One misconstructed idea of democracy is that
it gives opinions the weight of facts, just because they're held by the majority.
We see this in the weak defense Chetan
Bhagat puts for his books’ literary value based on their readership numbers. Here,
his argument contains its own fallacy, the fact that most of his readers are
non-readers, and hence have no basis for judging a book’s literary merit, a
fact he’s made a virtue of like his other mediocrities.
This example, of a mass of uninformed
opinions mistaken for a gospel, is still innocuous. It doesn’t indict anyone,
just gives too much credit where it isn’t due.
However, what seriously concerns me is this
kind of verdict by polls, because here the ruling is against someone.
There would be very few of us who would have any idea of what it takes to
control crowds of such record-breaking immensities; and yet, here we are,
exercising our right to pass judgment on the arrangements from many, many miles
away, having ourselves never managed more than our brood in the zoo ticket
line. Next we will be commenting on the security arrangements
of a visiting president, should a mishap occur.
Such armchair opinions are natural. We fear
reality’s ambiguities, and hence need to have our fingers wrapped around
everything we see and hear, to feel the reassuring closing tips of their conclusions
– and, hence, most of us have strong convictions on who Arushi’s killers were,
whether a particular person was culpable of taking a bribe or not, and whether
the security arrangement of a city we have never been to, a crowd of magnitude
we haven’t imagined, and having never managed more than 4 people, was adequate
or not.
And CNN-IBN instead of collecting the hard
facts from the ground and talking to experts who would know better, would smelt
these shards of opinions into a sword of nation’s retribution, and publicly convict
someone who might or might not have failed.
I have a poll for you – Is the CNN-IBN a
credible news agency or a mass-media machinery posing as one?
Go ahead. You needn’t have even heard of
the channel to bang the mallet of your verdict.
