Terror in the time of apoplexia

Mukul Kesavan brilliantly rips into the English-language television coverage of the Mumbai attacks in yesterday's Telegraph.

'During the crisis, the foregrounding of the Taj was inevitable. It was the site of the longest battle and the hideous drama of its near-destruction was bound to be framed by any sensible cameraman. But it’s still worth making the point Shyam Benegal made, that the dozens of people killed in VT (or CST) station and their grieving relatives and friends got very little screen time. When VT figured in the coverage, it was there for CCTV grabs of the T-shirted terrorist.'

It isn't news to anybody that the English media (even the Booker Prize winners among them) are notoriously susceptible to class prejudice, but Kesavan quite perceptively notes that the Mumbai attacks allowed for unveiled expressions of class resentment:

'Usually, privileged English-speaking Indians have the tact to be politically correct in their public statements; but in the middle of terror and tragedy, the sense of social self-preservation that keeps them from crassness, disappears. “Go to the Four Seasons and look down from the top floor at the slums around you.” That ‘you’ is us: Telegraph-reading, hotel-going people, who, in the heat of the moment and because of the death of people we know (or know of), become the world.'

Crassness. From the Latin crassus; solid, thick, dense, fat. What an excellent word to describe what passes for media analysis on English-medium TV channels today.

PS: Nivedita Menon has a somewhat less restrained, but equally thought-provoking, post here.