The danger of glamorising crime

by Padma Edirisinghe

“House of the dead” is not a macabre term coined by the writer but the name of a book by a famous Russian author of the 19th century. Any way we will comeback from Russia to Sri Lanka first. Or specifically to its media field that has turned it into a twin house of death.

The first pages of many a newspaper today are splashed with sensational news on bizarre and sinister happenings such as homicides, suicides, kidnappings and rape sometimes decorated with blotches of red signifying bloody red that pours out in reports such as”, “Whole family murdered at midnight”, “Wife kills husband and child in a fit of rage”.

So, what? Newspapers have to be sold and such newspapers sell red hot. TV Channels that flash such events sell red hot or capture in their tentacles a huge audience made aghast at the way the island or the world is heading towards. It is sad to note that the weird journalistic trend is more prominent in Sinhala newspapers that reach a wider and more average readership.

Moral degeneration

It is not only old grannies who exclaim, “Goodness me! What is the world coming to?’ But a good part of the country’s populace are now appalled at the moral degeneration.

The exclamation implies that the world just eclipsed was allrosy and innocent, but the truth of the matter, as anybody with an iota of brain can perceive is that the world has always been a mix of good and evil. Even the savants could not transform it to an Utopian copy, however hard they tried. Now to aggravate matters a mammoth monster with novel fangs and an “unstoppable” growing ability has entered the scene. The monster’s food is evil news and he or she thrives on it regardless of the long term adverse effects.

What presumptiveness, the reader will say. And what illogical absurdity, yet others would say, does she advocate the non–publication of crimes? In fact, they have some instructional value too cannot be denied. People would be more careful in locking up doors at night against the beastly marauders and mothers would be more concerned about their young daughters getting late from office .

A walk to the main road at dusk by a mother would prevent her weeping gallons before the lifeless body of her child. But there is something disproportionate about the attention given to grim incidents. Sometimes the girl who began an affair with a married man and broke up a family and later ended up a victim of a horrible homicide earns almost a page interspersed with eye–catching photos of the female who finally ends up a heroine.

Those who end up in heroic status are some who make mountains out of molehills, enlarging little issues that could be easily resolved into mega issues that end in suicide. Their thinking and actions are totally illogical, the issues so insignificant in the context of what most suffer, yet the media usually bloats them to the wronged party .

Sometimes settings are deliberately designed or so, for the shaping of the mind to have recourse to negative action.

While in the upcountry I have heard of a waterfall called Naga Meru Ella (Waterfall where Nangi was killed and this had later become a venue for many terrible happenings as (according to legend in the area) a young woman half naked rises above the rocks at night, her tongue hanging out. She has risen from the dead to avenge her cousin whom she refused to marry and was killed by him. Many a young couple with a deranged mind choose this place to end their lives.

Grim side of life

Fyodor Dostovesky, the well-known Russian author was noted for touching on the grim side of life. Some of his other works include. The insulted and injured and Notes from the Underground. Orphaned young, his own life was far from happy. His father was killed by his own serfs.

A tyrannical father he could have been killed by his own offsprings though this is not directly told. All that bitterness goes into his books according to my stray readings. Though reckoned as one of Russia’s great novelists, his writings had a strange effect. A head of a station close to his birthplace and one with a literary bend had decided to honour the author by getting drawn on the station walls fearful scenarios from his favourite author’s tales.

They were scenes of death, of murder, of grim and bitter encounters, of screaming helpless women, of outraged hooligans flexing their muscles at the “innocents”, in fact all that is horrible and terrible.

Statistics

Does the story end here? A record of statistics taken the following years show this area to have the largest number of suicides. Were they all natives? No. Some were, Some had come there from distant places purposely to commit suicide, the drawings on the station walls all facilitating the process that all religions of the world consider as evil as taking another’s life.

If the newspapers and the TV are set on turning the island into a funeral house or one churning and boiling with savage acts, in short into a ‘House of the Dead’, come, let us join them and fatten the frightful fun.

So the conditioning is as bad as the disproportionate publicity.

Extol the value of precious life by any and every channel and this does not mean the TV Channel only. The prime religion, Buddhism has extolled the value of human life mostly and folklore and literature have taken it up accordingly. Yet life gets cut short by its very owner. Dhamma discourses and teachings in Christianity, Islam and Hinduism too would help.