BackHot and angry
Technology has made it easier for one to outrage about anything and everything that happens half a planet away
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It is truly an Indian summer as I write this.
Delhi is hot and dusty, its air poisonous and streets filthy. As I write this, India are playing Bangladesh in Fatullah and Arvind Kejriwal is playing Najeeb Jung in Delhi (the second match is more interesting). The NDA government at the centre has completed a year, and underwhelmed everyone but itself with its performance. The financial performance of key Indian companies in the last quarter was their worst in 14 years.
It is a context in which it is easy to be depressed, listless, angry.
Anger comes easily to everyone these days. And outrage, as Times Now’s Arnab Goswami has proved, is a good business model. Indeed, he sometimes gets so angry that he resorts to old English and, in turn, influences his panellists to do so too. This past week, he insisted on calling the Delhi minister who falsified his degrees a “forgerer" (an obsolete term that is no longer used). “Isn’t he a forgerer?" Goswami and his colleagues kept asking. I honestly wouldn’t know, but as to whether he is a forger or not, the police investigation and the courts should help.
Still, Goswami is a fine journalist and English is the least of the casualties of outrage. Facts and understanding are far more significant casualties. As is a sense of proportion. It isn’t just TV channels, though, that are powered by outrage. Twitter, that fishbowl in which we all express and amplify and engage, is driven by outrage. And it is easy to express outrage (or, to convert a noun into a verb in the way most new media encourages one to do, it is easy to outrage).
“We live in a time when it has never been easier to mobilize outrage or express it. It doesn’t matter if our outrage concerns something that has happened in our immediate neighbourhood, or it concerns an atrocity half a planet away. Thanks to modern technology, proximity is no longer a prerequisite for outrage," says Sidin Vadukut in this week’s big story.
But once everyone is done outraging, what happens, asks Vadukut. It is an important question and one for which the nation would do well to demand an answer. “Never has the gap between the ferocity of outrage and an appetite for political mobilization been more stark," Vadukut writes in a piece that, alas, will not cause an outrage. Or then, it could. You never know with Twitter.
R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.
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