05/02/2016
The gory and disturbing visual of four youngsters beating another to death in broad daylight a few days ago has gone viral. It is there in all smart phones in Kerala; and on all news channels.
Four youngsters beating another to death while someone shot the whole action without any attempt to intervene. What a spectacle!
Has apathy taken complete hold of us? Or, where lies the problem?
George Orwell in his popular essay on English language and politics has said that language can influence thoughts. Going by what is happening in our society, it is very much possible.
The danger is that the decline in our linguistic and media practices and the proliferation of social media can breed a perverted society.
Influence of language — in its original verbal form — in a person begins even before his or her birth. According to a study conducted by the Institute for Learning and Brain Studies at the University of Washington, ‘language learning begins prenatally, perhaps as soon as fetuses are able to hear — after about 30 weeks of gestation — with their initial focus on vowel sounds, which are louder, longer and more rhythmic than consonants.’
In short, even before an infant is born, the influence of language is evident, and as it grows up in a media-driven world, its character and culture are shaped by the ‘language’ it comes across.
We live in a time when we have exclusive television bulletins for crime stories, which often reenact gruesome acts and telecast just before we go to bed. Imagine the influence of those images and crimes in our mind, let alone in all-absorbing children glued to the television.
To describe our own subversive acts, we, ironically, compare them with animals. ‘Bestial’ had been a word often used to describe the infamous gang-rape in New Delhi. Bestial, etymologically, suggests something pertaining to beasts or animals or ‘subhuman.’ But which animal or beast gang-rapes and after gang-raping, inserts all sorts of deadly stuff into the victim’s genitals?
Why do we attribute our most insensitive and cruelest acts to animals, while human beings are the cruelest, the bloodiest and the most violent of all creatures? In the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky writes: “People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.”
For animals, violence has no shades. For man, violence has psychedelic proportions.
Violence has always been in our society — be it in the form of wars or radical protests. But for the increasing incidents of murder, sexual abuse and violence in our society, some blame has to go to mainstream, mass media for the way they ‘celebrate’ each news item on gruesome acts of violence. By repeatedly and elaborately uploading and telecasting gory murders and sexual violence, they are creating a ‘subculture’ in our conscience which gradually permits, tolerates and approves a lifestyle of violence and abuse.
The laws will not, cannot, stop evil. They will not lick clean a society of moral corruption; nor can they protect it from violence.
When something becomes part of our culture, there is no question about whether it is right or wrong, but it is blindly followed. Otherwise, we would not perform many of our traditional and cultural rituals even today.
The danger is, the ‘subculture’ file is growing by the day, and mainstream media cannot wash its hands off from making bloody violence and sexual abuse part of popular ‘crime beat’ — even with separate bulletins and special magazines!
‘Celebrating’ and ‘selling’ crime is worse than the crime itself. Eighty per cent of the stories in the local pages of a newspaper are of murder, death, robbery and our pet topic, ‘peedanam.’ What does it reflect of a society? Readers are like addicts. They are not born with the habit. They are carefully cultured and conditioned, and over the years they have become addicts to gory tales. When we were children, a murder or a rape used to send cold shivers down our spine. Now it is everyday incidents — part of our popular culture.
How did we reach here?
As Orwell had warned years ago, we need to mind our language — both verbal and visual — if we want to breed a generation that will not drip blood, rape or rip through our conscience.
(Photo credit: Csutkaa via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SAjadawin42 via Foter.com / CC BY-SA
r.nial.bradshaw via Foter.com / CC BY)