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| Sunday, 11 January 2004 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Idiot box reigns supreme by Padma Edirisinghe It was the 153 new hospital bus I was seated in. Nothing spectacular about it for it was my homeward bound bus. Noise pollution is something we take for granted in this country now and the conductor kept on bellowing nawa rohala till the swift lip actions change nava rohala to navarola! Navarola! giving the place a complete new meaning i.e. the new roller.
Patriotic To come back to the 153 bus, as if to prove that appearances can be deceptive the synthetic looking female seated by me, with cropped hair and in trouser kit suddenly turned very patriotic. Having plugged her ears with fingers she turned to me and asked, "Have us, the Sinhala race turned barbarians who can't read and write that these fellows keep on screaming the terminus name to make everybody deaf?" I would expand the orbit of the suffering population to all Lankans and not only us, the Sinhala people. The suffering only escalates as with what is happening to the idiot box. Some call it the Idiot Box, on the premise that it breeds a set of idiotic onlookers via idiotic presentations. For my hitherto lukewarm attitude to disparaging the Magic Box as the Idiot Box I scapegoat the very tolerant Buddhist culture I grew in, perhaps hiding my timidity (at calling a spade, a spade) under that sacrosanct shroud... So I go on to voice holy sentiments as its potentiality to be a very useful tool of communication etc. Potential But last December 31, at last I took a clear stand on the issue after watching a set of men and women on the screen several times. The men had pencil - drawn moustaches, were sleekly dressed and looked like overgrown male dolls while the women all wore war paint and had their necks almost throttled by tons of gleaming jewellery. Every half an hour so they would appear on the box screen and announce that it is December 31. Now this is insulting the intellect of the average Sri Lankan viewer as most of the commercial ads do. Giving a list of examples might need this whole newspaper. Just to give one or two, some products are advertised as if the Sri Lankan civilization grew with them from time immemorial whereas these cakes and fruit drinks came out of the producer's womb only a few months back. Some scream out that rice, the indigenous Lankans have been eating for 25 centuries just cannot be eaten without the Oles or Doles. Does it need so many overdressed personnel to transmit a single small fact as that it is the last day of the year? The idiot box has also become a mutilator of children's creativity by breeding a set of kids who sit before it glued to watch all kinds of useless antics but also get them addicted to unhealthy exercises. About two years ago I was a visitor in a house where a set of poor relations from the village to the city had come the same day. Around the TV was on in the drawing room sat the children of the visiting family. When a TV ad starts they would begin parroting out the whole ad before the actual ad progressed. Then they would look proudly at me and others in the host family. "So you know all the TV ads by heart?" I asked. "Yes" a girl answered "We too have a TV at home and now all the ads we know by memory." She, a girl of about 15, and perhaps in a senior class at school sounded mighty proud of this capability. Never did she pause to think of what earthly use the exercise is. Nor did her parents who sat beaming as the children rattled off the ads feel the utter imbecility of the whole exercise. It was apparent that to them it was a yardstick of the proximity of their own offsprings to the children of the city relatives. So the older generation itself shows a degeneration. In fact today there is a grandfather in the idiot box who dances the Go-Go or Hoola Hoola Hoops at the mere sight of a buriyani packet carrying three English letters that enhances its value manifold. A serenely ageing grandfather (grand in more than one way) in our villages would only watch with pity and shame the bouncing greedy old man gone shamelessly jubilant over the impending food packet. Finally we come to the question, who wants to bring up a nation of fools and brainless parrots? It is high time that this product of massive value in the arena of communications retrieves itself from the mediocrity it is falling into. Just because I have managed to get my scribblings onto public media an acquaintance of mine is deluded into the belief that I know all the answers. So he recently asked me, "How is that not a single Sri Lankan is not credited with a great invention that contributes to make human life more comfortable? He went on to give a list of many of those ingenious humans of various countries who have had their names etched in golden letters in world history for doing so. "Inventiveness is clearly lacking in our youth" he declared and wanted to know the reason from me. The dumb one I am. I got away by saying that the country's mental background is not conducive to foster creativity among the youth. Wrong values are stressed , I said. Tinsel of life and prejudiced issues are given too much predominance, I added. Then I consoled myself thinking I wasn't that dumb after all and repented for not giving a broad sweep of how all mind-formative influences are today being contaminated by those accumulating the dough. The idiot box is certainly fast in the game, in which our cultural mores are submerged, under bushels of money. |
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| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
To go off the track or be on the same track, I read a piece somewhere
that a conductor of a Moratuwa bound bus halted at Pettah bus stand kept
on shouting Moratuwa AC! Moratuwa AC! till the hoarse cry emitted finally
changed to Moratuwesi. A buxom woman in her 30s was heading for the bus
when the man in his business exuberance had bellowed, "Come! Come!
Moratuwesi!" Soon the age old cries of the nattamis in this bus stand
born in the dim recesses of colonial Lanka were supplemented by a
thundering sound when the female heartily thrashed the conductor with her
slippers.
