Chronicles Of Deaths Untold

For much of the electronic media that panders to middle-class, metropolitan India’s prurient interest inthe personal lives of Page 3 People, last week offered an embarrassment of high-on-hormones riches. Firstthere was the sex-pack story of the alleged rape of a two-bit starlet by a one-hit director. The airwavesvirtually sizzled with the orgiastic coverage of every salacious charge and counter-charge, beamed live - andreplayed every hour, on the hour. Quite in character with B-grade film scripts that the plot faithfullymirrored, there was even a Mumbai-monsoon wet-clothes press conference right outside a courthouse - andtantalising disclosures by the protagonist that she was in a position to reveal intimate details of certain"distinguishing characteristics" in respect of the alleged rapist’s private body parts. Prime-time newslead, naturally.

Now, it is fairly universally known that the private lives of some showbiz personalities does not exactlyconform to the highest standards of morality. Nor is it any secret that the film industry isn’t quite abeacon of women’s empowerment. Therefore, precisely what greater social cause was served by these reports -beyond a titillating validation of these well-known verities - isn’t quite clear. If anything, going by theprofusion of smutty, sexist SMS jokes that the case and its high-on-innuendo coverage has spawned, they mayhave done incalculable harm to the public perception of genuine victims of rape. I say this without anyprejudice to the ongoing court proceedings: the Preeti Jain case and the media coverage have only served toreinforce in sick minds the sordid gender stereotypes about career women’s likeness to black widow spiders:that, first, they mate you, then they eat you up.

Just when viewer interest in this courtroom drama appeared to be getting a little flaccid, so to speak,news of the death by hanging of model and VJ Nafisa Joseph came in. And among the media vultures, this sparkedoff another feeding frenzy. For three days, the channels offered saturation coverage of Nafisa’s psychedelicfashion career, her record as an animal rights activist, her existential anxieties - including a succession offailed relationships - and her imminent marriage. News anchors quizzed Nafisa’s friends and relatives, andeven an asylum of psychoanalysts, to try and gain insights into her tortured frame of mind and thecircumstances that might have driven her to such a drastic end.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not so insensitive that I’m not moved by the death in such tragiccircumstances of one so young. That someone who evidently had an infinite capacity to love should have diedheartbroken is doubly tragic. But with due respect to Nafisa’s memory, her unfortunate death is a veryprivate tragedy. She was, for all her kindness to animals, no more than a beautiful socialite who led a fairlyvacuous life and had a notoriously poor record in matters of the heart. But watching television last week, you’dhave imagined that a former head of state had passed on after years of meritorious service in the cause of thepeople.

It’s unlikely that most of those who tearfully watched the coverage of Nafisa’s passing will know ofGunnala Narayana or his son Gunnala Kumar: for theirs is the story of another India, one that doesn’t quitemake it to the glare of television. Writer and journalist P. Sainath records (The Hindu, August 2,2004) that Narayana, a farmer in Mirdhoddhi village in Andhra Pradesh’s Medak district, committed suicide inAugust 2003, after a crop failure. He was heavily in debt, and that burden passed on to his impoverished heirs- wife Lakshmi, her son Kumar, her daughter and her daughter-in-law.But unable to bear the burden, Kumar tooended his life in June 2004, leaving the three women in his family in dire straits.

Photo Courtesy: P. Sainath / The Hindu

Narayana and Kumar are only two of over 3,000 farmers in Andhra Pradesh who, heavily in debt, were drivento suicide in recent years. Like Nafisa, they too died heartbroken, but unlike her, their deaths were thedirect consequence of the vagaries of the monsoon and the stranglehold of predatory moneylenders, an uncaringstate’s economic policies, the absence of agricultural credit or any other safety net for poor farmers. Inthat sense, they died very public deaths. But watching television over the past year, you wouldn’t have gota sense of the tragedy in the rural areas, only of a Shining India.

As was said on a more famous occasion, "When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavensthemselves blaze forth the death of princes." Which is perhaps why the story of over 3,000 farmers inpenury who committed suicide wasn’t tragedy enough for our television networks, but the death by hanging ofone beautiful socialite, particularly one who was kind to animals, has sent them into paroxysms of 24x7 grief.

But how long will the television cameras - and the metropolitan, middle-class TV audience - look the otherway? How many times can they turn their heads, pretending they just don't see? And how many deaths will ittake till they know that too many people have died? "No man," said Donne, "is an island, entire ofitself; every man is a piece of a continent, a part of the main… Any man's death diminishes me, because I aminvolved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."