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Guest: Sunchika Pandey, Osama Manzar and Natasha Badhwa
Host/Moderator: Rohit
Rohit - Good morning! My name is Rohit Rajgarhia and I'll be your host for today’s call. I welcome you all and thank you for joining us! We'll start with a minute of silence to anchor ourselves in the present moment.
Thank you again and welcome! So today we have got a panel of three very special guests, whom I am deeply excited and honored to host. They've all had long careers and diverse experiences in media, and have kept their values and public service at the center of their work. The theme of today's conversation is 'Media for a more compassionate society.’
Today as consumers of media, we are all seeing many stories come to us, constantly. The amount of content, which comes to us today, is alarming and overwhelming. 90% of total data and content of all times has been generated in the last two years. The stories which we hear shape us, our worldviews, and our actions. Research has proven that when we listen to stories, and we understand them, we experience the exact same brain pattern as the person telling the story. To the human brain, imagined experiences are processed the same as real experiences.
And it's not only about the story! It's about the media, which comes to us in different forms - in the form of entertainment, news, advertisements. We are consciously or subconsciously exposed to anywhere between 6,000 to 10,000 advertisements every day. Anywhere between a 100 times to 3,500 times, is the number of times that we are checking our cell phones every day! So, in that context, it becomes extremely important to ask what are the stories we are hearing? And how can the media share stories, in ways which are less polarizing and less commercial, while encouraging us to hold nuance, driving us towards compassion?
So with that, I would like to invite the first panelist of the day, Natasha Badhwar, to share her thoughts. I was very moved when I got introduced to Natasha's work in the last few days. She was born in Ranchi, grew up in Kolkata and, and for the next three decades, she refused to accept Delhi as her home. In 1995, she joined NDTV as India's first female videographer in the India private television news, and worked for 13 years with NDTV. Post that, she has worked as an independent filmmaker and an independent writer. She is a mother of three daughters, and also an author. She has written two remarkable books "My Daughter's Mum" and "Immortals for a moment". What really stands out to me about Natasha is her focus on love. In her books she talks about 'love warriors' - "Jab wo aapse nafrat kar rahe hote hai, tab bhi aap unse pyaar kar rahe hai" which means that even when someone is hating you, you still give sheer love to them. What is also remarkable about Natasha's writings is her clear reflection that you can take all the biggest of the world issues and run them through a sieve and what you're left with is the smallest of all units, which is the family, which is the self. She is considered an expert in parenting, but if you really take a deeper look, you ask "Is this a book about raising a child or is this book about raising a nation?" Natasha also leads the media team of the independent media platform Karwaan-e-Mohabbat (Caravan of Love). which I think is putting into manifestation many ideas which we spoke about and it's really about how to build bridges, in times there seems to be great polarization.I'm delighted to have Natasha with us. And I would like to invite you Natasha, to share your thoughts on your personal journey with media, as well as your insights about how we can design Media for a more compassionate society.
Natasha- Thank you Rohit. That's a really glorious introduction. Yeah so, I'm a media person and in various roles in my career, I have engaged with media as a trainer, as a videographer, a reporter, an editor, a writer, and now I'm a team leader. I have also stepped on the other side and have trained people on how to engage with the media. And taken the secrets from within the core media work to those who have to deal with the media. It has given me a huge opportunity to really delve deep into what is this big attraction we have for working in the media and for engaging with the media like you said constantly checking our phone to see what is new on the media.
So I actually got a very, very lucky break when I started my career. I had studied mass communication in Jamia Milia Islamia. In the first year that I joined the course, when one was still at that age, you were doing things as an experiment, "try karke dekh lete hai". You're so privileged-that you don't feel that you have to commit yourself to anything. You haven't assumed the burden of having to build a career and buy a home and have a certain standard of living which sooner or later, kind of descends on the middle class imagination.
So, I was very much on the margins of “Let's see what this is all about.” And, it was in the first year in 1992, we were sitting in our college canteen when the Babri Masjid (16th century Mosque) was demolished.
We had heard murmurs that something like this may happen- but in my mind, in my imagination, I was not anxious about what was going to happen, because I had told myself, “This is not possible. In an independent country, in democratic India, with the secular government at the helm, with an administration that is so committed to peace, in the 1990s, it is not possible to demolish a monument in broad daylight!”
And yet, one evening when we were sipping tea in our own college canteen, it happened! It happened and, immediately, even though there was no social media and there was no 24/7 news either, the news spread like wildfire throughout the country. Our college campus was immediately shut down. We were locked into our own campus. The gates were shut. There was talk of rioting in various parts of the city. There was talk of somebody having brought out a gun and shot at someone. I think that was one of the first reality checks that I got in my adult life.
You have no clue "kya kya ho sakta hai" (what all may happen). We were in college till about 9:30pm that evening and we knew that our parents were worried. We knew that our parents knew that something is happening in the college and we are stuck there but even when we did get the opportunity to walk out in peace, I didn't go straight home. I called up a friend abroad and I had a little bit of a breakdown about being an Indian. I needed to process this before I reached home. I needed to be able to hear my broken thoughts before I reached home. In a sense, perhaps, that's when a very, very definite engagement with the politics of the times that I live in, began.
One of the things they tell you when you're training to be a journalist is to break yourself up into parts. To keep your emotions, your personal self, your personal story in one box and to find this other self, which is a reporter who is somehow unbiased and will only find out what really happened without being influenced by how that is affecting you.
It's like in our understanding we seem to keep going two steps forward, and two steps back, and sometimes three back! There's so many things that we understand about the human mind, we understand about the emotional landscape, we understand about the unity of one's personality and yet, we keep talking about breaking it down.
It doesn't work. And the individual is constantly returning to trying to be whole. To bring oneself as a whole person to one's work, to one's love, to one's relationships, to one's webinars. And, so when I finished my course, it was a golden year. It was a golden year because it was the first time that in India, private television news, got permission to exist. Till 1995, the only television news was on Doordarshan.
It was state controlled. It had its pluses and minuses. It was not sensational, and yet because it was state control, it was paid by the state, it did have its biases. And, this is the year when BI TV, when ZeeTV, when TV 18, when NDTV, all of these private news organizations and news editors, were allowed to broadcast news. So they were looking for broadcast news journalists and frankly, not very many existed in India because there was no tradition of reporting for television. So they were very, very experienced and fantastic journalists who had spent their entire life working in print and not thinking visually. And then there were documentary filmmakers and people who were trained to be filmmakers who had not really done any journalism. So all of us who were coming out of the limited media schools at that time, were getting an opportunity to choose video journalism, if that's what rocked our boat.
And that's how I walked into NDTV and got an on-the-spot job and I was asked, "What do you want to do?" And I was still not ready to commit to what I wanted to do. I felt that I had the right to test them as much as they had the right to test me. Just the confidence of youth. So, I sort of put them on a trial period. I'll see you guys and see how you respond to the passion of a young person and their talents. So I said, well, I like to do camera. I also like to edit and I don't see why I shouldn't do both. So I actually did begin my career as a video editor, as well as a videographer, as well as a reporter. We had the choice to be able to do whatever we wanted to do so long as they produced a story at the end of the day. This is the year that Barkha Dutt, who is my classmate, both of us joined NDTV together and we spent the first couple of years doing most of our stories together. Our learning years began there.
It was remarkably easy, in an English news channel, run by Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy, that was still being aired on Doordarshan to be independent, to be fair, to feel that you were unbiased. So those really were the golden years, the mid-nineties, when there was fresh competition, AajTak had started a Hindi channel and Zee started a Hindi channel. Each of us had very specific audiences, which would soon begin to mix up with each other. So we often found that if we went to a small town and we said NDTV, they'd say “What”? And then they'd ask us as "Aaj Tak se aayo ho?" (Are you from Aajtak?) and we'd say “Yes” just to get access, because that's where the AajTak audience was. When you were in a Metro city, that's where the NDTV audience would be. To cut a long story short, what began as the golden years of private news in India soon became too big, too competitive, too expensive. Therefore it had to figure out its finances.
It was reliant on advertising, in the beginning. So there would be ad-breaks and those would take care of finances. Ad rates were so high and the number of news channels were so few that ad revenue would take care of your ability to produce the news.
We soon had to start getting entire programs sponsored. So "The breakfast show" was sponsored by a certain number of corporations. You still had the clout to be able to say as a news editor that just sponsoring a show or offering advertisement for a show does not mean that you will have any editorial say. So you had the clout, you could ask for independence and get it and maintain it.
Then 24/7 news coverage started and number of channels began to increase. Many of the late starting channels, many of the vernacular channels began to sensationalize news. They discovered that you could get much higher viewership if you reported crime in a certain way - if you started re-enacting crime scenes. There were channels that kind of resisted going that route and there were others that kind of took that quick route.
Then the era of TV debate started, it was very novel in the beginning. It was still fashionable to be fair, there was a demeanor that you had to maintain. Today, that is no longer true. The rest as we say is all recent memory.
In a nutshell, who pays for the news, determines what the news is going to be. So till it was state sponsored, the state had control over what they allowed us to know and what they did not want us to know. And we had an audience that was hungry for the truth and therefore, print news was very popular and then private news was very popular. When advertisers controlled whether you would be able to go from one year to the next, you had to have some programming that pleased your advertiser.
When entire media channels began to be owned by corporations it was very clear where we are heading. Media channels don't have a revenue model, they cannot earn back the money. What do they own? They earn eyeballs. They earn the attention of people. That's what they bring to the person who is investing. So overall, loosely, I call it social morality - it has loosened, it has collapsed. Things that were obviously not good and very good in the past- it's all kind of become mixed up because we have a political climate where you can be the head of a nation and lie every day in many countries today. So the political climate has changed. So has the media climate. So this superior moral position that the media had always kind of been bestowed with that because you are a journalist, you have a certain credibility - we are now in a time when all of that has been lost. Even the credible ones are having to work extra-hard, to be able to find space and get any attention from an audience that is now overwhelmed by what the state wants it to know, by what the corporate media owners want it to know, by what the media organizations that are aligned with the state, want you to know. So it's all as we see, become a mix up.
However, there's another trend that we have seen, and that is the morality, the strength, the conviction of the individual journalist. So one of the first editors who was fired, around 2014 was Siddhartha Varadarajan and he founded TheWire. Another very senior editor who did not feel that there was space for him within mainstream media, Naresh Fernandez founded Scroll. Then we have AltNews, who often like to underline, "We are not a media organization. We are fact-checkers." and yet the audience does actually engage with them in the same way as they do with media organizations. If I read any news that I wonder whether it is true or not, I will quickly go and check with AltNews and they will have a news story that either debunks it or proves it right. And, similarly, we have NewsLaundry, we have Article 14, so we have a crop of independent media organizations that are all struggling for funding, that rely heavily on the internet which is a free platform to reach their audiences, which have actually made a mark for themselves and built an audience for themselves despite the collapse of mainstream media organizations. So that's where the hope lies. That's where Media for a Compassionate World actually becomes very, very relevant for us when we look at, what are the ways in which some non-media organizations have engaged with this business of bringing information to the viewer. Of bringing not only information but analysis, stories to the viewer so that the viewer is able to make some kind of a judgment. So that the viewer is able to get some kind of a variety to choose from and then it depends on the viewer to decide how much attention span and how much credibility they give.
So a lot of channels that have the highest viewership have the least credibility. People will tell you openly, "Oh, I watched Times Now and Republic only for entertainment. That's just on in the background, I don't believe it but it's just fun to watch it." Then there are other organizations that are kind of battling with that fun and trying to make themselves attractive enough in some way. There are individual journalists within mainstream organizations who have held out. And they are the Magsaysay Award winners, they are the ones who are being respected not only by the industry and by other people, but also by audiences. So a lesser number of people will know NDTV India, but more people will know Ravish Kumar, because the credibility has been maintained by a particular journalist.
So, I will wind up here by saying that I quit mainstream news after 13 years in late 2000s at a time when I felt that my own organization did not need my journalistic skills anymore. That I could take my skills, my abilities, my analytical abilities, if I wanted to really let all of them work together and find out how that can find an audience, then perhaps I needed to do it independently and perhaps I needed to look for new ways to do things. So I quit mainstream news. I kind of came back into mainstream media when I began to write a column in MintLounge, which did not begin as a political column, but, because our lives are intertwined so deeply with the politics of the times, there's no way you can talk about yourself or your family, or about even education without talking about the political landscape that we live and without engaging with it, without dissenting with it, without confronting it.
And now for the last two years, I've been leading a team of young filmmakers, and what we do is we tell stories, we bring you the news. We bring you information, we bring you analysis, we bring you poetry, we bring you the stories of people. In a way, we use every format available to us to do the work that we learned to do in mainstream media. So all of the people who work with us in our team are either people who worked in mainstream media and felt that there wasn't any more space for them there so they are now working in independent media or young people who know that this is their best chance to tell the honest story. So we really are at a very, very interesting time, largely because of the power of the internet and largely because there is a vast audience out there that continues to stay hungry for the honest truth.
Rohit: Thank you Natasha for that beautiful unpacking of the 30 years of how the various forces have panned out in the media space. Thank you so much. With that, I would like to pass on to Osama. And Osama's life, is a remarkable story of what he says, "Why are we all running to get? have you seen anyone running to give? What will happen if someone starts running to give?" And Osama's story is a beautiful, very powerful reminder of that. He was born in a small village in Champaran to now being a global leader for expanding access to digital information and reducing the "information poverty" from India. Over the last 20 years, Osama has been championing this work through Digital Empowerment Foundation, which has helped more than 12 million people, including 4 million women are at the fringes of the Indian society, which typically does not get access to the media and hence lives in information poverty. Digitally empowerment has helped these people in various ways. He's a social entrepreneur. He's a columnist. He's a mentor. He has initiated numerous awards, which have shaped up this sector in many visible and invisible ways. With that, I would like to invite Osama to share his views on this theme. Thank you.
Osama: Thanks Rohit. Thank you for introducing me, many things that you said, I didn't know. So, I just thought that your topic is "Media for a Compassionate World." Earlier, I was thinking it's a compassionate media for the world. So I'm just reading it vice-versa also. Is it required to have a compassionate media or do we have to have a media for a compassionate world? If there is no compassionate world, what will happen to the media? So all media is the reflection of whatever the audience is or the world is. The story is very clear in the last 70 years, how the media has taken shape in our country. I'm actually not a mainstream media person, but certainly, I have done journalism. And, when I did my journalism from AMU (Aligarh Muslim University) and came to Delhi, you can imagine my level of journalism as for four years, I didn't get a job in Delhi. Now it seems that I didn't get those jobs because I always thought that I didn't deserve it. One of the very senior journalists told me also "Pehle angrezi likhna seekh lo, tab job dhoondhna" (First learn to write in English, and then you can look for a job) as if only English journalism mattered. I still feel that I would have been a better journalist or a writer in Urdu had Urdu not been an economically irrelevant language in our country. So, you also aspire in today’s world that you become an IAS, or an engineer or a Doctor. If you want to be a journalist, you should be an English Journalist, but not hindi or urdu journalist, because it cannot change policies and it does not create an impact. Even now you see, everything you write - if it is in English then there is a lot of attention, even the administration reacts very differently when you have written something in English. Thank God Natasha was in English journalism in our NDTV mainstream media.
So, coming from Champaran, I grew up in Ranchi, and then came to Aligarh. All I did in Aligarh in eight years was that one year of journalism. Everything else I did was making posters for elections, which again, maybe a form of media, because you have to make someone win. So I did my graduation in seven years and I passed it with some cheating and the one year of diploma in journalism was the only year I worked passionately. I bought a camera. I did photography and started a newsletter in AMU etc. So, what I realized was that "only do work which gives you joy otherwise don't do it." Then, I came to Delhi and struggled for four years. I survived on the food my girlfriend would bring from her hostel. Had it not been for her kindness, I would not have survived those 4 years.
The first job I got in "Down to Earth" and they kicked me out in two months. And incidentally Down To Earth magazine, which is now run by Sunita Narain at CSE (Central Science and Environment) but about two years back, she invited me to join the board of Down To Earth magazine. So that also is like a full circle of going through the ups and downs of journalism, but, coming fast forward, my first proper job in media was working for an IT (computer) magazine. And by the way, I don't have any computer background. I did my physics graduation but it was a pass graduation and I was hardly interested in my subjects and my studies. So when I got my first job in IT magazine in 1995, I hardly knew anything about computers but ended up becoming kind of an expert in the company, to head the internet division of Hindustan Times and created their website. Then, within three years I started my own software company and we ended up making websites for all major media companies of the country, from the Tehelka to Hindustan Times to Mid-day to Amar Ujala, to Rashtriya Sahara to Dainik Jagran, Outlook, Outlook Traveler, etc. Then as I was writing my first book, called "Internet Economy of India" in 2000, I realised that digital is coming into our lives in that kind of force which is not only a technology or a communication medium but it is also an integrated DNA of our lives. It is media, it is the medium, which is now that I can also say it is also a language. Digital is a language. Digital is a way of life. Digital is our communication. Digital is our mainstream infrastructure. Digital is our backbone of our existence even though there are many things about it that we don't like.
Somehow when I was tired of running this company and I was not enjoying it. So I thought that what are the problems in our country and in our lives and I realised that everybody is actually going behind acquisition and acquiring, whether it is degree or fame or name or certificate or money or anything. You actually are running behind. I had this Nirvana moment that why are we always running and it is always when you are going to acquire, you cannot acquire anything without the permission of the other but if you work for giving then perhaps you can take your own decision. Perhaps giving can take a full circle and come back to you. So that was more from the Nirvana aspect but going back to how digital was becoming so important as a medium, for access to information which can reduce inequality and that was the realisation behind founding Digital Empowerment Foundation from my house. I realised that access to information is the main reason for poverty, or subjugation or exploitation and it is not really the availability of resources or the economic situation. India is very much economically sound- we have enough money, we have enough resources, we have enough everything. But we don't have means to access it. It is something like we have the right to information, but we do not have access to information. We have the right to food but we don't have access to food. We have the right to education but we don't have access to education. We have the right to house but we don't have access to our house. So it's very interesting that in a democratic country we have the right to many things, it is access to media or access to information which is brought to you through the media that actually keeps you away or keeps you from exercising your rights. So even though you have Aadhar you cannot exercise it because your internet is not working in rural india and your biometric is not matching and so it is already subject to a digital infrastructure, information infrastructure and access infrastructure. These were the thoughts that were very much there in our mind when we started building Digital Empowerment Foundation.
Very interestingly what is happening is that if you read the underline of Digital Empowered Foundation, it says that empowering people at the edge of information. Even after 20 years of our work, that sentence is brutally brutally still relevant. You must have started reading now suddenly due to pandemic that a girl commits suicide because she doesn't have access to a smart phone and cannot access education online. Now suddenly "digital divide" word which was relevant 20 years ago or 10 years ago is suddenly coming back to haunt us because those digital media or devices haven't reached those people. Incidentally it has reached the mis-informer. It has reached those parts of the world which are not compassionate - which manufacture misinformation, which manufacture fake news. These kinds of things are more accessible. So media has now become although more democratic, media devices have become more democratic but the ability to use it as a meaningful connectivity or a meaningful device or meaningful content is largely challenged, maybe because the money and the economics is actually favouring the non-compassionate world. You are already reading news that one of the largest media entity, which is Facebook is being used in a biased way by its own employees to favour one kind of political view. Such things are quite common. When you see one video on Facebook, next all hundred videos will pop up on the same line.
Even in the traditional world- in the newspaper or a TV world, media was subject to who runs it, who publishes it, who has funded it but the point now is that the media has now become more viral, media is now in more hands, media is now more individualistic and it's also more diversified. However, how it is being used is not something that we can fathom to understand.
At one point in time, we were working on enabling access to information but now we are witnessing how much harm this media can create especially in a country like India. We have 500 million mobile phones, 250 million is in rural India. Most of these people do not know how to use content or how to consume information. As soon as we receive it, we forward it. Natasha has done a lot of research on people who have been attacked to death, lynched, only and only because of forwarded messages on WhatsApp. WhatsApp today is one of the biggest media. There are great positive uses of WhatsApp also. There is this person in remote Uttar Pradesh (a state in India), who runs a news service entirely based on whatsapp called RocketPost. It's great, and there's no doubt about it, but the same WhatsApp is being used by IT cells of various political parties to bombard everything before it comes into the newspaper or magazine or TV.
So what we are actually struggling at this point of time, and why I'm mentioning this is because at Digital Empowerment Foundation; when we started our main goal was how to bring down the information poverty, how to enable people to access information. You won't believe, as of now, half of our energy is going to train people how to do fact-check, how not to forward. How not to consume information which is actually not authenticated. So for example, I know Rohit and if Rohit is forwarding, I need to consume it only when I know that it originated from Rohit and not originated from two, three people before him, whom Rohit has no idea of who they are.
So this is very important when we are in a situation where 70% of the country has no access to the internet, more than that has no access to Mobile phones, 80% or so of our women do not have access to any kind of mobile devices. In a situation like that, the bigger energy of the country and the bigger energy of the media still needs to go to how do we make the media itself sane, and how do we ensure that the information that the media is creating is actually not harmful and not create a polarized world and rather create a compassionate world.
You must be seeing that even when you go to Twitter or you go to Facebook - why is there so many hatred-driven posts there? Do we really know about it? What is interesting at this moment of time is that we need to create a world, which is compassionate. Media is not an exclusive property, but a non-exclusive and mass property. It is in the hands of everyone. Everybody has got a mobile phone and that is the first and last device for consumption of media, messages and information. How do we create the world which actually will actually ensure the sanity of information, sanity and the neutrality of news? That is the most important challenge and that is what I and my organization are struggling with and trying to figure out how to tackle it. The next 20 years, it looks like the way we knew the internet is no longer the internet that we have or wanted. It has gone audio-visual. It has gone multilingual. It has gone oral. It has gone beyond any script, and it is in the hands of everyone. How do we create a society and community which actually overcomes the mass-production of misinformation and fake news, and allow the media and the medium to be absolutely neutral and more compassionate?
Rohit: Thank you, Osama! This was wonderful. The points which you brought up about rights versus access, and also about the face of the problems changing from lack of information to misinformation. Now, I would like to move to Sunchika, who has also spent close to two decades in the media industry, and in her most recent avatar, is known as the TwitterMadam by most of the police force in Mumbai because she is the woman managing the Twitter account of Mumbai police and many other police departments. She and her team have done a remarkable work of building bridges, of transforming the relationship between police and the people from being distant and inhuman to being much more humane.
Sunchika has had a long career in media. She started first as a news journalist in the crimes beat with NDTV for about five years, and then has held various roles with SatyamevJayte, then as an entrepreneur or as a part of larger companies in Digital Marketing and other roles. What is most inspiring about Sunchika is her relationship with her father. Once, when she was thinking of leaving a job because of a conflict over her values, he gave her a piece of advice after which she has never faced any confusion in decision making. That advice was "Your work should always be in the interest of welfare of the nation and all of its people, and you have a choice between choosing a successful life or a meaningful one" in service. So with that, I would like to invite Sunchika to share a few thoughts.
Sunchika: Thank you so much. Since my father was mentioned, I think it's a good time to relate how he played a major role in how my relationship with news began. From the time that I was in 5th standard, I knew that I wanted to be a newsreader on Doordarshan because every morning I woke up, my father was always watching the news on Doordarshan. So, every day started with news, and he discussed politics and what was happening in the country.
So I think that is something which always stayed with me. Even at my school reunions, all my teachers always share the story that this is what Sunchika wanted to do from that young age! It's just that I was presented with better and bigger options, and hence, I moved on.
So, the medium of communication may have evolved over a period of time. As we grew up, we saw new mediums of communication -- I'm calling media as communication right now because the main purpose of media is to communicate information, to educate and inform people -- I think the mediums of communication evolved from newspaper to radio, to pamphlets, to television, to digital media and all of that. But the power of information has always been the same. And the power of people finding out about what's happening around them, the power of letting people know what are their rights, what are not, what can and cannot be done, is the biggest power that we can acquire. And like everything else in democracy, whatever is happening around us, the country and all of us citizens need to take responsibility for it.
As Osama and Natasha have mentioned regarding what we used to think was media, all 3 of us mostly started around the same time. So the challenges were the same, the confusions were the same, the choices were the same. Most of us moved to this side, and that's why today, we are here participating in this discussion. In a democracy, the kind of information that goes around or gets aired and shared depends a great deal on what people are looking at or endorsing. Like Natasha said, what people want to see or hear and the respective TRP's are what determine where the funds go. So all of this is basically coming from what a large number of people are watching. So, these are the choices that we are making.
Inspite of everything that has happened over the past so many years and what is happening right now, I am somehow very optimistic that this is the medium for change. Media is the medium for change. Information is the medium for change. And this is something that can only happen if everybody comes together. For instance, when I decided that I want to cover crime, it was not because as a child or in any way, I looked at it as something really sensational. And fortunately for me, I was never following a particular channel or an anchor, or I was not idolizing anybody, any news person as such. I just loved the fact that I would be far away from my home and my parents would get the news from me.
I did not know any other languages besides Hindi and English, and I chose Hindi media. I joined NDTV India by choice, because I knew that for a larger portion of the population, and for people who are related to me, this is the language that they understand. I knew that as I was giving out some news from far away, my parents sitting at home would understand it if it was in Hindi. That is why I made that choice.
I just think that the kind of information that is going around right now, we will have to make the choices on what we want to do. When I started covering crime, a lot of people used to ask me, "Don't you find it very disturbing? Don't you find it gory? Don't you think it is too dark? Why do you want to go to this space? And why do you want to cover crime?" For me, crime was something that people really needed to be educated about. It is very important for me to know if my neighborhood is safe. Can I go out in the dark in this lane? Did something happen here recently which should be brought to the notice of people? And I should know that my surroundings are safe. Is the police in my area cooperative? Are they helping people? I think this should be the purpose of news.
This should be the purpose of information -- to empower people with some bit of information which keeps them informed and helps them in making good decisions. The purpose of news is to inform, not to persuade! We can give information to people. We can't decide for them, and we should not put words in their mouth. We should not put a decision in their mind. We should just inform the facts that we have learned. We have all studied Journalism, and the basic thing that we are taught is that we are supposed to ask questions. Who, how, when, where, why? These are the questions that we were taught to ask. That is what we are supposed to do in this society. Ask questions -- Is everything alright? Whatever is happening around us, is this right? And, I think, the problem begins when we ask the questions and we answer the questions too.
The only need that is around us is to get more perspectives. To look at what people around. What a person beyond me is thinking, is something I also need to acknowledge and understand and see if there is merit in it.
So, my journey, it was not really planned, like moving out of news. As a child, when I grew up with the thought of becoming a journalist, it was more like activism. We used to think that we can change the world. There is nothing that the news media can’t do. We were all aspiring to do something really, dynamic in the country, which would change people's lives. I think gradually when we realized, ok possibly this is not working out right now. I think my first disillusionment was not when I was in the television medium but more when I shifted to print for a short while. There, once there was a news report about a political person and a fraud related to him. The publication kind of clearly said that this news does not have to go out and for me it was a big breaking news worth story. I thought I got a big news story, where there was so much corruption and there was so much reality to be shown to the world. So, I think that's where my disillusionment began, so I moved out. I would still not say that I am critical of news, as such, because I really think it's a very important medium. It's a very strong pillar and we just need to make very judicious use of it.
I think a beautiful invite had been written and sent to us, which opened by saying that "if stories we tell shape the world, then how might we hold the power responsibly." So it is my habit, basically, that whenever I read something, I pick some words, I think, in the digital world, it's called keywords, but this is an old habit that I have, I latch on to certain words. I was reading this and these are some words that I listed from the small one paragraph that has come to us, which kind of raises questions, that we are here to answer and they answer the questions themselves in these words. And the words that I jotted down were "shape, power, responsibly. complex, interplay, money, power, biases, design, media, independence, agent, inclusive, compassionate." Even if we read these words independently, it clearly signifies the problems and solutions to the current scenario, which all of us need to address.
I always quote this example also. In Hindi there are 2 idioms. One says that “Baat Karne se baat banti hai,” -- Through dialogue, we can make progress. And the second one, says “Kaman se nikla hua teer and juban se nikali hui baat , waapas lena bahut mushkil hai,” -- An arrow which has left the bow and words wich have left the tongue are impossible to retrieve. I think if we remember this thin line, in the use of any communication medium, it will help all of us a great deal, in making some good decisions.
When I used to cover crime, I did a lot of stories against the police also, of course, because if there's something going wrong and if some crime is not being covered well, we have to report it. As a crime reporter, that would be my big day when I got something, which was very critical, which raised several questions and all of that. However, eventually since I was working around so many policemen, I also got to know them as people, as human beings, interacting with them, in between all this crime covering and running around to find scoop, find news and everything. I also got to interact with them, and we got to know them a lot more as human beings.
There was a deeper perspective that I got into their work, into their lives. And that's when you start questioning, when you see the circumstances that they work in, the way they live, the number of hours they put in for work, the kind of money they were being paid at that time, for putting in all the effort and all the work.
Once during Satyamev Jayate, we came across a whole footpath in Mumbai, near a chawl (slum housings), where most of the policemen and their quarters are. They lived there and we were just passing by. When passing by the chawl I coincidentally saw a full line of children sitting on the footpath and studying under the streetlight. They were sitting and studying there and just out of curiosity I went and I started speaking to them and I realized that they were kids of policemen who live nearby and they were sitting on the footpath, studying and preparing for the examination because the houses are very small, the chawls are very crowded. There is a lot of noise. They needed some kind of electricity and they could not have sat in one room and studied with so many people around in the house. So, all these children, every evening, they used to come and sit till, late night, on these footpaths and they used to prepare for their examination.
So, when we are talking about telling stories, it's also important, what stories are we telling people because when I saw these children sitting and studying there, I realised that there is so much to a human being beyond their profession. There are so many stories which are unexplored and which really touch your heart. This is something which has stayed with me and I'm much lesser critical about everything around me now. So, I think we really need to decide what are the stories we tell people. So when we talk about whether we can make media more compassionate, I don't think that's a difficult thing to do at all, because after all, we are all human beings and I just think that in this haste of delivering news, in this haste of getting viewership, in this haste of getting the advertisers, all the concerns that both of you have already spoken about I think there's a need to just slow down a little bit, and I think we are reaching somewhere there, because thankfully due to digital media, people are lesser dependent.
Earlier people used to really call us to give a particular news and they would say we have the news, you come to us and we will share it. Sometimes one would go, and if you got some really heart touching story, but which was not worth catching eyeballs, as Natasha mentioned, they would have to be let gone. Those stories were not being told, but right now with social media, people can just come themselves and they can tell their own story and they have this kind of freedom.
Now I have been working with many police departments for last 5 years. Now in a lot of places, people create Twitter accounts only because they realize that this is a faster medium to reach police and not just ask the question but also to get an answer and an update of whether something is being done. Its been a slow process, but over the last five years, so many more police departments have come on social media.
They have become so much more transparent. They have become so much more accountable and answerable to people. So, there are lots of negatives, but we have discussed all of that, but I just want to keep emphasizing on the fact that communication is always going to be the most powerful medium. None of the revolutions have happened overnight, none of the successes have come overnight. It's always a slow process and good things always take longer to reach its destination. So I think we just need to develop the patience which in the digital world, we are losing more and more. But, I very strongly believe that, though this is a very slow process, but it's such a powerful medium that we have in our hands right now and we just can't let it go,
Whenever I go to train different police departments, there is definitely this craze "How can we also quickly scale to 5million twitter followers like Mumbai Police?" It makes me feel bad sometimes and I tell the smaller districts that you do not need to worry about the number. Even if there are 20 people on your Twitter handle, that means they are looking up to you for some kind of help, they are interested in what you are doing. So, if you're able to help 10 people also out of that 20 who are following you, you have a successful handle. Don't worry about scale.
I think somewhere, we lose the cause, the reason, for which we started something. This is happening in every medium. Television started for a reason, digital media has come up for a reason. I think Osama also brought about a very important point that social media is there but many people don't even have the devices. That's also a problem. So this is one more thing, which I always emphasize on whichever public service office that I go to and support on social media. I've worked on all mediums except radio and I always tell them that no single media is complete in itself till the time the same information is being communicated in every possible medium available in the country. Osama also mentioned that the problem is not that the governments are not providing facilities, it's just that people do not have the information about it. In contrast, I see a lot of IAS officers who are there on social media. I see their posts and I've spoken to them and they're doing remarkable job. They're not putting any extra efforts. they're just making sure that people in their area get to know about the government facilities that are supposed to reach to people. Any information which needs to be communicated should be communicated in a way that it reaches everyone. Any girl should not feel disadvantaged because she's not getting a phone to attend her classes, that's very unfortunate. These are the challenges we really need to understand and address and I think we all learned a lot in the pandemic. We have learned to deal with a lot of crises and if we overcome this in some way, I hope,I really hope that this makes us better humans overall. And helps us understand that we are not the most powerful, there are forces beyond us.
So there's very little time to do something good that we want to do, we do not have so much time. Like if I think of doing something nice, it should be done today. If I can start it now, it has to be done now. If there's a mistake that needs to be corrected, this is the time to start right now because we don't know how much time we have. When I am hearing Natasha and I'm hearing Osama I feel that I have still not done enough. I think this hunger should be alive in a lot more people in the country, I feel that you've done so much more productive work and there's so much more that remains to be done.
I think we need to bring this hunger alive space, especially in the youth who are going to represent us and the country and take all of this forward. And these are the communications that we need to make. I would still not say that then pessimistic. News was my first love. So I always think that what is a positive thing that can be done with it. So I just think that there needs to be a very clear communication. Like I said earlier, like everything else in democracy, only people can bring about this change. So there should be more and more such conversations with a larger number of people and people who think differently. They are still lesser in number, but I still believe that we can do better than this.
I really hope that all the mediums of communication, the ones which we have left behind, the ones which we are using now and the ones which are going to come ahead in time for us, they are all used, most effectively as a medium of empowerment for people. The only purpose of media is to empower people, educate them and inform them. Then after that, it is a responsibility of the people who we are informing and educating to take the responsibility, step up, come be a part of this and bring up the change, which is so desperately needed in the times that we are living.
Rohit: Thank you, Sunchika, it is wonderful. What you are saying reminds me of one of the things which Gandhi said (paraphrased) One of the objectives of the newspaper is to understand the popular feeling and give expression to it. The second one, he says that, is to fearlessly expose popular defects. and the final one is to, arouse among the people, the desirable sentiment which I'm interpreting as moving towards oneness and moving towards wisdom for self and also collective harmony."
I want to presence a question, Natasha said "It's not possible for me to for the reporter in me to stand up without the whole person in me standing up", Osama also said something similar. "Are we talking about a compassionate world or a compassionate media first?" So at the foundation, there are individuals. So I would like you to share what we can do at an individual level and what can we do collectively? How can we do small improvements in existing systems while how can re-imagine more wholesome systems altogether?
Osama: It's very interesting. The media and the medium were always there, even though there was no electronic media or no printing press also, there used to be announcements, there would be shouting, people would go and inform people and all that. What is very interesting is that if you really look at the last hundred years, the way we have “progressed” is that we have constantly destroyed the community. So our model of development is such that it created an aspiration to do something which is focused more on the economy. There is an assumption that something desirable and critical lies outside, somewhere else.
So if you see the last 100 years, I could be living in a village in a community but my aspiration is somewhere else. I want to study, I want to read, I want to get an education, then I want to become something so that I can have this, and so on and so forth. Our education never taught properly that the economy, the prosperity, the development can be realized at the place where you are. So the first thing that we did in this entire system is that we dismantled the community.
Then we taught that we will again create community. That is a far fetched aspiration and what happened is that then every broken unit of the community became an individualistic consumer. Then this world of consumerism, capitalism is being leveraged to use them as a consumer. So whether it's media or entertainment or product or services or agriculture, everywhere you are trying to influence people to use them as a consumer. Then if you are an individual consumer, your sense of utilization of anything that would be very individualistic, it will be not community-oriented.
Still today when you go to a community in a village there actually, you will find that if any news comes, it comes to all of them and they might be taking collective wisdom and asking questions together. Is this good for us? Whether we should let this come in or not in our community? Should we consume this or not, etc.?
So, we need to figure out how to reorient the community, rebuild the community so that we can have community-oriented media engagement and then community-oriented media dissemination. That way you can bring in compassion into the media because you consume it as a community and you don't consume it as an individual.
Even you see another trend of well-off people returning to the village. Most times when such people relocate to the village, it's not for the community but rather for themselves. They go there for the environment, water, and agriculture but not for the community. They isolate and create a boundary in their farmhouse. So in my view, it is critical to re-build community in such a way that we are not treated by media as a consumer, but like a group of people who can collectively choose what is good or not good. Maybe it could only come by seeing the worst day, I think we still haven't seen the worst of media yet. Then perhaps we will realize how important it is to have community-oriented media.
Whatever way you look at it, the whole media is oriented either towards the goal of consumerism or communism, or economics and so on. The goal of treating people collectively is hardly there. So if we need compassionate media, we need to create a community and then we need to engage with media as a community.
Natasha: Osama talked about the breaking down of communities to serve the interests of the market, or to serve the interest of authoritarian politics. Similarly, all of the large systems that govern the world and that govern power depend on diminishing the individual. From a very early stage, they depend very much on telling you that you don't matter. That you alone are not powerful enough to influence anything. Unless you belong to someone who either pays you or owns you (and often it's the same), you are of no consequence. This, if we kind of break it down, to its core, it comes down from the community to family and then to the individuals.
So this is something that our schooling, our education, our parenting, our governance -- all rely on making the individual feel that they are powerless. That he or she is powerless. That it doesn't matter what you think your story is, we will tell you what to believe. So what we need to do is really put our energies into one, building ourselves as individuals and not allowing ourselves to be broken down into boxed parts and being told that this one is valid and this one is invalid. Also, giving each other that strength, which is exactly we are doing in this webinar. As I read some of the emails and the stories of the volunteers of Awakintalks, I got me thinking what is it that has brought you together? It is that sense that as an individual, I want to influence social change. Its same as what Sunchika’s father said “How are you going to define success?” Is it meaning or is it just climbing the ladder and eventually for everyone, it is meaning. Our mental health depends on finding meaning for ourselves and we are non-functional without mental health. More so in times of the pandemic.
So claiming our part, claiming our story, claiming media spaces, not allowing anyone to make us believe that there is a silo. They will tell us and we are the ones who will consume. No. We will tell our own story, we will build our own audiences. That's the power of the community that the internet has allowed us to build, which is, again literally all of us on this screen, it's a new community coming together because we have shared beliefs, because we have a shared vision of what we want the future to be like. Also very much, believing in the power of an individual and giving each other that strength because we get it from each other.
Sunchika: I just think it is a very basic thing. I always say that we just need to go back to the basics. Like we are learning to go back to basics in our diet, in exercise etc. I think we all need to live more consciously and more aware of how each act that we do affects the lives around us. I think if we develop that kind of understanding and if we help people develop that kind of understanding then it's going to be a great learning for everybody.
I've not been great with advice because I really think that I can only take my responsibility and do things the right way. Try to do my best in any situation and hope that the people around look and learn and I in a way be able to inspire people around. So I think that it is an aspiration, which all of us should have, that we do something good that people can't resist joining the league. I won't call it “following the herd”. I'm saying just join this “league of goodness”. I think we should try and do something and we should just inspire by example. And I have seen that this has worked with one police account and many other police departments came. It is very heartening. I think the satisfaction that we get when we see somebody helped with a little bit of effort we have done, it's a very satisfying feeling. I hope that a lot more people get infected with this desire to get satisfied in other people's happiness. So, this is all I think we should be aspiring to do because really you and I, or anybody can't really change the people around us. We can only do and hope that we are inspiring enough. We should also take inspiration from people. I think that is the cycle we should follow.
Rohit: Beautiful. Thank you all of you. That brings us to the time to close. We will take a minute of silence in gratitude for this collective exploration of shifting from isolation to community and supporting each other in finding our values and meaning so that we all can live a more purposeful and wholesome life. In this process, we may also move towards a more compassionate media and world.
Thank you all a minute of silent gratitude and then we'll close the call.
Thank you!