What can I say, The Toilet Paper never ceases to amaze me. I might have clicked the disgusting site probably five times in the last twelve months. Even the TOI servers must be groaning, “Oh God!” as they serve up crap, sparking interesting studies in news-to-crap ratios.
I digress, but considering that it is the weekend, and the Toilet Paper has come to our attention once again for all the wrong reasons, I cannot but comment on this Bennett, Coleman entity getting its panties in a bunch via the commentary by some guy named Shobhan Saxena.
Having said that, I have got to admit, this is one of those rare instances where we get to see a name associated with verbiage in the Toilet Paper of India. Most of the time, contributions do not have names; probably due to fear of criticism from readers. I still doubt if this Shobhan Saxena exists or if this is a name conjured out of thin air just to make stuff appear credible.
Without further ado, here is the clinical dissection:
Everyone has a story to tell, but everyone is not a natural-born storyteller.
The piece opens with a very silly rant, precisely the type he is accusing others of doing. Right off the bat, one can say the guy does not have the faintest idea of what blogs are or why people blog in general*. What else can we expect from an entity that wimped out and blocked Pradyuman Maheshwari?
They are interesting people. They think that they have something to say. They want to be read and heard and seen. But their aspiration is blocked by the obnoxious monster called the Editor and their high-voltage facts mixed with slam-dunk fiction, with a lot of typos and commas and semi-colons in wrong places, go down a drain called the Editorial Process.
The man basically wants to edit and educate us about our typos and such. Shobhan, Welcome to the blogosphere. I presume, the babu mindset is kicking and screaming inside you. It is not your fault, it is the conditioning that we all have been subjected to. In India, we are somehow made to feel that we are entitled to stuff by default. The crybabies at these Indian media outlets are nothing but extensions of political power; propaganda machines so to speak. Case in point: NDTV’s foray into the blogosphere. When a disruptor such as a blog enters the scene, media establishments kick and scream.
Forget wrong grammar and bad spellings, bloggers are now writing murders on the web.
That’s right. When the Indian government blocks blogs en masse or when there is a tsunami or when the Toilet Paper provides the list of most famous NRI baby names for the year as a top 10 news-item as terrorists blow up people in Kashmir, the need of the hour is clean text, sans the typos and such. Yes, blogosphere should be run by grammar Nazis. I cannot bear the mobile text lingo and it grinds my gears as much as it does for any sane person but to complain that blogs don’t follow the rules of grammar takes the cake.
It’s good fun, but this is no journalism. Learning and mastering good journalism is tough. You learn it in libraries, on flooded streets, in front of a rioting mob, in the middle of crossfire between a militia and a military, in war trenches, in the corridors of power and in the hamlets of deprivation. Sometimes, a reporter walks for miles in an area ravaged by a tsunami to get one quote from the man hanging on to a tree for a week.
Blogging can take the guise of journalism but all bloggers aren’t journalists. Blogging is a new dimension in the aspect of “freedom-of-speech.” People in general have the right to say what they feel irrespective of the language or the semantics thereof. Just because they don’t earn a living by reporting does not mean they do not have a say or should not broadcast how they feel.
For the first time since the idea of democracy took shape, blogging has provided a way for the general public to opine and let their voice known without fear of persecution. Before the advent of the Internet, Town hall or the Panchayat meetings were the closest one could think of but opinion in a Town hall meeting setup can still be swayed by force or hijacked by sheer strength in number or decibel level. Blogs are immune to such force and are extremely helpful in letting a point of view known in oppressive states such as Iran, China, Pakistan and to a certain extent, India.
Eager to make quick bucks, many have already boarded the train of paid bloggers, blowing away their claims of citizen-generated media, free from the restrictions of top-down “old media”.
The blogosphere is a self healing system. The lack of top-down control is one of the key strengths of the Blogosphere. Every blogger is a potential whistle-blower unlike an organization bound by protocol; so, by that rationale, one need not worry about credibility. Even if someone were to generate propaganda, it won’t be for long. Considering the omnipresence and penetration of the Internet, the people behind the propaganda will be exposed within days if not hours.
In the West, blogs have become an outlet for the rage that people are no longer allowed to express in the actual world. But, in India, with a booming and vibrant media, journalism without an editorial process is a dangerous trend. It’s easy to dismiss journalism as literature in a hurry, but blogging is just organised gossip.
I have no idea what the man is smoking but East or West, there will be a signal/noise ratio irrespective of location. The above text is proof of the crab like mentality that permeates the Indian mindset in general. He would cite glowing examples of western bloggers but cannot extend the same generosity to the tsunami, earthquake or anti blog-ban efforts by Indian bloggers. When it comes to Indian bloggers, suddenly, grammar and journalistic ideals become paramount.
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*Call it coincidence but I had a minor debate with another person online about blogs and as to why people blog.
(I know this is more of a repetition, this is why I added it at the end. Please feel free to skip it.)
People blog for various reasons. There are no good blogs or bad blogs. Of course, the same reasoning cannot be extended to blogs that support Jihad or spread terror and such; you get the drift.
I hear this lament from pseudo-intellectuals who complain that the blogosphere is filled with nonsense: people writing personal stories or some kid writing about the latest pop-culture news item. But you see, that is the whole point of a blog.
Someone like Salman Rushdie or a 14 year old has access to the same technology and the means to create the same kind of impact via this vehicle known as a blog. How one does it is open and left to the creativity of the poster.
Once again, not everyone tries to create an impact, for some, it is therapeutic, it is a way for them to organize their thoughts and see themselves grow; an attempt to pour the ideas in their mind into a database located remotely on some hosting service somewhere in a portable format so that these thoughts don’t bother them and thereby create clarity, making them more focused on their immediate goals.
For some, blogs are the only hope outside their box and the oppression. They are powerful transmitters to the world. This oppression could be of any kind: self-inflicted, disease, or a government that curbs the freedom of its people.
