Welcome to the ketchup times

Earlier, the end of a year seemed to offer a time for stock taking. An occasion to look back: to recall with surprise an occurrence one may have forgotten, to regret the death of a significant person, notice the flowering of a trend or a talent, wonder that such and such a thing could have happened, so on and so forth. Today that sense of quiet reflection has disappeared; instead there is an element of jitteriness in such an exercise. The things that are said at year-end have been said and said so often through the year that they have acquired a staccato, slogan-like quality. And the people covered have been seen and heard so much through the preceding 12 months that they too appear almost ludicrously unreal, trying to justify their prominence, like contestants in a minor beauty contest mimicking the emotions of a Ms Universe.

The beauty contest analogy is not accidental; I believe the whole beauty pageant business has something to do with this phenomenon. Let me explain. Over the last decade there has been a media explosion. Television channels have multiplied, newspapers have sprouted new editions and new sections, the magazine business has seen several new glossy entrants and radio is the new big growth medium.

The sudden multiplicity of media products and the search for the selling formula is not an insignificant factor. In India at least we seem to believe in duplicating success rather than looking for niches or original ideas. If any evidence is needed then look at cosmopolitan Mumbai where it is still hard to find more than a couple of regional cuisines or at Bollywood where one hit teenage romance but must translate into a hundred flops for the trend to shift. But this is part of the story. Which brings us back to the beauty business.

What beauty business one may ask? Isn’t it passe? Beauty contests don’t sell anymore. Not much anyway. Nobody cares about the new Miss Indias or Ms Universes or Ms Worlds. Though there was a time when even a Ms Ludhiana East or Ms Sholapur West could hope to get her pretty face on television. Today, we’ve moved on. True the lasting effects can be seen in the rash of glitzy new cosmetic surgery institutes and mofussil beauty parlours but that is just one fairly direct influence.

There is another more insidious effect which derives not from the beauty pageant business per se but from the hallowed significance that had been given to it in the not-so-distant past. Remember the wall-to-wall coverage? The breathless countdowns? The treating of beauty queen aspirants as if they were Olympic contestants, masterminds and ambassadresses rolled into one? The equation of beauty with achievement on a scale that cannot but have been a lie. The craze may be out but the lack of proportion has stayed.

So when one looks back at the events that dominated the past year and chances upon, for example, the Manisha Koirala-Shashilal Nair fight, it is not with a sense of new understanding or even amusement but with a sense of horror that that sort of minor spat was and will be allowed to take centre stage in our lives again. And again.

Which is why when a Narendra Modi claims that the media grossly exaggerated the violence in Gujarat last year he almost manages — amazingly — to sound credible. Because, despite the extremely creditable and brave role much of the media, particularly the maligned English language media, played in Gujarat, it has become careless with its priorities and space in other ways.