It’s incredibly shocking when in the midst of a serious discussion among family and friends about what one can do to make our world a better place to live in for all, and how to put an end to the cruelty we witness closely around ourselves on a daily basis, your best friend turns around and says that us human beings are a virus inflicted upon earth to destroy it and that we have been bombed upon earth by some beings who are more evolved than us and who live on another planet in a yet to be discovered part of the universe; that we are a curse upon this world.
Yes, Salim Asgarally, lifestyle and fashion designer par excellence and my dearest friend, made the extreme comment one-day and set my mind thinking as to why a majority of us as a species, are more destructive than constructive.
The thought hit me harder when a day or two later I was lounging around in my house and got to watch an episode of a soap opera that my mother is hooked to.

It is called Saathiya Saath Nibhana and since I am not a regular viewer of the series I didn’t really know where the many characters in each frame of the show were coming from or going.

There were a bunch of men and women, middle aged, dressed head to toe like Christmas trees, watching two elderly ladies spewing venom at two extremely young and pretty girls who were also dressed garishly. One PYT slapped the other, it turned out they were sisters, and then both started to weep inconsolably. A motley of characters of different ages surrounding them kept getting more and more puffed in their faces, trying desperately to react silently and unemotionally but in varied ways and their close ups repeatedly interchanged on the screen to the bangs and bursts of sound that could send anybody sane to a mental asylum.
As per ratings, the series leads and has been a bestseller for years now.
Who is watching it and why?

I began with my mother and asked her the question.
She looked at me vaguely and said she didn’t know why she watched the show, but there wasn’t a single episode that she had yet missed.
I asked her what the story was and she pointed to a character on the screen that seemed like a child herself and said, “you know this poor girl, it is her story.”

I asked her who the poor girl she was referring to was and she said that she was the mother of the two PYT’s who were weeping inconsolably.

I then said to her that the poor girl hardly looked like a woman who could be the mother of the two grown up girls, and my mother smiled. She told me that the she was a young woman about an year ago, and when she saw me utterly confused, she quickly continued, “but then the series took a leap of 20 years, and the poor girl is now a mother of two grown up daughters in her screen life.”
I gave up.

My head was at the time a little chaotic with thoughts about a post my colleague Deepa Bhalerao had put up and tagged me on Facebook that day.

It said: Vinta Nanda – Check this… “Impact on programming (on television) is likely to be significant as well, especially if the 50% weightage (from rural India) indeed becomes reality. Early prime is bound to gain more importance, and we should be prepared to see more mythology, culture reinforcement and patriarchy. It may not seem like a step in the right direction, but if it is closer to an accurate representation of what India watches, we can’t fault the logic.”

She was referring to an article she had tagged to my wall, and the profoundly confusing excerpt from it, which she had added to her observation, as well.

Sailesh Kapoor, an expert on television audience research and data, wrote this article on Rural Ratings, which is a new emerging paradigm for audience indicators being delivered to content creators in India.
You can read the full article here if you are interested

http://www.mxmindia.com/2015/08/rural-ratings-interesting-days-ahead/

My point is that what the hell is going on here?
Do we have to camouflage mythology in contemporary contexts and dress characters, sets and content in such archaic and outlandish ways, reinforce obsolete cultures, traditions and values, and endorse a dangerous patriarchy embedded to our feudal and divisive histories in our storytelling, only because it works?
By that I mean – Is ratings the only measure of the success or the failure of television? And will it ever be possible to coincide the success of television and media to the progress made by a society, and the failure of television and media to societies regression?
As long as the numbers of eyeballs captured remain the only coincidental to revenues earned, obviously never!

In a piece titled Shaping Tomorrow: Sustainability And Media, by Alicia Ayars and Frances Buckingham which was originally published in Franklin Rae’s Raedar Newsletter, it is said that:
Media and entertainment companies shape public opinion, provide a voice for the voiceless and bring a welcome escape from the trials of daily life. They influence what we read, listen to and watch and yet companies within the media sector are often overlooked as major social and environmental actors. This is partly because the impact of media is not tangible; rather it is emotional and intellectual. The responsibility of media companies lies not in their physical footprint but their ability to influence consumers’ footprints through the ‘brain-prints’ they leave on their audiences – and their, potential to effect positive change is profound.

But in the words of Lord Kelvin, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”, and how do you go about measuring a brain-print?

You can read the article here – http://www.sustainability.com/blog/shaping-tomorrow-sustainability-and-media#.VfB7DGSqqko

The piece ends by saying:

So if we can’t measure it, should we still do it? In a word, yes: the ability to influence behavior is ultimately where media companies have an advantage over all other sectors. If any sector is well positioned to raise our levels of awareness, lead the debate on exploring solutions for some of the worlds most intractable social and environmental problems, change our views on what is and isn’t ‘acceptable’, and aid the transition towards more sustainable livelihoods, it is the media sector. The inherent difficulty in quantifying their impact should not deter media companies from trying. Their action today is vital in shaping the more sustainable world of tomorrow.

In India, mothers die during childbirth at alarming rates and newborns too, because of inaccessibility to primary health care, while poor children before the age of 5 die in huge numbers because of malnutrition.
Millions of people live in abysmal conditions in urban India and those in rural India desperately struggle to survive.
Tribal and backward communities languish and are exploited continuously, and the poorest and most marginalized beg for mercy upon them.

There is an environmental disaster impending upon thousands and million populations and hundreds of anguished farmers commit suicide due to despair; countless women and children rendered helpless, are trafficked to keep another kind of economy which never touches their lives flourishing, and the list goes on and on.
The arithmetic adds up exponentially and beyond imagination.

So how to we bring this math to consideration along with the numbers of eyeballs captured by various mindless programs across the spectrum of media and entertainment is the question that still in 2015 remains unanswered.

I travelled to my office the next morning and as my car slowed down and stopped at a signal, I look around me.
To my left was a fairly young girl, must be in her mid twenties, dressed to kill and also driving the latest bright red Mercedes CLA, talking on her phone, oblivious to the cars honking behind her and urging her to make way for them.
To my right were two young girls, giggling away in an auto rickshaw and watching a video on a smart phone; and further up on the road side an elderly lady, rather stressed out, stepped out of a hospital and crossed the road, beating the heat with a scarf wrapped tightly around her head; and then much further on the right were two spritely girl children who were begging on the street, laughing and grinning as they chased each other among the cars amidst the traffic, trying to attract a gaze so they could hook someone for a few pennies.

All these different types of women and girls were among many more men of all kinds; and they belonged to different socio-economic and cultural sections of our societies; that if I were to divide them as per our television ratings matrices.
Not one of them looked remotely like those wretched creatures on the TV show I had watched the previous night with my mother.

The two girls begging caught my eye, so one came running up to my window.
I have the habit keeping some peppermints in my bag so I pulled down my window to give her two of them.
She leapt with glee and shouted out to her friend who was peering into the glass window of the red Mercedes CLA, making funny faces at the svelte woman who was still talking on her phone, in a bid to attract her attention.
As the signal changed and my car moved away, my eyes followed the two girls who ran off chasing each other to another side of the road.
Then I saw the girl to whom I had given the mints, hand one of them to her friend.

In that moment in which the girls disappeared from my sight, I understood that giving was something other than being about those who have the most.
That sharing was not a privilege of the entitled but on the contrary, ability that the disadvantaged and prevented perhaps were gifted a little more with, than the advantaged are.
I understood that the only way we the advantaged and privileged could contribute to making this world a better place is by nurturing a capacity within ourselves to take slightly less than what ‘we can have’ through entitlement.

I believe that we will be able to correct the discourse if we allow ourselves as an industry to let go of a few numbers of viewers, and in consequence then a part of the huge revenues we earn.
I believe that if we are able to make greed less attractive and are also able to guide aspirations towards austerity, simplicity and inclusivity by exploring depths within the characters that we build in our narratives; we will not only be able to achieve a sustainable model for the media and entertainment industry for the long term, but sustainable communities as well.

But where are those people who are thinking long term?
When the race is to grab the largest number of eyeballs, and each individual player in the business’ main aim is to sustain his survival at his job every single week, then where will there be any time left to explore depths in human beings or for that matter there be any time in our lives to save this world from ourselves?