Small Voices for a Great Future

“There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow”, Victor Hugo
The definition of future in our land has always been enormous. Enormous in the sense of doing something big. Creating a future for a nation. A nation very abstractly defined. We have always remained a people who think big. Thinking big is good, but only if it serves higher interests and also remains beneficial to larger sections of humanity. Here thinking big never had this aim. This is the top to bottom, vertical thinking process that we persistently follow. We always wanted to build a Pakistani nation, the future of our dearly won freedom. This is a great thought. But how did we decide to realize it? We decided to follow dreams of rich and mindless who grafted ideas in isolation. Our education system, so vertically designed, indoctrinated generation after generation that we no more know how to think to get a future for a nation.
Lets think for a moment what a nation really means? It is made of individuals who could be best understood in their small interactive contexts. Contexts we know as communities. Now defining a community is another issue. If we try to get a perfect definition for every human denomination, we shall reach nowhere. Thus the famous saying: "definitions are abstractions and are never comprehensive." The easiest way to define a community is an interactive human entity that shares the joys and sorrows of everyday life in a very direct manner. There is nothing imaginary about knowing each other. If one doesn't have access to water the other doesn't have it either. Availability or non-availability of basic amenities (or luxuries) is a shared issue for a given community. Right now we are not talking about luxuries. We can't afford the luxury of thinking about a community sharing luxuries where basic amenities of life become luxuries.
What could be the definition of a future if we look at the world from the bottom upwards. It would simply be a sum total of most (preferably all) communities getting a better future. It is simple, the greatest good for the greatest number of people. How can we achieve it? Through allowing the greatest number of people get their voice to the greatest number of people. To give a platform to all and sundry (the not too positive term) say whatever the world is in their eyes. To respect this world view. To overcome the prejudice of prejudgement. To allow unsophisticated voices come to the fore. To let people evaluate their immediate environment and respect it with open hearts.
True, this is the death of the mainstream, but what is mainstream. If mainstream doesn't accept the parts that create the whole, it becomes an abstraction. And this is what is happening right now. Even when we send cub reporters to their own small villages, the very villages they left in the morning to come to the university, they get into their parent communities, their mothers and fathers, with a mainstream bias. The psychology of status at work. The "I am better than these simpletons, because I am going to give them a voice." And it is at this point that our community project fails. Our young men and women fail to recognize their own kith and kin.
Overcoming this natural bias is the art of community journalism. This is a typical outcome of backwardness, of predominant illiteracy, of education becoming a privilege. True, the few getting the chance to higher education are privileged, but this also posts a responsibility on the shoulders of the privileged. They are also ambassadors of the underdog. If they fail to recognize their responsibility and act as celebrities in the very courtyards they breathe in day and night, they are doomed. Their communities don't have a future. And if communities don't have a future, there is no nation to think about. We do need dreams to create our future, but we also need to know how to dream.
Community media is one such enterprise that needs technology and humanity at the same time. You can’t feel, you can’t film; you can’t make sense of the simple world around you. A world that is telling its story in thousands of different ways. One has to get rid of preconceptions to listen to the music of the heart. Getting into ones own parent community with a sense of superiority is the worst moral crime of all. It becomes even worse when the visit is meant to bring the reality about the life of a people. State of the art technology is excellent, trainings are a must, but a good heart is a precondition. Journalism for the voiceless is still a mission. It always will remain one. This is one reality never going to change until all ills of human survival on this planet are defeated. Until then we have to keep the torch burning high and bright.

Media For the Commoners

"It was that simple. Chou En-lai knew that he was addressing lonely men, men whose mentalities had been branded with a sense of being outcasts. It cost him nothing to make such a gesture, to speak words of compassion. He offered no programs of industrialization, no long term loans, no mutual defense pacts. To the nations smarting under a sense of inferiority, he tried to cement ties of kinship." Richard Wright, The Color Curtain.
This is the voice of compassion we direly need from all quarters. The have-nots of this country have become a city within the city, the city of the poor. Marx’ words about being two cities within a single city, one of rich and one of poor, can easily be generalized for the whole Land of the Pure. What does the city of the poor, that part of the nation that is the dominant, silent majority, reeling under abject poverty or a minority among them (the so called middle class) ready to go down the spiral to be devoured by it, need to become part of the scenery rather than being the spectator?
What can we offer and how can we do it? The how becomes more important than the what because we have to look for venues of compassion. The only compassionate partner of modern men and women, no matter how backward he/she is, is the media. What type of media might bear the word “compassion”? It is community media. What is community media? Even the present day mass idiot boxes pose to be community spokespersons through giving local tickers and making a mockery of people's miseries by claiming to be “the first on the scene”. They don't qualify to do it. There is no question about it.
Community media is a media that develops out of the needs of a smaller human denomination and responds to its needs, answers its questions, and advocates for its needs. Corporate media, the media running on fear and favor, to be precise, do not qualify to do it at all. The needs of the impoverished and those "smarting under the sense of inferiority" can only be met by something more altruistic. Here again many will object that such an arrangement is impossible in the world of cut throat competition. This is also what we call mediated reality. If good schools are possible, and good hospitals are possible, than why not an altruistic community media? The need of the hour is to understand the meaning of this important phenomenon. To understand how it operates.
First, community media is a patient, audience-based enterprise. One should have the patience to listen to stories and also the acumen to tell stories. One can never tell a story if one is not positive enough to listen to one.. Our mainstream media malaise of stuffing people with preconceived questions is not of any use. Questions must arise from the very soil and souls that are being presented. It is their version of reality that is important, not what we decide is important in our cozy (and not too cozy) drawing rooms. Our being "knowledgeable" is the worst qualification for the job. We need to "come to" them "with the trust of a child," borrowing the words from Peter Gabriel's famous song “Red Rain”.
The very word community media means it is their media, not someone else's. The second most important step is to give the people their voices back. It should not transmit messages in "packages", giving the name of the reporter and the channel that streams it. The person and the community should get their name acknowledged. It is important to build confidence and develop a horizontal system of communication. People should get their views back in a form where they can see themselves; individuals as well as communities should be able to identify themselves. It is the same with movies and drama all over. And those with the tall talk about objectivity know well that there is none. The most objective is what helps the people who lay claim to it the most. That doesn't succumb to narrow, vested interests. If we make this the yardstick there don't exist many. So, enough of the objectivity chirping. And still it is objective. It is never based on fables. It is the truth of a people. Let it be in the open, let it see the light of day.
There is need to develop a network based upon community radio (the most effective), newspapers, or even TV that uses reporting methods in a humane manner. The above picture is one such example. The little guy is feeling comfortable with the camera. He is interacting. The kids are not afraid. They are enjoying being part of the process. All this comes after a patient hour or two. The reporters roam in the area with their elders, listening to their stories, the little ones watching the whole process. Then comes the moment that they let themselves play around in front of the camera. And all this ends up in a photo (also a video clip) where the media is no more an outsider.
The need of the hour is thus to develop a network that lifts images, without bias and prejudice, from the simplest level of human existence (and these shouldn't be social outcasts, exceptional problems), to the mainstream. Every part of the country should get its share of presence on the national mainstream. This can only be done if we learn the art of reporting for the poor, understand the need of "cementing ties of kinship", to give the silent, dominant, unrepresented, but never honored majority of this country, a voice.

Empathy Design for the Water Struck

"Nothing can describe the Confusion of Thought which I felt when I sunk in water; for tho' I swam very well, yet I could not deliver my self from Waves so as to draw Breath, till that wave having driven me, or rather carried me a vast Way on towards the Shore, and having spent itself, went back, and left me upon Land almost dry, but half-dead with the Water I took in."
Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe defines a very pertinent human condition. A condition we can sympathize with, but can not fathom. We need not to fathom it. Our responsibility is not to analyze how much pain one (or all) felt when they suffered at the hands of water. This is done. People are left "half-dead." Don't need our analysis. They need our understanding. The question is how to understand. The instrument of understanding is naturally our heart and mind. It is being fed through information. Information that comes through different sources. One being the modern mass media. Media brings sorrows and pleasures from distant, and also not so distant, lands into our immediate presence. But media always brings in bias with it. It prioritizes one happening over the other. It helps and blurs our vision of reality at the same moment.
There are but other human faculties that help us understand the sorrows of the ones who are "left upon the land almost dry." The best instrument is identification. Identification is the human faculty of putting ones being in other's position. We cease to remain human once we are unable to empathize ourselves with the ones whom we consider our own.
The people who are left in the lurch by the existing disaster are a resilient genre, since "Pakistani society is a pain absorbing society", a German TV channel commented at the very beginning of the disaster. The aids to our perception, namely the media of mass communication, are but an important instruments in this struggle against the inevitable. Natural disasters can not be stopped. These are the testimony of power of nature over the struggle of man to survive. But disasters could be managed. This could be done through preemptive training or post disaster management efforts. The time to preemption is no more. It has already been lost. reasons are numerous: inability of state and society to understand the meaning of interactive, community based, responsible, humane structures could be cited as the main reason. All the talk about corruption, inefficiency, and many many other ills could be brought to one point: non-participatory, vertical system of social interaction, in simpler but more elusive terms absence of grass root democracy; democracy whose natural outcome is responsible attitudes, not only in the political sphere, but more importantly at the social level, down the very grassroots.
This is the problem lying at the heart of all problems of relief and reluctance of the world to come forward with hearts and minds to help a disaster clearly accepted by the world as one of the worst in recent history.
Media could be used in two ways in the present crises. One is the mainstream media. This could be used in a proper manner to cover the disaster. Here, despite the intensive debate on the issue, a coherent understanding of the issue is absent. Anchors with urban bias reaching a devastated site, camera focussed on them most of the time, their will be done all the time, people shown as third world miseries, while the guy sympathizes with them, isn't any service to the people at all. Now if we turn to the other side of the equation, we see the same overdressed, unpreparedness in the newsroom. Guys this is no Eid transmission. Be human. Try to empathize. Your images are being floated for years and all the viewers appreciate your appearance and mannerisms. This is ensured. Now let humanity flow through your body, your word and your body language. No training can teach it. It is you who can unlearn pretensions, harmony with the hapless will naturally flow through you and become an integral part of the image world. And believe me you all will look much prettier, once you become more humane.
The other important media is altogether missing in the present episode. Not that it has been snatched away or swept away by floods. It never existed. This is community media. We do have FM channels, FM radio. The anomaly between cheap and handy broadcasting and community service has shown itself at the worst moment of our history. The times when this country needed this mouthpiece of the poor it doesn't have it. FM community radio stations went through many phases in Pakistan, but never reached the destination. From hobbyists, to militants, to the money mongers, to aid aspirants; but never to community journalism.There is a dire need to instal FM radios in the camps or in the immediate vicinity. Many would think of this idea as a mad man's dream amid such a situation where people are suffering in all possible ways.
I can understand this and also empathize with the feeling. But at this moment of dearth of resources we should not underestimate the role of this cheap and handy instrument of communication, this voice in the neighborhood, the voice next door. At a moment when we have least resources, this handy media could help managing them through bringing awareness among the affected people. Health and hygiene, helping the people through trauma, information about what is available and what is not, and why, wether updates, and update on conditions at the homes they left. All this could be done most easily through interactive broadcasts on community channels. How will people listen to them, how will they respond? Mobile phones helped people to keep in contact with their near and dear. Every villager buys a phone that could catch FM radio. This job has already been don. What is left is the government's (PEMRA's, to be precise) earliest decision to draft a contract structure for issuing community radio licenses. PEMRA can do this, They are neither struck by the disaster nor are busy in relief. Their bit would be to make it possible for the ones left high and dry to get a taste of grassroots democracy. To get the best gift in the worst times.