There are times when you wonder if your head and mind resides in the right course, especially after a dangled phase of disillusionment with life and its priorities, in general. Bachelors of Mass Media, as they call it, is meant to help you fit into those over-sized multi-tasking boots that the fourth estate demands in the 3.0 age. Deadlines are sacrosanct, even if it comes at the expense of excellence.
One of my major issues with the course has been the amount of confusion it breeds. When I entered this booby-trap at Wilson’s, I had my mind and vital organ fixated on becoming a press journalist. One distinguished female anchor at CNN was a source of endless boners throughout my tweens. Another desk worker at The Times of India, New Delhi fitted my definition of violent attraction. Halfway through my first year in BMM, the display monitor of a Sony handycam replaced her as my muse. I relished dictating terms to it. I loved forcing the actors to undergo umpteen re-takes. I almost went to prison once for filming a barred place after trespassing on private property. I did not mind. As long as I had a camera with me, they could have very well put me inside bars for sedition.
Then came the army of David Ogilvy and Theodore Levitt, imposing upon us the beauty of an idea and the tact of selling. Kurosawa and Kubrick followed soon after, leaving us in further doldrums, with their fiddling of the three acts in a narrative. Gramsci and his cronies were never far behind, with their twisted and subdued ideas of domination and consent. Soon we were straddling without a life jacket in the waters of the Mississippi-sized creativity expanse. I still wanted a job that enabled me to write. But at the back of my mind was a niggle that I could earn decently as an account planner in some ad agency. I had more or less accepted my handicap at direction, but I still reckoned that I could make films better than Ed Wood.
All I knew about myself throughout these hurricanes of indecision was that I wanted to do something that stood out amidst a heap of employment applications. Something that was marked with a 6B black pencil, in bold perhaps. My professor would emphasize in every sermon that the ideas and figures that revolutionize the course of future events need to be small and simple. Consequently we were so obsessed with capturing the flickers and sparks that we let the fire rage, unhindered and unfettered.
By now, we are perfectionists at ignoring the broad canvas. We think Pat Robertson was diabolical in blaming the earthquake in Haiti on its national hubris, and we will rally full-throttle against it. We will come up with posters that espouse the futility of believing in Creation; we will make documentaries exposing the travesties of bishops (sexual or otherwise) since the inception of Christianity. We will, however, unremittingly ignore the Facebook campaign for humanitarian aid to assuage the 500, 000-plus victims of the calamity. As tyros in the information dissemination industry (the media fracas, in short), seniors unabatedly push and shove us to pursue juicy stories. Two years into the course, more juice is the buzzword. We love the hoopla that comes with selling a destination when we take up advertising in our final year. None of us would overtly confess to relishing the prospect of digging up stories in conflict-prone areas, which is what awaits us if we opt for journalism instead. Maybe, savouring juice is an essential part of human nature. No girl likes to suck the dry ones after all.
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