How do miners make millions?

IT’S BEEN a week of literally uplifting images. Apart from the euphoric closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, the other big image was that of the Chilean miners being released from their accidental prison. They emerged from the cage of the phoenix into the arms of their families and the Chilean President. This story has consumed the UK media and much of the Western world — it has been on the front page for weeks and TV channels have flown their best anchors to report from Ground Zero (that ubiquitous, all-encompassing phrase).
Perhaps barring the death and funeral of Princess Diana (yes, Mr Suresh Kalmadi, she is really dead!), there has been hardly any other non-political event that has got this kind of international non-stop coverage.
While no one in their right minds would have ever visited the San Jose mining camp normally, the hordes of reporters, satellite vans and politicians created a Peepli Live kind of situation in the desert, with an unnerving and almost obsessive interest in the 33 men — all recent celebrities whose privacy has been torn to shreds. A few of them had interesting personal stories though perhaps not something they would have liked to share with the rest of the world. The last vestige of that hope has been crushed as a pugnacious media and a garrulous public has ensured that we know the various secrets of the 33 trapped men. We know about the drug addiction, the alcoholism, the girlfriends and the mistresses and no doubt much more will be revealed as the days go by. Because once the camera teams land they seek out eyeball-fodder — anything that will keep the story spinning. So will this miracle turn into a personal nightmare for the miners? Is this how modern-day celebrities are created and then ritually disembowelled?
The indomitable British PR guru Max Clifford has announced that their story is worth at least £100 million but only if the 33 men stick together, and do not individually start spilling the beans about what happened in their underground dungeon. Hollywood beckons and book deals shimmer on the horizon.
The interesting thing will be to see whether the unity and bonhomie which has bound these miners together will last, or will greed and the power of the media break their resolve to give a joint account of their ordeal and thus wreck the chances of them all becoming millionaires. In fact, that would by itself make another great story — how adversity unites and the fruits of success divide. Perhaps, this is one film where the sequel is already pre-scripted.
But, no doubt, there were many moments in the miners’ saga that were made for the silver screen — right from the point when they were discovered to the manner in which they survived and to the very end when they emerged to shouts of “Chile! Chile Chile”, breezily waving and dancing.
I was personally struck by how clean these men looked. Amazingly, for people who had supposedly not bathed, shaved or even brushed their teeth for months, they emerged — neatly airbrushed — from their burial looking like (no doubt) Robert Redford or Brad Pitt would, were they to play one of them. Where were the dirty clothes and long beards? Dust-encrusted faces and tangled hair? I was equally amazed at how passionately everyone was kissing and hugging them and no one said a word about the fact that even if they were soaked in perfume there would have been a slight, err stale, odour of having been with 33 other bodies all trapped underground…
This undiluted joy could have been partly due to the fact that it is considered a miracle that all of them emerged alive — and partly because of the omnipresent 24x7 media coverage. It was a made-for-television moment and wrinkled noses had no place in the picture. So while a small country like Chile was able to win over billions of hearts by its determination to recover these very ordinary men, Hollywood could not have scripted a better ending. It was a heart-warming moment when the world cherished human lives no matter how poor and underprivileged they were. But whether the miners will appreciate the tenacious Peepli Live gaze of the media and open discussions about their family secrets is something only time will tell. Right now the euphoria of it all will keep them feeling sentimental, for a while.

HOW LONG does it take for evil to be brought back onto the centrestage? And how long does abhorrence last? These are some of the questions that we may be confronted with as Germany finally puts up its first exhibition on Adolf Hitler (it opens this week in Berlin). Europe is a little uneasy about the display and many compromises have been made so that too much importance is not given to the man after whom the exhibition is named. In fact, so reluctant were the organisers to give Hitler any undue publicity that the exhibition theme has been changed from Hitler to Hitler and the Germans. The German Historical Museum is maintaining a low profile for the exhibition because in Germany, Hitler is almost a taboo. Even books about him do not bear his photograph on the cover and his birth anniversary is barely remembered. But, perhaps, 65 years after his death, it is time to confront ghosts of the past even though glorifying Hitler in any form is still an offence in Germany. Thus no one blames the organisers for goose-stepping around the subject but at last it will bring into the open one man the Germans most hate to discuss.

A QUICK celebratory note: With the appearance of the young Ed Miliband as the Leader of the Opposition in British Parliament we now have a Shadow Cabinet where the gender imbalance has at last been sorted out. There are at least 11 women MPs who are shadow Cabinet ministers and (perhaps taking a quick look across the pond at Hillary Clinton’s success) one of the more popular figures in the Labour Party, Yvette Cooper, has been put in charge of foreign affairs. Time for the coalition government to wake up?

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com [2]