News not views

In a blog entry, Neha Paliwal points out that food prices after all have not been so much of a trigger for Arab Spring. Earlier Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed had declared food price volatility a fundamental trigger for political instability. Neha points out that inflation-adjusted prices have in fact not gone up in the middle-east – so it's difficult to assert that food prices had a big role to play in the Arab Spring.

It just goes to show that we lack the standards which can let us measure the accuracy of political analyses. Some scrutiny is needed before fiction can make it to the public masquerading as analysis. The conclusions which journalists and writers often draw on economy and politics are subjective – even fictional. Although our institutions – law and governments - don't run on subjective grounds yet somehow a wide gap seems to exist between law and media when it comes to ed-pieces and commentary on economics or politics. It's not just that media stories read a lot different from documents of law. It's that what media offers as analysis is often a selective medlee of laws and data.

Such gaps won't be a problem if entertainment is all that media was offering. But unfortunately truth is claimed to be offered in those sweeping conclusions drawn on politics and news. The interpretation of data – whether it be that of Mr Ahmed, Paul Krugman or Jim Cramer - seldom receives scrutiny. We assume the truth in extrapolation of data judging by the repoutation of the author or the journal.  Stating the extrapolation or adding scatter plots often don't sell the story - so what we're sold instead are prose of doom or self-appraisal written by people who we trust. This may not offer us consistency or semlbance of a truth but allows us to choose our news the way we swtich channels on TV.

Empire State of Mind

While reading Amit Chaudhari's Afternoon raag today some distant memories of my own childhood were evoked. Growing up in Northern India, it seems strange that some of us lived with our minds placed outside our vast country. We had been colony for such a long time that being a colony was ingrained in our society. I was too young at the time to have understood the post-colonial context of my surroundings but I can clearly remember of my English teacher and my grand-dad having an unexplained respect for the British. My dad on the other hand - a rebellious believer of Indian self-dependence – did not pay much respect to the West. He seemed conscious of the Western might and he was proud of having studied at an early Victorian college but somehow managed to fight the tendencies to fall in love with the West – as if having learned the futility of such romance from the previous generation.

The West existed in such unspoken subjects in my childhood. My grand-dad had taken British for granted and at school and without realizing I too was a part of this same system. We all had a tendency to assume British supremacy in all matters. We spoke local tongues but whenever someone had to make a strong argument, switching to English seemed natural. It gave it that official touch. All disagreements over anything in fact came to an end if someone could quote from a book published in English. The possibility of publishing something in English ourselves was so distant that nothing in our world could have possibly questioned the authenticity of a book written in English. In a strange way therefore the Empire was still in our minds even if in reality it was long gone.