JUST SPAMMING | Making A Joke Of A Serious Issue Through Debate

Hogging the social media limelight in Tamil Nadu was a peculiar debate that not only gave enough fodder for people to laugh it out and the meme factories to whirr without break for more than a week but also embodied the dumbing down of the television media. The meaningless discussion that triggered a verbal war on social media and other platforms only threw up adequate grist for jokes, abuse and snide remarks on the obsessive love for dogs.

As those following the developments would know, it all started with a Supreme Court suo moto order on July 28 directing the authorities to clear all public spaces of dogs in New Delhi. Self-styled dog lovers rose in anger asserting the right of dogs to live wherever they wanted to and in whatever way they chose to and sought remedy through various avenues. Some hit the roads with placards, choosing the democratic path, while some others rushed to the court opting for the legal recourse with another group voicing their opinion on social media.

With the national level debate – to let dogs have a free run through public spaces or not – raging at diverse forums, a private general entertainment television channel that runs a popular (yes more people watch it than other programmes) reality show picked on the topic and brought people with opposing views face to face. True to the genre of the channel, ‘entertainment,’ the episode was indeed entertaining. But when some participants, viewers and media critics took those things spoken and also expressed in other forms of communication like hooting, barking, squealing seriously, it led to social media channels pouncing on it.

As it is its wont, the particular reality show (now some who were part of the debate claim that it was an orchestrated drama that did not reflect any ‘reality’), grazed at the tip of the serious issue involving the Supreme Court, trivializing the entire subject and injecting acrimony into it. The debate saw people, lined up on opposite sides, pouring vitriol on each other and making insensitive retorts to narrations of heart-wrenching personal losses. To put it otherwise, though the airing of that particular episode would have helped the TRP ratings of the programme to soar to the skies, it left a lot of bad blood in the ground.

Without touching upon the legal nuances of the subject, whose genesis itself was in the hallowed precincts of the Supreme Court, the debaters with marked prejudice and well-marked ignorance went on and on with some participants sounding absurd. One of them, said to have links with cinema, said that if you were aware of a street corner infested by stray dogs you should not frequent those places after a particular time in the night. Though the celebrity anchor cut him to size and said that he had no right to tell people not to go anywhere to avoid the canine population that had overrun the locality, that participant later went into a rant, defending himself, on social media.

That small-time actor challenged the producers of the reality show to telecast the entire proceedings that were shot for close to half a day. His point was that the edited version, slashed mercilessly to fit into the one hour or so slot in the television programming did not convey his real views though he did not say that any of his quotes, say like don’t go if you know there are dogs, were tampered with. His desire was that his longish spiel should be heard in full to understand his point of view about dogs and the love for them.

Another participant, said to be an actress in Tamil cinema, also put out a video after the telecast of the programme, alleging that she was not heard in full in the debate and what the viewers saw and heard had given them a wrong perception of her opinion. For another young participant, his mother, a Tamil film lyricist, took up the cudgels on social media and said that her son representing an animal rights organization in Chennai, was at the debate with data and legal documents but the ‘animal lovers’ were not eloquent enough to put across their points effectively. They know only to cuddle dogs but not to effectively argue, she said, adding that if the anchor or any other channel could interview her son individually, he would have argued convincingly.

Perhaps taking a cue from the mother, a YouTube channel interviewed the young man giving him the opportunity to spill his pearls of wisdom in the public domain. Among those pearls of wisdom was the complaint that human beings were exploiting animals by stealing their milk, honey, skin and such things. He also put out messages in social media making it clear ‘The life of a human being is not more important than the life of an animal.’ He even went to the extent of saying that those who consume animal products and services were terrorists for billions of innocent animals.