Judged from this standpoint, Indian media can be said to be in the grip of the silly season all the year round except that they manage to make some parts of the year sillier than the rest.

There has been a bountiful harvest of non-stories this summer which the media have gleefully flogged to death. Indeed, they have never had it so good. Actually, the instances are so many that it is difficult to decide where to begin and where to end.

Well, mindful of protocol and warrant of precedence, let me begin with the President, Ms Pratibha Patil, herself and her son.

Her visit to Mexico and Brazil coinciding with the leanest of the silly seasons in recent years, the media did not even have to peel their eyes for molehills which they could make into mountains. They got incidents on a golden platter.

The President forgetting to bow before the Indian and Mexican flags during the Guard of Honour on arrival in Mexico City was an appetite-whetting hors d’oevre, presaging some delectable main dishes. And they were not slow in coming.

In Brazil, the Indian media were simply thrilled by the sight of the near-empty Senate which the President was ceremoniously led to address. It did not occur to them that empty or full, the highfalutin, hortatory, homilies composed in ponderous officialese by the mandarins of the Ministry of External Affairs and the President’s secretariat mutually reinforcing each other would have left the Senate cold anyway.

Then came the air-dash that the President’s son, breaking off from her delegation, made to Florida with the innocuous intention of exploring avenues of collaboration in the educational field.

This was made so much of that one would have thought that he had committed some hefty bank heist (to borrow the picturesque description by Mr Bill Clinton of the US media’s lampooning of his wife and Presidential candidate, Ms Hillary Clinton’s spurious claim of having been under sniper fire in Bosnia).

Then there is the ever-obliging Mr George Bush who sent our media into an overjoyed overdrive by blaming the world food shortage and the consequent high prices on the sumptuous repasts to which the Indian upwardly mobile middle-class wannabes numbering 350 million have developed a voracious taste.

If only the media whiz kids had done some arithmetic, as apparently Mr Bush had done, they would have found that consumption of an additional kilo equivalent of foodgrains morning and evening by each of the yuppies amounted to a staggering quantity of an extra 700,000 tonnes daily which is not exactly chicken-feed.

Even the belabouring of Mr T. R. Baalu over his efforts to get gas allocation to his sons’ companies would not have snowballed to such relentless proportions but for the setting in of the silly season.

After all, he did not do anything that countless others at all levels of the governing and political classes have not been doing.

From my experience of holding various positions in government and public sector, I can confidently proclaim that this influence-peddling extends to officials of all categories and journalists as well. They make requests and write letters of a similar kind to each other all the time, not even sparing Public Service Commissions and sometimes even the individual members of the judiciary known to them.

The ‘holier-than-thou’, self-righteous, sanctimonious bawling at Mr Baalu can only be explained by a particularly virulent form of silly season this year.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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