Freedom to ridicule

“Q: What’s on the drinks menu at Eklav’s Cafe?
A: Dhoka Cola and Thumbs Up.”
From Bachchoo’s
Ancient Quizzes

Occasionally, and when they can’t think of anyone else to fill the forbidding emptiness of the broadcasting ether, Indian television stations and programmes ask me to appear and voice my opinion on some topic of the day.
If one is in London, the drill entails driving or bussing down to one or other satellite-linked studio, on most occasions the one on the Albert Embankment in a tall red building adjoining Lambeth Bridge.
From the studio on the ninth floor of this building one has a magnificent view of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament muted only by the darkened-glass walls which shield the cameras from glare and give the world the protected look one gets from wearing “shades”.
Very polite young men seat you down in front of a camera which looks like a small flat TV screen and wire you up to listen and to speak. Then they abandon you for the little adjoining room with mysterious monitoring equipment through which they perform their transmitting ceremonials.
One sits in the chair, switching the mobile (or “mo-BILE!”, as we Indians would have it) off and waits the five or 10 minutes before the earphone crackles and the host or hostess of the programme can be heard introducing the guests and perhaps bouncing into a question of the topic in hand.
Indian TV debates can get very noisy and sometimes very difficult to control with the participants insisting on getting across what they want to say oblivious of the fact that saying it above the voices of other participants militates against any communication at all.
It’s what happened on the last occasion I was invited onto a programme which was supposed to debate an article by one Joel Stein in Time magazine. It appears that Master Stein is a columnist of the international magazine. He wrote a satirical piece about the town of his birth and youth, Edison, New Jersey, which has now been transformed by immigration from the subcontinent. The article was an attempt to be funny — and some may have found it so — as Master Stein lampooned himself and his friends as petty shoplifters, street nuisances and the robust if harmless youth of a community.
The piece would have had some bite if it had been written 20 years ago, as it was no more insightful than to say that the local cinema now showed Bollywood films, the cafes served spicy food and that the young Italian bling-merchants of his adolescence had been replaced by Asians who wore their black shirts open and decked themselves with tasteless gold jewellery.
Nothing new there — and perhaps because he and the editors at Time knew that, Master Stein ventured into hotter territory. He noted that the racists in his old school referred to Indians as “dot heads” and wondered how good the schools of Edison could be if this was the only insult they could think of for people “whose Gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose”.
For my generation “dot heads” is associated with the American racists of the 1970s who went around assaulting Indians and calling themselves, the assailants, “dot busters”. Not very nice.
Master Stein also ventured the opinion that when Indian immigrants first moved in they were mostly engineers and doctors and were regarded as very clever, but then they brought their merchant-class cousins and this somehow let the tone of the neighbourhood down.
The entire article was intended to be tongue-in-cheek but the editors who approved of it should have noticed that Master Stein’s cheek was thin enough to have allowed his tongue through it to rudely protrude and point.
On the occasion on which I was invited to comment on the article the sound in my earpiece, my only indication as to what was happening in the studio in Mumbai or Delhi, was fuzzy. Turning up the volume only deafened me with incoherent ethereal noises of the electromagnetic spectrum. Remember, playing by satellite, one looks into a blank glass plate and can see nothing of whom one is addressing — a sort of blindfold inquisition.
What I could hear was a lot of very angry shouting. I couldn’t make out the sentences but it was apparent that our interlocutor, the gifted and acute Arnab Goswami (known in Australia as “Go-get-‘em”), had invited someone to assess the article and they had “gone” what the English call “bananas” and the Americans call “ape-shit” (I have always wondered whether ape-shit can be, or is, used to fertilise the growth of bananas, but that’s another question).
The person doing the militant interrupting, whose name or provenance I failed to catch, was screaming about racism in America and, though I can’t reproduce his argument as I didn’t hear his words, seemed to be warning the world that this was the sort of article that led Nazi Germany to acquiesce in the holocaust.
The host did ask me my opinion and I ventured to say that the article struck me as the sort of tosh one finds on an amateur’s blog, but felt impelled to warn against a particular vein of objection or extreme reaction. I don’t think anyone in the audience heard a word I said because the Don Quixote of anti-racism was in full gallop against the windmill.
The host, with someone indistinct, protested to my argument by saying that Time was an important magazine and by being published there the article had been given some sort of official sanction. Editorial sanction by the insensitive? Yes! An official declaration of war against Indian immigrants which would result in injury? No!
The stuff which borders on ridicule of the avatars of Lord Shiva or Ganesha is, I agree, the most objectionable. But none of Master Stein’s observations were to me a call to the barricades.
Neither should the Indian diaspora assume the hijab of intolerance and murderous threat for which the fundamentalist Muslims who place fatwas on writers have become noted. I would urge Quixoteji to burn copies of Time in Edison’s town square, to begin a bloggers campaign to stop buying the magazine, to write articles flaying Stein. But Stein mustn’t be stoned. The right to write satirical articles, however unfunny and insulting, as long as they fall short of incitement to racial assault, should be tolerated and seen by the world to be taken in our sophisticated kadam.