On racism and censorship

This is wonderful piece written by Shashi Tharoor in his TOI column "SHASHI ON SUNDAY". Wisely written to touch both the aspects of the NEO TV Commercial.

Hearing the news that the private broadcaster Nimbus Communication has got into trouble with the government for allegedly broadcasting racist ads on its Neo Sports channel has left me with decidedly mixed emotions. The mixed emotions come, first, from the fact that this is a channel i both love and hate. Whenever i visit India, i morph into a Neo Sports addict.

After decades of living in countries where i was deprived of the possibility of watching cricket on television, i seize every guilty opportunity to cancel appointments and turn off my phone, so that i can sit goggleeyed before the tube, soaking in the goings-on on the greensward. And no one offers quite the range of cricket that Neo does live and recorded, from home and abroad, testmatches and one-dayers and Ranji Trophy games. Rare is the moment when the cricket-starved soul cannot find some balm on Neo Sports. At the same time, the channel infuriates me. It possesses, for one thing, the single most irritating voice on the planet, an androgynous off-screen sloganeer with a gratingly self-satisfied accent who informs listeners withteeth-grinding regularity of the name of the channel they are watching.

Fortunately for him or her, this occurs offscreen, so that viewers never learn who they can throw rotten eggs at. The executives of Nimbus appear blissfully unaware that this creature’s mere enunciation of the words ‘Neo Sports’ has done more than any rival or enemy can to incite sheer hatred towards the brand name amongst the most Gandhian of cricket fans. And then there are the ads. One can’t blame Neo, which is still a fledgling channel, for filling its commercial spaces with advertisements for itself (after all, how many repeats of Airtel’s ‘Songcatcher’ ads can any station inflict on its viewers without being accused of cruel and unusual punishment?). But who on earth conceives and approves these excrescences on the national psyche? I was in India when the West Indies team was touring, and watched in mounting horror as Neo ran a pair of promos in appalling taste about the visitors. One showed a West Indian at a dhaba, his mouth aflame after being served a deliberately over-spicy meal, running from person toperson looking for water, only to have the Indians there stick their fingers into their glasses, throw dentures into their water, and so on, until he finally flings himself at a tap and discovers it has run dry. The tag line:It’s tough to be a West Indian in India. Bad enough, but far worse was a second ad, in which a romantic black couple is rowed out to the middle of a lake by a boatman who abruptly stops, glowers at them and proceeds to strip off his clothes. The audience is clearly meant to expect that he will assault the girl but once he is down to his shorts he jumps into the water, leaving the couple moored mid-lake without an oar. Repeat tag line: It’s tough to be a West Indian in India. Of course, i can figure out from deep mid-wicket what the advertisers thought they were doing. First, they thought the ads were funny. Now humouris the most subjective of qualities, and though i can’t for the life of me find anything remotely funny in these two ads, i imagine somewhere in this vast subcontinent of ours there may well have been a few people who actually laughed, though i can only imagine they must have been hit by a bouncer on the back of the head when they were young. Second, the bosses at Neo Sportsprobably imagined that this was a clever way of promoting the cricketing contest and in so doing, drawing attention to themselves in the hope of expanding their viewer base. Now it doesn’t take an exceptional intelligence to point out that an ad which demonises a group of people, whether identified by nationality or colour, as ‘Others’ to be mistreated is inherently offensive. And that a story-line that mocks people of that group, and depicts people denying them basic human courtesies, is not funny. Nor that depicting Indians, who as a people must rank amongst the most hospitable on earth to foreigners of any kind, as being neither welcoming nor courteous but positively nasty to strangers, is unfair and untrue: it both promotes xenophobia and denies our true national character. In other words, the ad campaign was fundamentally misconceived, ill-thought out and disastrously executed, and those responsible should be spanked with the business end of an extraheavy Tendulkar bat.

But should there be more? This is where i get conflicted again. I detested the ads, but i was not happy to read in mid-February that the government slapped a notice on Nimbus, asking for an explanation. And worse still, that Neo Sports faces a minimum 30-day ban if charges of violating the advertising code are proven. Not only does that seem unnecessarily harsh towards the company, it will punish an entire class of innocents, the cricket fans. Far more worrying, it allows the heavy hand of government to intrude into the space for public discourse that is so essential a part of any functioning democracy. An official of the Information and Broadcasting ministry wasquoted as saying: The ads were in bad taste and perceived to be derogatory against foreign citizens. Bad taste is a matter for individuals to determine, not bureaucrats or even judges. And if Indians are to be punished for being derogatory towards foreigners, it will not be long before we return to the bad old days when the avatars of Indo-Soviet friendship banned James Bond’sFrom Russia with Love and later only allowed its release under the title From 007 with Love. In a free society, when the media errs, viewers should make their views known, advertisers should protest, and the company should be forced to think twice about its reputation. But let’s get the government’s unimaginative fingers off our remote controls.