DailyPost 2395
GRAPEVINED INDIA
India lives on grapevine. Over the last few decades, it has become our DNA and moving at a pace to completely take us over. The descent of the nation from facts, truth, statistics and cut & dry validated official statements to opinions, stage managed stories, post truth statements, false positioning, selling unadulterated dreams, playing with sentiments and ignorance is the passage to Grapevined India. You should have the capability to sell and the country is yours. The only catch is that you should not sell the right thing, sell the grapevine laced with all that hits the audience’s and viewer’s feudal heart and idiosyncrasies and you will never have dearth of buyers.
You can call them the users; they might become practitioners one day of the same trade that you would be teaching them. It is easy to learn. It gives you immediate kick and you would able be getting a feeling of being heard and appreciated. The next stage is that of an echo chamber and if and when more than half of the country lands in that state, we can be truly called a Grapevined Nation. Grapevine would become the core value and practice of the nation. This *trend is increasing in polity, society and unfortunately in business too, to the peril of each of these. It is like thin ice, how much can you operate on that and for how long I leave it to your imagination.
The decimation of facts from the mental imprint and imagination of the nation, is the first major milestone achievement. Given the nature and level of education in this country, the masses banked to the right thinking and rationale of the better few. Grapevine has been the mainstay of Indian politics for decades now, but it was in spurts during elections and some other public interfaces, with no permanent video or audio or text documentation of it, to keep setting your mind and heart on fire. Electronic media and more so with the onset of New Channels changed the whole landscape. They had to fend for themselves and this is route they took facilitated by a variety of factors and stakeholders, each supporting the other for vested interests.
The advertisement money on which they survive and love to survive on, comes with strings attached. This gets accentuated if you look into the nature of ownership of this grapevine providing channels. We don’t have a single news bulletin today, it is an endless anchor and spokesperson-based drama, feeding into each other. Opinionated programs have become a staple. The ultimate readiness of the grapevine is killing. 24/7/365 they operate with the same precision and focus to muddle things beyond recognition. A recent bizarre killing in UP caught on camera is already on the grapevine mode. Challenging expertise in any area, till the time it is numbed is another prime objective of this gameplan. Social media is providing a field day for making India fully grapevined at the earliest. Whatever might be the medium grapevine shall prevail.
IS GRAPEVINE ANTITHESIS TO DEMOCRACY?
Sanjay Sahay