The transformation of the media into a money machine is a price that India has had to pay for our economic mutation (one can’t call the post – 1991 phenomenon ‘development’ without a shudder). Consider the latest issue of Outlook Business, the cover story being on small town tycoons, who have grown businesses working out of Class C towns, without ever considering a migration to the Big City. One such entrepreneur featured grew his business – manufacturing and selling pan masala and gutka – exponentially to list among the wealthiest in the country today. The issue celebrates his success, with an article that speaks of sales, profits, diversification plans and more profits.
Instead, it should have ignored his story, for he is a merchant of death, a man who has made his millions by selling an addiction, by poisoning people, by driving to poverty, families that incur huge hospital bills on a gutka addict with oral mucous fibrosis, the precursor to cancer. By placing the onus on the Indian consumer (‘we don’t force anyone to eat anything; it is the consumer’s right to choose’), these merchants of death - for there are many like him - fool no one. The gutka consumer is largely illiterate, a victim of peer pressure and hopelessly inept at understanding the implication of his consumption, instead placing trust on a brand that betrays him with vicious regularity.
Yet, for the media, such considerations don’t matter. There is no other denominator in which business can be understood by them or by their readers, other than the cold definition of profits. This is not just regressive, it is macabre.
In GK Chesterton’s quaint story, The Man in Green, the President of a country speaks with a character named Lambert about another person named Quin.
‘Is he really off his chump, do you think?’ asked Lambert.
The old President looked after him with queerly vigilant eyes.
‘He is a man, I think,’ he said, ‘ who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man.’
Lambert laughed. ‘Dangerous!’ he said. ‘You don’t know little Quin, Sir!’
‘Every man is dangerous,’ said the old man without moving, ‘who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.’
