye-opening footage: the woman who escaped after years of forced prostitution, the father who tracked down the speeding lorry driver who ran over his son, the schoolgirl who fought for under-age factory workers to return to class, the ninety-year-old Freedom Fighter who’d battled to have her pension reinstated, the man who brought officials to book for siphoning off funds from government schemes. Many had used provisions of the Right To Information Act, an innovative law that allows members of the public to request information withheld by officialdom, to build their cases. If the evening had finished there, I’d have left inspired by the possibilities ahead.

Then Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood superstar and the evening’s guest speaker, stood up and damned the broadcaster with his praise. In sonorous tones, the actor-statesman eulogised the broadcaster for cultivating the ‘nascent seed’ of citizen reporting. An elaborate discourse on citizens’ rights and their reciprocal obligations to the body politic then followed. ‘These individuals amongst us . . .’, he’d said with in-character gravitas,
‘. . . possess the native intelligence to think for themselves, the will to inform themselves accordingly, a higher justice beyond immediate self-interest, the heroic valour to act, and a belief in the possibility of change.’

The corporate executives in the front row began to squirm. The addendum was not in the script. If they’d been in their control rooms, they’d have pulled him off air. But, trapped in their seat, they could do nothing but sit and listen to the King of B-Town lecture them on journalism’s ‘code of ethics’. Their painted smiles looked grimacing.

At the podium, India’s biggest superstar still had more to say. Audiences, he railed, deserve more than info-tainment, saccharine emotionalism, hackneyed language, hysterical rumour-mongering, shallow punditry, blind partisanship and ‘hyped-up, dumbed down, scooped out, frivolous conjecture’. All responsible journalists would agree, would they not? Citizen journalism was ‘at best a modest redress’, he rounded off, dagger now truly bloodied. Indeed, some might argue that more ‘cynical’ elements of the news media embrace it so as to ‘dissimulate’ its threat, ‘lavish such praise . . . as to kill it smilingly’.

The King of Bollywood sat down to applause that, for once, was less than ecstatic. Even among griping celebrities, such a vitriolic gnashing at the arm that feeds them is rare. More so for someone like Bachchan, who has the media to thank for a good part of his hyperbolic fame.

All the same, I found it odd that his high-profile speech should have gone more or less unreported in the next day’s press. In the following weeks, I’d watched CNN-IBN’s mainstream bulletins in vain, waiting for a citizen journalist to crop up. Repeated requests to speak to the broadcaster about the initiative went unheeded.

Bachchan may not be the most objective of commentators, but nor, I began to sense, is he the most misinformed.

Rajesh Jala operates at the other end of the film spectrum. Whereas the Bollywood icon lives his life in the glare of the spotlight, this quiet, clear-eyed pundit from Kashmir strives and struggles in the shadows. As a documentary-maker fascinated by
the human condition and the plight of India’s underclasses, both his medium and his message fall outside the remit of the popular.

At our first meeting, he was in good humour. After a dozen years devoted to full-time film-making, his work had finally won some recognition. His recent film –
Children of the Pyre
, a stirring, evocative portrayal of the ‘untouchable’ Dom community that service the cremation ghats of Benares – had won a number of accolades including the special jury prize at the prestigious National Awards.

Six months on, he is in more sombre mood. I find him in a ‘tricky spot’, he says, when we meet for coffee in Delhi’s South Extension. He’s keen to do a film on his home state of Kashmir, he tells me, but unrest in the disputed border area keeps forcing him to stall. He’s scoping out a second documentary on Benares too. This time, his focus will be on the widows who travel to the holy city to die. This project is running into difficulties as well. One of the women who he’d planned to film has just passed away.

As for
Children of the Pyre
, he’d successfully applied to Plan, an overseas grant-maker, to run an awareness campaign in Benares about caste discrimination. Twelve months on and internal problems with his local partners mean it is still waiting to get off the ground.

There is some good news, though. Four of the seven adolescent boys around whom the film revolves are now in full-time school. Two others are learning to become drivers. That gratifies him enormously.

I ask him how the film has been received in India. It hasn’t been, he reluctantly admits. It’s won plaudits on the international festival circuit, everywhere from Amsterdam and Rome to Montreal and Leipzig. But the film has yet to have its Indian debut. He has some screenings planned for the coming months. But venues for documentaries are limited. As for cinema halls, forget it. Television offers an outside chance. One in ten documentaries might get picked up by a national network. ‘Even then, the pay is peanuts.’

He spent his life savings on producing the film, topped up with substantial loans from his friends. He is hoping to recoup the money through the sale of overseas rights and DVDs abroad. He has an international distributor, Fortissimo Films. Channels in Poland and Hong Kong already plan to screen it. Isn’t there funding from the government? There is, he says, but it requires a ‘lifetime’s patience’ to extract it. Nor is it very much, just five hundred thousand rupees. ‘You can’t make a film on that.’ Plus only five per cent is paid up front, subject to the film-maker depositing a similar amount as a guarantee. To add insult to injury, the government takes twenty per cent off the top. ‘As a culture tax.’

I don’t have the heart to ask Rajesh how he thinks messages like his can best be conveyed to the public. He is fighting against a system that seems reluctant to listen. So instead I ask why he bothers. The forty-three-year-old sighs. It’s a question he must have asked himself more than once.

‘Films can’t bring revolution,’ he eventually states, ‘but they can change perception.’

‘Yet . . .’

I hesitate. An obvious rejoinder jumps to my lips. I’m not sure how to phrase it. I admire Rajesh enormously, both for his human sensitivity and his gifts as a cinematographer.

Last time we’d met, he’d loaned me a copy of his award-winning film. I watched it and was as impressed by its technique as I was moved by its subject-matter.

Earlier in the year, I’d stood at the same burning ghats on the River Ganges where he’d shot. I’d watched bodies placed on the high stacks of sandalwood, seen the mourners crowding round. I’d smelt the sweet incense of butter oil as the first flames flickered, felt the warm blast of air as the fire built, heard the pop as a skull exploded. I’d stood there mesmerised, for as long as I could bear the heat, right on the edge of the cremation ground.

Thinking back to the scene now, I can picture a shaven-headed man, the eldest son, clothed in a white dhoti. His chest naked, tears in his eyes, he rakes the coals for the last of his father’s earthly remains. I can see him turn his back for the last time, eyes cast heavenwards. Biting his top lip, he throws a small clay water jug over his shoulder, shattering it into a hundred tiny fragments, severing in a single move the mortal ties with his father and releasing his spirit from the cycle of Samsara, from the circle of suffering and rebirth.