Aakar Patel writes a column titled “Reply To All” in the Mint newspaper on alternate Saturdays; these are available online at http://www.livemint.com/Articles/Authors.aspx?author=Aakar%20Patel&type=wa. His writing on 29th October on “Why educated Indians are only half-literate” had a number of interesting points on the available talent pool in India for the IT industry and the English media business; reading this column brought to mind a number of related points that I had wondered about in the past. I will cover some of them in this post and hope to do the rest fairly soon.
The article talks about the poor language skills of a majority of the reporters in the english media. I think that apart from language, there is also an issue of content; I suspect that many of the reporters and anchors are (to misappropriate a phrase from NDTV) incapable of “going beyond the headlines”. In the aftermath of the 26/11 attack on Bombay, a regular feature of the 9 o'clock news on NDTV was to have the anchor talk to someone from Pakistan. The anchor would try to get the guest to agree on some point or the other; if the guest (often a print journalist or a member of the Paksitan establishment) chose to be non-cooperative, the anchor was often at a loss since (s)he was no match for the intellectual and debating skills of the guest. Also I don't know whether it was because I was more impressionable and less cynical at that time, but I do think that the participants in some of the current affairs discussions I've watched on Doordarshan in the eighties and early nineties were more knowledgable than the rent-a-quote types that show up on the private news channels.
I suppose this focus on english language skills could be criticized as being “elitist”. But then, if the person's primary task is to communicate a story in english, is it wrong to expect/demand above-average proficiency in the language?
In any case, I don't think the problem in the media business is because of the lack language skills alone; if that were the case then what explains the state of the Hindi news channels? It is not that the Hindi channels or the channels in other local languages offer more substance than their English counterparts.
Is it that the tabloid approach of all the news channels simply reflects what we the audience want? Is this the obvious outcome of our fascination with sound-bites, executive summaries and information in 140 character tweets?
The article mentions that “in India quality thins out very quickly” in connection with the availability of talent for the media industry. This scarcity of quality holds true in a number of other areas as well; for e.g. in education, there is a significant chasm between the top-tier and the next. I guess the increased participation of the private sector in education has meant that there are more good quality schools and colleges now than say twenty years ago; at the same time the private sector has contributed more than its fair share of mediocre institutions. Also while some of the new private schools are comparable to the “colonial institutions” mentioned in the article, these are often very expensive.
