Consuming the tragedy

Thu, May 15 02:35 AM

We saw blood on the tracks. Strangled cycle rickshaws, twisted into the shapes of death, floodlit streets empty of anything but deathly shadows.

Television news channels were there moments after the bombs exploded in the old city of Jaipur. You were watching IPL-Delhi Daredevils against Kolkata Knight Riders when this devastating intrusion forced you to switch channels. Between eating dinner and devouring cricket, we became consumers of a terrible tragedy. Another one.

Had you watched Tuesday night's coverage of the Jaipur bomb blasts, for any length of time, you would have experienced an urge to get up and correct the angle of the picture, rather like you might have straightened a photograph or painting hanging on your wall. The picture was tilting too heavily to one side.

There's the initial shock, dismay, sadness, a statistical deconstruction - 7 blasts, nay 8, maybe even 6, 50 dead, maybe 100 injured... TV news pursues those figures like shadows that always elude them: was it 50 or 60 dead? Nobody knows. Nobody will know till the next day. Or the day after.

The reporters, the anchors are busy with interviews - Rajasthan Chief Minister Raje, Minister of State for Home Affairs Jaiswal.

Then the blame game: correspondents on different channels, perhaps depending on the authenticity of their sources or their affections for a particular political party, blame the Centre ("no information was forthcoming from the Centre to the state government") or the state ("the Centre had provided ample warning of the possibility of attacks in Jaipur"), and each one speculates on the identity of the perpetrators, in the absence of facts.

TV news dutifully rushes to Sawai Mansingh Hospital. We watch the façade and imagine the fate of those within, their families. Who are they, the dead? Why were they there? It is those stories that you want told.

You watch the television screen with a deepening sense of sadness. The anchors are speaking faster than the words have time to make sense. They're rushing from their correspondent ('live from Jaipur' suddenly acquires an entirely new meaning), to the expert (in what death, attacks?) in the Delhi studio who feebly tries to explain that this is another intelligence failure or, alternatively, a new ISI plot to divert our attention from Pakistan's own political woes. Nobody can agree on anything - from the number of bomb blasts to the identity of the attacker. One says it was Lashkar-e-Toiba, another says HUJI.

Deepak Chaurasia, Barkha Dutt, Arnab Goswami, Sagarika Ghose - all are breathless with the effort to connect with someone who may know something: now we take you across to our correspondent standing right there... no, we're going across to the Minister, no, no, we'll talk to our studio guest.

In the studio are the innumerable retired police and civil officers (the same every time a bomb explodes) - Ved Marwah, Joginder Singh, etc. - telling the anchor that this is one more dastardly attack on our nation state (what about the attack on the 60-dead, 100-injured?).

For TV news it should not be about catching up or staying with the competition, it should not be about whether you have Vasundhara Raje on the air or Sachin Pilot, whether or not you can make contact with your correspondent who cannot contact you. We went on the merry go round from the blast scene to Pilot, to Raje, to the expert and back correspondent, none the wiser but with a dizzying sense of confusion. Instead of this wild, idle and largely half informed discourse, just give us the latest information with constant updates, just give us some feeling of what it is to be a person who has lost someone in that blast.

Otherwise, it's 11.15 pm and, perhaps, time to return to Eden Gardens.

shailaja.bajpai@expressindia.com

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