End of civilisation

Straight Face
By PAMELA PHILIPOSE
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By the time the sun shone on the third day of TV-less darkness, things were seriously out of joint.

Cataclysmic does not quite describe it. For a few days last week, Delhiites had a frightening brush with their own mortality. In other regions of the country, disasters are measured in terms of cyclones and earthquakes, fires and bomb blasts. In Delhi, we measure disaster by the number of hours Messrs Cablewallahs Inc decide to deny us our daily fix of cyber cocaine.

By any token, last week’s three-day TV blackout in Delhi would constitute the grossest of human rights violations and would measure 9.9 on the Richter scale in terms of the train of destruction it wrought.

True, we did not have our houses collapsing over our heads and water coming up to our necks, but in the scale of human suffering isn’t the sight of some 12 million people gazing on a blank TV screen interminably more worthy of the most urgent rescue measures? How does the nation expect us to carry on a decent conversation if we hadn’t, on the night before, seen Kaun Banega Crorepati?, played ‘Antakshari’ with Annu Malik or watched Govinda display his 32 pearlies on a countdown show?
Does the rest of the country even have the faintest idea of the mental agony that this cruel denial caused us?
Let me explain what empty TV screens did last week. Meals, which were once convivial family affairs arranged around the TV set, went back to being the eat-and-run snacking of yore. Marriages began to give way at the seams, because both Mr and Mrs now had the time to dwell on each other’s flaws and foibles in detail, something they had meant to do these 15 years but couldn’t because the ‘‘chotta sa breaks’’ in TV programmes were never long enough for a truly heartwarming slugfest. And look what TV sets going on the blink did to our children. Programmes like MTV and Channel V, we all know, were specifically designed to render our progeny into manageable if static life forms. With Backstreet Boys or Ricky Martin refusing to wriggle their backsides and distract them, thanks to the treacherous cablewallahs, our sons and daughters were back where they belonged — on the streets, keeping the neighbourhood awake with their Kawasakis, their 5000w stereo systems and their nifty Colt automatics.

In short, life as we knew it, was stood on its head. By the time the sun shone on the third day of TV-less darkness, things were seriously out of joint. Whole communities started displaying symptoms of cyber cocaine withdrawal, cold turkeying into the night. People lost weight, displayed sudden urges to consume sweets, fell asleep in the middle of conversations. Eyes turned glassy, eyelids drooped, facial skins paled and the bodies of those in advance stages of addiction started twitching inexplicably.

If things had gone on in this fashion for much longer, we would have witnessed mass migrations on the scale that hasn’t been seen in these parts since the days of the Partition. Like Mad Tughlaq driven by a great thirst into deserting Delhi in the 14th century we, the latter day Tughlaqites, made insane by a parched sensation in the brain, could well have been forced into searching for more congenial living environs where the cable TV runs for 24 hours.

It pains me to document this piece of social history, but document it I must in order to draw the attention of our fellow citizens to the unbearable lightness of being that characterised our lives during this punishing interregnum. If we who constitute a 5000-year-old civilisation are to retain our sanity, the show must go on, folks, not off.

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