Here’s a profound statement from none other than Rajdeep Sardesai: “Bless social media! Power with zero
responsibility! Have a good day”. (Twitter April 17, 8.41 am). I can use this
particular statement for many debates. That can wait. In a ‘friendly fire’
article Firstpost, the online
sidekick of CNN-IBN, dismissed Rajdeep’s silly tweet as sweeping
generalisation. Alright, in another tweet (Wee hours of February 5, 12.14 am)
Rajdeep says “Tonight time to say F off to those who call us ‘paid media’.We
are journalists, not sensationalists or elitists. Gnight”. Hmm! Just months
back one of Rajdeep’s colleague, Pallavi
Ghosh, tweeted: “..That’s the unfortunate part, came to know yesterday that
some journos who I work with closely in Congress are on their payroll”. Pallavi’s
tweet was made at 9.53am on October 14, 2011.
Now, would Rajdeep and Pallavi make those statements on their TV
channel? I doubt it. But that’s how journos themselves use social media and
then complain about it. In response to my post IWJ-2012 another prominent journo tweeted it was “hate”. I asked her how she categorised “lampooning”
as hate. She responded stating it was contained in the mail that forwarded her
my post and not her own statement. Well, if one stored up all the quotes of
journos, most of them would find it hard to believe they actually said those
words. Self-righteous shills usually
forget what they said or did in the past. That is what brings me to the RTE
Act. While much has been said and written about the SC upholding the
constitutional validity of the Act it really hasn’t been debated as well in the
MSM as it has been in the social media. So Rajdeep would do well not to dismiss
social media as having “zero responsibility”. Many of the analysts and writers on social
media are far superior to the ones in MSM. Those in the MSM have typically discussed the RTE in a literary flourish rather
than with cold logic and facts. Do read on…
“Otherwise, let's be honest - we had become the sort of people who were
inured to the sight of a barely-clad shivering child, his tiny stomach
ballooned into hugeness by the absence of nutrition, as we indifferently drove
past the sight of him huddling with his mother for warmth on a tiny patch of
pavement every night. At the traffic lights - where our cars came into enforced
confrontation with poverty - and we saw a small hand stretched out for alms, or
a disabled man trying to wave a red rose or a magazine at us, imploring us for
help - we would barely look up from behind our over-sized designer sunglasses.
We would, in fact, sink back into the plush leather of our seats and be extra
determined that the story of India would no longer be told in picture-postcards
of poverty…. Over the many years that we
- the upper middle class - have lived in aggressive denial of the inequalities
in our social order, we have become more and more cocooned by our elitism. … That
is why the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the constitutional validity of
the Right to Education law for all schools - even in unaided private schools -
is such a potentially seminal moment for us as a people. And nowhere is our
intuitive social snobbery more apparent than in our resistance to the idea of
an economically and socially heterogeneous, inclusive classroom…. Others have
cloaked their subliminal social biases in apprehensions of a so-called clash of
cultures or possibilities of social maladjustment….” Do I hear applause? Thank
you!
Ah well, my momentary flash of literary genius has to be exposed
though. I didn’t write the paragraph above, it was another literary classic
from Barkha Dutt. Extracts from her article “Writes of passage” in Hindustan Times, April 13. That is how
you discuss a matter of an Act of Law: in literary flourishes devoid of much
logic or cold facts. And pray who is “WE”?
Add “Designer sunglasses” and “Plush” leather seats in cars. Is that “WE”? When champions of MSM like Barkha
want to transfer their personal life experiences as being of a larger population you don’t
need sound logic or arguments for any discussion or article. That is where
social media wins and does a better job.
Being in the education domain and one who has
interacted with more than 3000 schools, thousands of teachers, thousands of
children and parents I do know a little bit about schools and their problems. I
was associated with an organisation whose directors built one of the finest
schools in India from scratch. The school has become a near pilgrimage for any
education professional who visits my city. That school wasn’t built by Barkha’s
‘elites’ for the elites. It was built by a group of IIM-Ahmedabad graduates who
set up new standards for schooling and even for teacher education. Even before
RTE that school had a practice of enrolling a certain number of slum children
along with other students from upper classes. One of the founders lived in a
slum for months to understand their needs. And no, they aren’t ‘Jhollawalas’ or
NGOs and they don’t wear “designer sunglasses”. Those guys started another
organisation with negligible capital to improve the quality of school education
in India which is helping schools and even State govts. In another case, a sinking Municipal school
was taken over by a private body and turned into a well-functioning school now
known as ‘Mahatma Gandhi International School’. To me, the RTE Act is more a political act
rather than any real act for ensuring education for all children. And just like
child-labour laws it is destined for failure. Why? Govt failures cannot be
passed on to private citizens by strangling their freedoms and enterprise.
But let’s get back to Barkha Dutt. She is the Group Editor of NDTV and while writing so passionately
about changing caste and other equations and our “middle-class” biases she
forgets what her own organisation does for schools and people. If you go back
to first few paras of this post you will be reminded how journalists often
forget what they did or said in the past. Barkha forgot to remember that in
recent times NDTV joined Coca-Cola
in some school campaign. Now, would they have done the same campaign if
Coca-Cola weren’t involved and some other body without similar financial muscle
had undertaken it? I doubt it but still, it’s fine if, by the campaign, some
good comes to some schools somewhere.
Barkha forgets something else too; NDTV does
promote a certain set of schools – Elite,
Rich, Luxurious schools. More than just promote, NDTV is the ‘media-partner’ in that campaign. Yeah,
it’s called “Good Schools of India”
and NDTV promotes them through the directory. The news-channel had also
carried a number of advertisements promoting the directory. And what’s the
directory about? It’s a directory about the best residential schools in India. Ever
visited any of these schools? I can assure you most of them are luxury schools
which will be the biggest opponents of the RTE Act. These are hardly the very "..economically and socially heterogeneous, inclusive classroom" in schools that Barkha talks about. However, most of them won’t even be affected because no ‘disadvantaged or poor’ parents would even remotely think of sending
their children to these schools. So while the MSM, like Barkha, sheds tears
over the poor and disadvantaged, they haven’t really debated the finer points of
the RTE at all. Like in most other cases they failed to do their job.I wonder what Rajdeep would call that: "Zero responsibility" plus hypocrisy?
So, as my answer to Rajdeep Sardesai who claims social
media has zero responsibility I would recommend that he read the following
posts by different writers on RTE and
evaluate the quality of the discussion. It’s far superior to what one will find
on TV channels and newspapers:
Is the Right to Education quota really for the poor ? and On the EWS category in the Right To Education act both by @RealityCheckInd and another one Analysis of the RTE Judgment:Part I – The Question of Severability by Dilip Rao (CentreRight India). Also (update) a great analysis by Sudhir Kumar: Right to Education Act - The Devil is in the Detail.
There are many frivolous and even bad laws that get enacted because the
MSM does not do its job. Next time you see a child working at a tea stall or
restaurant, next time you see a child buying cigarettes or tobacco products
from a pan-shop, next time you see a child buying alcohol for another from a
shop remember the worthlessness of the related laws. The biggest Act of ‘Rights’ that the govt should pass
is irreversible one that ensures they never intrude in the lives and activities of private
citizens and entities. The govt’s courage to do the opposite is partly driven by the
self-righteous shill in the mainstream media who have nothing at stake and who, like Rajdeep and Barkha, look down on ordinary people as much as the govt does.
