Discourse is becoming increasingly fractious, I find. Frivolously fractious too. So much so that labelling it as discourse is an insult to the word. There are more verbal brawls today than there are respectful discussions.
Am I growing out of date, I ask myself, when I fear I cannot keep pace with the histrionics that pepper otherwise routine conversations, sometimes spiralling them into slanging matches. Eyebrows drawn together, brows furrowed, eyes narrowed, breathing rapid, fingers wagging, fists thumping, that is how normal genteel people I’ve known all my life have begun speaking. Everything is exaggeratedly terrible or praiseworthy, everyone is fit either for worship or for the gallows. Hyperbolics are exhausting, when they aren’t disgusting.
Societies are becoming more and more polarised they say. Ironic, isn’t it, in this era of globalisation. This and the other. Us and them. Ours and theirs. It is as if demarcating lines are drawn clearer for combat and it is our duty to recognise and defend the territory we occupy, political, ideological, social, economic, religious, regional, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, artistic, sartorial and on. Ambivalence about whether and how we pray, unsureness about whether or not we support a paradigm, reservation about whether or not a government deserves our support, that could be construed as the vacillation of the typically weak. We must belong. This side or that. Not that everyone on the side we’ve picked necessarily knows all about the side they are defending. One may know nothing, but one still needs to voice opinion in support, all in the spirit of proud partisanship. The speaking voice must be loud and clear even though the substance of speech is shaky and hazy at best.
I’ve stopped watching the news on our TV. I find the tenor there an insufferable effrontery. The decibels are deafening. Even when I mute the newscast to salvage my ears, the myriad contortions of newscasters’ faces are voluble enough. And the debates are a farce. Harangues, rather. When a motley group of guests is invited solely for the host’s pleasure of pulping them in public view. Why they continue to accept invitations is a mystery to me. Masochism? Maybe. Or then, losing face is just a staged sham and there is something bigger to be won off stage.
Yet these debates are consumed avidly by our citizenry. It is prime time entertainment. When allegiances are put to the test every night, when questions are thrown in the face of the other while denying any reasonable room to answer, when their hapless discomfiture and their ineffective dancing around to edge a word in are pounced upon gleefully as vindications of their contemptibility. When tables overturned bring forth wrath, the more intense when the embarrassment is larger. I find this appetite for aggression, the addictive excitement of anger rather disturbing. When viewers vicariously quarrel with all their ‘others’, badgering and berating their opponents paraded every successive night on that idiot box. And it is this style of address and debate that has seeped into our living rooms. Where we see ourselves as legitimised in breaking into quarrels, shouting above each other, slanging one another viciously, sometimes even without provocation. It is as if there is a contagious itch to fight. An itch we don’t wish to cure. One that we are growing fond of.
The itch gets exacerbated during the seasonal tamasha of elections. Head honchos of political outfits bellow through megaphones at their captive audiences shepherded forcibly to the rally grounds hours and hours ahead on the promise of darshan of their lords and masters and, of course, some pitiful lucre. But the address is to the entire constituency, not merely those hapless heads arrayed ahead. The target audience is the mohalla, the state, the nation, whatever the pie up for contest. And the spicy snippets of their speeches become the screaming headlines in the press, print and electronic, and thence the theme of the subsequent debates. Our excitable citizenry is agog, alert on their chosen warpaths, ganging up with their ilk against their adversaries. Often, there isn’t much that differentiates the two really.
Group chats on digital platforms are also at times irritatingly LOUD. Yeah, the capitals go with the volume of the impact our netizens want to make when typing words to match. Many have an ongoing angst to share. Really? Where is the energy for this coming from? Oftentimes the angst has been formatted for them, I suspect, with an insidious reaching in for whatever discontent that might have been simmering in them already and purposefully deflecting it and exploiting it for other agendas. So then we have positions and counter-positions, posts and counter-posts, forwards and counter-forwards, people gathering on their respective sides, defending their threatened echo chambers, picking up virtual cudgels to battle it out on their phones and tabs and other what-have-you-s. Emojis get deployed as missiles. Exclamation marks abound. And then the labels fly thick and fast, that these so-and-sos are this-and-that-and-the-dreaded-other and that they must be challenged, made to rescind their traitorous opinions and beliefs, silenced and perhaps hounded out of chat groups. Wordy warriors wearing their judging hats oh-so-seriously. Oftentimes the labels regress to uncivil name-calling, but hey, civility is an old-world virtue, passé for this volubly brash world of today.
Hmm. I am out of date. For I miss the even tenor that marked debates earlier. That of gentle persuasions, resigned acceptances, the agreeing to disagree and still being respectful of the other. When questions poked but did not bludgeon, when answers were substantive and not mere rhetorical theatrics, when the speaking voice was polite though clear and firm, when the listening ears paid attention not merely to rebut but to first absorb and reflect and then accept, qualify or refute as the case may be.
Yeah, I’m probably a misfit, I guess. And you may agree with that and may have already condemned me with pursed lips and frowning foreheads. No matter. I assure you that when you want to be heard, I will lend an ear. And I will try to reply without the theatrics.
Anyway, shush for now. From me too.
Rohini Paranjpe Sathe
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