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Without romanticising or obscuring the workings of such channels, what I was able to gather is an environment of informality around content production where studio setups were much smaller and a lot of the final production was based on improvised decisions of the editors, graphic designers as well as the camera persons.

At the same time, owing to its ambitious and expansive reach that has managed to penetrate segments with low literacy, internet penetration as well as access to urban spaces, merely connecting to one person from the world of spiritual media revealed Fan pages, Groups and people who inhabit the world of spiritual television and by extension manage the online presence of spiritual entities. Under the program code it was mandated for all IBF partner channels and recommended to non-partner channels to have a content auditor for the purpose of self- regulation.

Figure 1 Inside the OB van, a view of the multi-camera and editing setup at Ramdev's rally Siting the spectacle In this section I find it is useful to dwell on the oft invoked idea of the local as a site of spiritual practice and cultural production. In this story, the geographical space of the local can be mapped starting from tier two and three cities like Bhopal, Jabalpur, Ayodhya, Alwar, Rewari, Haridwar as well as towns and villages that will soon be subsumed to form the periphery of metropolises like the Delhi-NCR.

I argue that the imagination of place itself has changed as a variety of forms, objects and bodies lend themselves to the act of mediation and storytelling. That the ability to instruct, entertain, mobilize and advertise is not limited to cinema, television channels or private audio companies, marks a huge shift in cultural production from television programming as discussed in the chapter earlier. I argue that it is in this ordinary and seemingly undisrupted life in the city that uninhibitedly travels through different cycles of urban, political and technological times, that the analysis of large media forms becomes obsolete and the post-political, affective and banal become more useful ways to talk about a phenomenon such as televisual consumption.

Narela Industrial Complex. Accessed October 13, Care has been taken in the plan to keep a big portion of the estate green. All over the estate there are green patches of wild bushes and shrubs but no lush and luxuriant vegetation.

As one travels through the marked urban expansion zone, many ground floor apartments and offices display advertising hoardings for real estate brokers offering housing and industrial property on lease hold or free hold — an scheme initially offered to incentivize settlement. Figure 3: Surender Panchal singing on the stage in Narela, also seen on LED screen However, Alipur village of Narela sub-city, situated almost 23 kms from the nearest metro station and accessed only by Delhi Transport Corporation buses during the day has a dual life as a local centre of religious and political mobilization for Swami Ramdev who also comes 35 Kapoor, Ravi "Shoddy execution overshadows excellent planning in Narela industrial estate.

Both the shivirs of Ramdev that I attended were packed with a thronging crowd of over a thousand people from nearby villages. Before his entry on the stage, the saint was preceded by Surender Panchal, a local devotee who was also responsible for spearheading the cause of Yoga in villages around Narela.

Panchal further beckoned the crowd to clap as loudly as possible because their brothers and sisters in Delhi and across the world would see them on Aastha TV pointing to the two big LED screens on the sides.

All these anxieties and aspirations find articulation within, before and after public congregations such as the Yoga shivir through music, lectures and physical acts including Yoga. Since the concern in the spiritual spectacle is not a metaphysical realm but negotiating the complex material world, conversations and representations on the purity, redemption and fitness of the mind and body are central to generating a sensorial field of experience.

One camera was always on the Baba, the second was on the public, the third was a close up of the drumming or clapping and the fourth would be a panning shot of the venue. To revisit the Narela camp, Ramdev elaborately demonstrated different breathing exercises — Kapal Bhaanti, AnulomVilom, Bhastrika and enumerated the effect of each exercise on different parts of the body.

While teaching Yoga and preaching on life, he constantly addressed the children who were all made to sit in the front rows and would then extend his proposition to the adults. Hey motu [fat boy] you should also do pranayama! If the mother is fat and the father is fat, the child will also become fat!

If you are fat, and you have gas you cannot work well! If you cannot work well, how will your family and country progress? Also, the exercise of mediation is not simply between affect as abstract human experience and its transmission through media tools.

All affect or the trace as Derrida puts it Derrida , is first realized in the gramme or language In this section, I will attempt to map the role of linguistic utterances as co-constituting the sensorium. In his book Language and Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu Bourdieu , 57 talks about the economy of linguistic exchanges.

In Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault states that the term discourse no longer refers to formal and linguistic aspects but, to institutionalized patterns of knowledge, that become manifest in disciplinary structures and operate by the connection of knowledge and power Foucault In the context of the televisual sensorium I propose that language indeed plays a pivotal role in creating a field of experience around television viewing.

Trace, then, comes to signify experience in its pre-utterance form and gramme is the linguistic vehicle of the trace.. Linguistic devices embedded in forms of storytelling help establish and recall a continuity in the face of rapidly changing forms of physical technological objects, although such forms like the Bhajanget massively reconfigured in content, enunciation and spatio-temporal significance as they travel through mediums. In one instance, Surender Panchal, the local devotee who had also accompanied Ramdev on his famed political rally at Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi40, sang a song that he had composed especially for Swamij but was set to the tune of Main Nikla Gaddi le ke This became a widely covered media event with Ramdev escaping in disguise.

In another example of combining messages in the same utterance, Ramdev starts making direct attacks at his political opponents by comparing them to mythological demons and bodily diseases. What do we have to do? You just have to press a button to destroy the Tadka of our age! What did I tell you, how big was the Bofors scam? It was less than Rs 64 crore! How big is the 2G scam? How big is the commonwealth scam?

These are in lakhs of crores! How do we go about investigating the truthfulness of these fictions? Does that imply that new media technologies only penetrate urban or semi- urban zones and even so, are only accessible to only certain classes, castes and genders within? Ninan provides an interesting insight in her book on the revival of Hindi newspapers in North India. Expanding telecommunications, including the spread of broad- band telecom made multi edition newspapers more affordable and viable.

In the context of contemporary religious practice and associated activities, the newspaper continues to perform an important role as an object of sociality with its matrimonial pages especially in towns and villages , obituaries, and advertisements of local political and religious events. This localization or the rendering visible of previously uncharted zones of consumption also revived production and circulation of culture in local dialects or languages.

For instance, BrajBhasha43, considered to be the language of Lord Krishna, has seen a huge revival with the resurgence and popularity of devotional and popular audio and video cassette labels such as Sonotekvideo and Bhojiwood and their corresponding YouTube channels. Akshardham temple, also a part of the new spiritual sensorium offers a mix of spirituality and entertainment within a temple complex by means of its deliberate architectural and textual references to ancient Hindu texts and temples as well as the presence of a food court, 3-D film auditorium, joy rides and more Singh , Instead, in terms of bodies and sites both, the new spiritual sensorium is only assembled in electronic images, making them the dominant site of its production.

Compared to previous forms of religious participation such as calendar art, temple ceremonies and audio cassettes audio-visual and electronic mediation significantly changes spiritual practices. As witnessed in the case of the Yog Shivirs, the 43 Brajbhasha or brijbhasha is a popularly spoken dialect of Western Hindi language.

Other dialects of the same family are Awadhi and Khari boli. Braj refers to the region nebulously defined as Vrajbhoomi that was a political state in the era of the Mahabharata wars, spanning the modern day states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and parts of Haryana. The dialect also became the language of medieval Hindi literature including a majority of bhajanscomposed to the Hindu deity Krishna.

These shows produce altered modes of viewing, worship, spatial and temporal engagement, the ascribing of new roles to the subject of spiritual participation and related peripheral sensorial practices such as consuming medicines, food, exercise regimes.

As I have also attempted to illustrate, religious practices are modified and rearticulated as they travel through mass media technologies and become containers or language for nurturing conversations and affinities that are not spiritual or religious.

In the first part, the chapter follows two major initiatives within his campaign namely the use of 3D holograms to stage virtual rallies, Chai Pe Charcha — a video conferencing initiative. The two initiatives explore how new media technologies enabled the possibility of new interfaces between Mr Modi and his audience to remotely reproduce the experience of contact and intimacy.

Next, the chapter explores the exploiting of varied social networks for the first time including platforms such as Facebook, twitter and video-viewing site Youtube but also mobile messenger application Whatsapp, that were all actively used by the BJP volunteers. This section also probes the role of humour and the reappropriation of language in reappropriating political messages to help them travel within existing networks of affective exchanges as well as repurpose visuality for the circulation of political messages.

K Advani, a veteran leader in his own party did not approve of his nomination Even after the start of his prime ministerial campaigning, voices discouraging people to vote for him came from several directions including leaders of other states like Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee and Naveen Pattanaik45 but also from a number of intellectuals within civil society, The prime reason for opposing the candidature of Modi was his alleged complacency in massive communal riots that happened in Gujarat in leading to the death of over people, most of whom were Muslims Thus, it was unclear how he would succeed in establishing himself as a national figure.

It also required popularizing Mr Modi across Indian states where linguistic and regional leaders dominate the political scene. Lastly, the media campaign had to focus on sanitizing and obscuring his links with the communal riots by turning him into an icon of economic development through the highlighting of his urban development and technology initiatives executed in the state of Gujarat. What followed the announcement of his candidature in September up till the elections in April was a period of massive media mobilization in order to overcome the challenges discussed above and help Mr Modi win the elections eventually.

He stared out of full, front page ads in newspapers across languages, commercials across television channels and hoardings across cities, especially Delhi. Commercial time was bought on radio networks to reach out to tier two and three cities.

The BJP also turned up its advertising in a constituency a few days before it went to the polls during the week long polling which ended May The comic book also played on the name Narendra as shared by Modi and freedom fighter, Swami Vivekananda whose childhood name was Narendra to evoke similarities in terms of the sacrifice of personal pleasures for public welfare To generate his symbolic presence across different states, Modi not only ensured that his advertisements and other promotional material appeared in local languages on regional television channels but he also performed his identity as a national leader through a careful selection of attire and a refashioning of his speeches.

During his speech in the southern city of Hyderabad, he started by welcoming his audiences in the regional Telugu language. Not only this, taking cognizance of the ongoing Telangana movement for a separate state within Andhra Pradesh, he also incorporated his support for the movement and congratulated its people on the formation of the new state These spectacles were covered by national English and Hindi news channels as well as local Telugu channels simultaneously broadcasting the Modi image through not only Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi but also other cities in the entire country.

He performed local identities not only in a bid to appease his local audiences but also to simultaneously produce a televisual map of the nation as marked through his travels. Another way in which the image of Modi travelled was through the stories of his travels itself.

An organization that helps Indian citizens register records in the Guinness Book of World Records even sent an application to register Modi for a record 1, rallies.

In the same article it is also mentioned that some within the BJP claim a total of 5, rallies A news report describing his daily schedule described how a fleet of three aircrafts ensured that he travelled to a different part of the country everyday and yet returned to his house in Gandhinagar every night In his original bid to solve the problem of traversing the length and breadth of the country, one experiment with virtual presence was the use of 3D holograms66 to reproduce his presence simultaneously at many locations across the country.

By the end of the campaigning season, while he had made over actual appearances, he had also appeared as a three dimensional holographic image in rallies Dean Nelson recalls the most popular use of hologram as a simulation technology at Coachella concert where the famous rapper Tupac Shakur posthumously performed as a holographic image. However, the use of holograms in a general election campaign, he said, has been done for the first time by Mr Modi De Certeau, as Patraka describes, makes a distinction between place and space in his application of spatial terms to a narrative.

For de Certeau, while a place refers to those operations that make an object reducible to a fixed 66 3D Holograms refer to three dimensionally simulated through the interference of light beams from multiple laser sources to create a lifelike image of an object. Employing this distinction to see how holograms work, one can say that while the hologram only appears for the person or in place of the real person, thus signifying his absence, it also performs an indexical function of recalling the absent body through its exaggeratedly realistic reproduction in the three dimensional image thus establishing a spatial continuity by evoking what the body stands for.

Another distinguishing aspect of the holographic form that attracted people to the rallies was the form of 3-D and the spectacle of wonder that it created. They think he has probably gone to the green room. They wait for the experience to sink in and ask where he is. Is he behind [the stage]? Their faces are so surprised But if he wants to distribute tea here, we will find a place for him.

Tea-stalls with a combination of tobacco shops and food carts occupy a ubiquitous presence in the Indian public sphere. Modi himself described tea stalls as footpath parliaments This is where you find the real pulse of Patna. In the first session held at Iscon Gathiya, a famous tea stall in Ahmedabad, Modi sat among the gathering of ordinary citizens sipping tea for three hours.

His ears were plugged to earphones and he was being live telecast to tea stalls across cities in the country using a combination of DBS Direct Broadcast Satellite and wireless transmission. Not only the people at the Ahmedabad tea stall but also select others at the other venues could ask him questions about his agenda of development and governance. Instead of resorting to his standard fiery, rhetorical and loud speeches he explained his plans, answered questions in simple terms It was certainly not the first time that video conferencing was being used for a national discussion.

In fact, Narendra Modi became the first leader in August to organize a Google Hangout with ordinary people What differentiated the Chai Pe Charcha campaign was that it not only used video conferencing in order to connect Mr Modi to voters across the country but it employed a unique reorganization of visuality because it involved screens at three different locations — one at the space where Mr Modi sat, another space where interactive screens were setup to view Mr Modi and be viewed by everyone, and a third order of multiple screens in different locations only for viewing where people congregated to watch and listen to the question-answers.

In that sense, video conferencing does not perform its original or supposed function of enabling face to face interaction between two parties but actually produces a feeling of belonging through viewing. Unlike a Google Hangout where the conversation was only between those posing questions and Mr Modi, the third layer of audiences here ensured that the conversation also became a staging. Not only this, given the novelty associated with the campaign, television news channels also simultaneously broadcast the spectacle, adding multiple layers of audiences to the conversation in different degrees of distance.

Both, Chai Pe Charcha and the hologram project, I argue, are not only an investment in spectacle building but also crucial in furthering the logic that technological advancement is closely linked to progress in modern societites.

As Martin Heidegger said in his seminal essay 'The questions concerning technology', the full essence of Technology techne is a way of looking at things, a way of revealing things aletheia J. The video conferencing events, then, are also producing an encounter with technologies; visions that were previously unimagined by its publics.

The initiatives described above also reflect Modi's longer history of obsession with and proactive use of new technologies that prefigured a speck in the larger e-governance narrative in the Indian context involving the transformation of urban spaces and citizenship through the deployment of technologies, some of which I will discuss in the last section of this chapter.

Campaigning then also became a ritual of reiterating, imagining together and spelling out the kind of nation and in turn, the kind of citizens that we collectively wished to imagine.

Ideologically, whether these campaigns succeeded or failed in gathering votes, the pervasive desire to manifest, portray and collectively view technological progress and efficiency as harbingers of national development continue to foster.

Do you use WhatsApp to chat with friends? We would like to send out some political jokes, Modi messages and videos. Can you post and circulate them among your friends? This moment, for Rheingold was indicative of a significant visual shift in communication from the oral medium, a recurrent quality of new interfaces. Their small size as pocket devices and the reliance on the visual and literate modes of communication versus aural, also renders them less visible and allows their usage unobtrusively as we perform other tasks.

They also allow us to have multiple conversations, pay bills, surf the internet and perform many unrelated tasks at once. One of the defining factors of the elections was the participation of youth in it. This section explores how mobile technologies served as the primary mode for engaging young people through restyled political messages and the use of social sharing networks, merging affective and political communication in the same interface. Also, since mobile phones were still a relatively new technology, bulk message sending in the earlier times was only a one-way strategy where the recipients could not respond.

The Guardian, 08 April, 77 Rediff. These volunteers were imparted with the task of forwarding the messages received from above to the people in their local databases. As observed in the efforts of RSS volunteers as well as CAG to systematize and maximize the effectiveness of campaigning, organization of voters through information collection was a major and permanent change introduced to the sphere of Indian political canvassing.

However, apart from the gigantic digital media spectacle that the party was able to assemble, what became interesting was the content of the messages being circulated. Before the elections, Facebook and twitter were both used largely in the Indian public sphere only for sharing personal messages, photographs and keeping in touch with friends.

Having observed the primacy of humorous and witty content being circulated through social media networks, the content of the political messages was restyled to incorporate jokes, sarcastic and witty 78 See footnote An important term associated with the 'mobility' of mobile objects is virality or the ability to spread to a large scale within a short time through sharing among digital networks.

It is important to note that a shift to mobile and digital technologies also induces a renewed pace and frenzy in the way messages are being circulated, which was illustrated when Youtube videos and forwarded bulk text messages became potent vehicles for rumor mongering to incite panic among students of North East Indian states living in Bangalore city79 to flee for their home states in and in a morphed video of violence between Jats and Muslims, two communities in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh instigated riots However, merely the presence or availability of technologies does not transform change in an environment.

Rather, they perform crucial social functions of binding communities by making it possible for people to interact in new ways. Special trains had to be deployed overnight to facilitate their return.

The government also used social media networks, text messages and other forms to combat the rumours being spread through SMSes. Eventually, six men were arrested on the charge of spreading those rumours. In this section I produce two fieldwork accounts in order to understand the political-media volunteer as crucial in appropriating technological forms in order to actualize larger spectacle at local levels.

Most messages, he showed me, were actually in Gujarati or Hindi but written in Latin script. To extend her observation in the Indian context, hybridized linguistic practices are a common feature, not only in terms of combining two languages such as Hindi and English but also as a mark of negotiation with the media that prioritize English through the script of communication, such as mobile phones.

Thus, a mixture of Gujarati, Hindi and English became a convenient way during the elections to expand the register of cultural references and bilingual wordplay, enabling more humorous and witty remarks about different political leaders. Similarly, two teams were made to boost social media activity and make phone calls to people in India. Another account is of a female volunteer, Smita Barooah, an Indian professional living and working in Singapore who took a three month sabbatical to volunteer for BJP's 'Mission Plus' My attempt through this brief mapping of the volunteers, party workers and supporters of the Modi campaign was to illustrate how participation as understood in terms of temporal and material investment has undergone a massive shift in the context of political action in general, even beyond this campaign.

Although the mediated strategies of political participation discussed in this section were implemented for the first time during the elections they contributed to a paradigmatic shift in the way we perceive civic participation in larger movements by highlighting the possibilities of remote and selective action.

This reminds one of the original spectacle of cinema where symbolic presence almost succeeds not only in representing the real but also replacing it. For Mannathukkaren, the hologram [and the mediatisation of Indian politics at large] signifies an erosion of ethics and a subsuming of the local by the national- a hollowing of the message itself that gets shrouded by the newness of the technological spectacle evident in the fact that voters turned up at local polling booths unaware and unconcerned who their local candidates were, looking for Modi's name in their ballots.

This question prompts me to address two historical philosophical positions that speculated on the effects of Spectacle on society. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. In such a world as Debord describes, civic action and social transformation do not really change the conditions of living but they only signify a change in what we see in the mass media.

Another theorist, writing almost a decade after Debord who commented on the explosion of the electronic image was Jean Baudrillard. Focusing on the state of the social in a televised world, Jean Baudrillard argued that postmodernity is a post-social world of hyperreality dominated by images and signs produced by electronic mass media Baudrillard To elaborate, according to Baudrillard, the real and social as categories could no longer be studied as realms of expression because they were inundated with 'simulated images' that exist, reproduce and circulate without any dependence on or relation to a real object.

In the next section, I look at the logic of media technologies as they get employed in the production of a certain kind of urban space, the site where India's developmental projects are being materialized. However, these technologically powerd changes do not disrupt existing socio-economic hierarchies. To understand how technologies embed visions of development and simultaneously reproduce them, I will look at two instances from India's relatively recent encounter with the idea of e- governance.

Technology as means or end — revisiting public opinion The first instance unpacks the promise of e-governance by investigating the GIFT city Gujarat International Finance and Tec-city , an artificial city being constructed through PPP Public Private Partnership 18 kms away from the Ahmedabad airport.

Modelled on the likes of Shinjuku, Shanghai and London docklands, the GIFT city will be India's first entirely "smart" city with a central business district CBD where global financial and technology companies can set up business.

It is also a model for the upcoming smart cities recently announced by Prime Minister, Mr Modi where technology will be used to transform administrative systems and optimize the city to make the most efficient use of limited resources. Along with the controversial Vibrant Gujarat festival89, first started in to attract large scale foreign capital investment, the city witnessed major changes in the urban landscape - the rise of malls and multiplexes, beautification of lakes, roads and lastly - the ambitious Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project SRDP , an attempt to create a skyline for the city along the banks of river Sabarmati that also involved displacing over 20, families - mostly migrant Hindus and Muslims, lower caste communities and daily wagers.

While the Gujarat government was taken to court over the issue of displacement and lack of rehabilitation plans, the rhetoric of development continued to assert that "sacrifices" needed to be made in order to achieve greater good.

Similarly with the upcoming "smart cities", documentation on the GIFT city deals in abstract words like infrastructure, services and waste management with little detail on who its occupants will be.

One wonders whether the labourers that toil to build new cities from scratch, laying the water and fibre optic lines will find a place within the smart city. As has already happened in the case of Dholera, one of the first four proposed "smart" cities in Gujarat, farmers have been dispossessed of land and the withdrawal of major private investors has left the city in limbo.

The second instance relates directly to the stakeholders of this modernization - the upper caste, upwardly mobile programmers, technicians, businessmen, volunteers in BJP's media campaigns and so on.

In the interview with Mr Ripal Shah volunteering to organize Chai Pe Charcha, a live video conferencing initiative at tea stalls, told me that his reason to support Mr Modi and not the BJP was his "pro-growth attitude" and enterprising spirit. Shah confidently explained that a minister who could use such advanced and sophisticated technology in his campaigning was surely keeping up with the world In another interview with Manoj Bhatt name changed , a core member of CAG Citizens for Accountable Governance , a non-profit that played pivotal role in data collection, constituency analytics and online campaigning for the BJP, told me that since his engineering college days, he really wanted to "do something" for his country with his skills and seeing Mr Modi's enthusiasm for new technology they took their ideas to him.

Echoing their optimism was U. K Senthil Kumar, the man behind realizing the hologram spectacle Again, he narrates, " He is educated and knowledgeable. That is why we thought of pitching the idea to him.

Others were stories of diaspora mobilization, NRIs leaving their plush jobs in countries like Singapore, UK and USA to come back to India and canvas for a change they personally believed in.

This brings us back to the question of the urban everyday and the electronic publics - those figures central to India's technologically inflected modernity for whom the questions of caste, class, gender and other inequalities represent almost rational and economical problems that can be solved through the promise of e-governance.

Conclusion Ravi Sundaram, in his theorization of India's "dominant electronic public" writes that what is crucial in the Indian scenario is that the dominant electronic public has cohered with the cultural and political imagination of a belligerent Hindu nationalist movement R.

As discussed in the previous section, a 94 Rediff. He explains how a road can serve the technical function of facilitating movement and connecting spaces through uninhibited circulation. At the same time it can also be an excessive fantastic object that generates desire and awe unrelated to its technical function.

The last section on past and proposed e-governance initiatives signals a similar promise embedded within the the massive drive for technologization of the public spherethat simultaneously generates amazement and enthusiasm for visions of speed and efficiency of which the spectacle becomes the most immediate realization..

Thus, while the Modi wave worked temporarily as a blinding spectacle, its stage was already set by a systematic argument for imagining progress through technologically infused spectacles such as the GIFT city as well as a transformation of citizen subjectivities where being a progressive citizen is aligned with supporting this form of development.

The distinguishing factor between the Nanavati scandal and the other two incidents is that it was circulated by means of a tabloid named Blitz while the other two incidents occurring almost four decades later proliferated by the means of television news channels and the Internet.

Because of excessive generation of detail and the way in which different modes of investigative journalism allowed audiences to immerse themselves in the universe of these cases, their respective moral crises appeared to have become the concerns of a wider public sphere. Examining the differences between the older media event that is the Nanavati scandal and the newer media events, this chapter tries to highlight the distinguishing features of the new media event itself. The situation of the newer incidents in a time where the pervasive nature of technologies of the self and State surveillance are constantly reproducing the human body as temporally and spatially indexed thus allowing for reality to be recorded and revisited in retrospect.

This causes a situation where bodies are eternally performing and private acts always have the potential to be rendered public, producing new forms of transgression..

At the same time, the development of new discourses such as forensic science and cybercrime provide new registers of evidence, speculation and fantasizing about the event. This chapter explores how the old and new media events differ in their creation and articulation of regimes of public fantasy, justice and morality.

Dayan and Katz , 1 Syntactically, they describe disruption and transportation as two features of televisually created media events because televisual events such as the broadcast of a global sporting event or the launch of a space ship or a war are all disruptive since they replace daily programming schedules. At the same time they are also able to transport their audiences in real time to the scenes of festivity or crime depending on the event they cover.

For Dayan and Katz, media events in general are unique moments as they not only enthral their audiences given the scale and simultaneous reach to a massive audience but also because they bring together competing television, radio and other forms of broadcasting channels to focus on a singular event in multiple languages and serve varied audiences uniformly.

As often seen in the reportage of global media events, newspapers and channels often borrow exclusive footage from and make citations to their rivals. They propose that the society attains the highest form of social integration through mass communication in such events. Dayan and Katz , 15 Of course, media events are not of a singular kind.

They range from global sporting spectacles to coronation ceremonies to election spectacles, wars, economic meltdowns and scandals among others. This particular chapter moves between old and new forms of mass media to see the changing construction and proliferation of scandals that in turn reveal parallel and alternate regimes of public fantasy and justice but also produce commentaries on the evolution of the media event itself.

Differentiating between scandal a much earlier form and the media scandal, John B. But scandal would not have acquired the salience it has the in public domain today and would not have become so critical in determining the fate of public figures today were it not for the fact that scandal has become interwoven with [media] transformations which have shaped the modern world. He argues that essentially, some transgressive acts are more transgressive than others depending on the social environ in which they occur.

Also, the continuous and heightened visibility that evolving forms of mass media afford us, are constantly shifting the notion of what constitutes private and public domain. Since transgression or the act of crossing moral boundaries depends on their evolving threshold, the zone of what constitutes a scandal is ill-defined Thompson , Preface. The kind of scandals I wish to discuss here concern not only popular but also ordinary life incidents that became fabled, household stories in contemporary India through hypervisibility.

Three actors remain central to the discussion in this chapter — citizens, media and the law. What is interesting is that the scandal always has a dual life — one within the court of law and one outside of it that is created and sustained by various sources including the people involved and the ongoing media coverage.

What I try and probe through the triad of citizens, law and media around a scandal are two notions of justice — legal and affective. While all crimes get judged in the court of law in order to deliver justice to the victim and the perpetrator, the judiciary is charged with considering evidential and factual information to do so.

For instance, an act of murder would be judged on the basis of its brutality, intent and age of the perpetrator and victim but it may not reflect the gravity or outrageousness of the social and moral transgression it may have committed, thus often denying a cathartic reconciliation to the dominant social order. In such a situation, the media event indeed becomes a middle ground for facilitating a parallel and often an alternate discourse to the legal one.

As Thompson observes, one feature of the mediated scandal is that it allows a performative role to non-participants such as the public at large and media entities in order to transform a private cause to a public concern. Then the role of mass media is critical in regularly enacting the scene of crime as well as narrativizing it in order to deliver a coherent story and highlight the transgression involved. Media events are also important because they construct a story where none existed — by using interviews to establish view points and draw character portraits and putting together pieces of incidental information in a chronological order to present it in the public court.

Writing about decontextualization in the age of information explosion, N. The focus here is the sensational murder by Cdr. After the murder, Nanavati confessed to his crime but later changed his confession and was pardoned by the jury. However, the case came up for retrial as the jury was declared perverse and Nanavati was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Eventually after the war with China, Nanavati was pardoned due to the intervention of Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India and migrated in obscurity to Canada with his wife and children.

As Gadihoke observes, the case was peculiar in that it unfolded against the turbulent backdrop of political unrest in various parts of the country as well as the war with China However, what catapulted a case relatively unknown outside of the metropolis of Bombay was the hyper sensationalized media coverage by a tabloid named Blitz among other media outlets that kept the case alive with speculations and fantastic alternate versions to the minimal and factual reality that trickled through the court proceedings.

Nayyar, Compared to an earlier scandal of the Elokeshi trial in in Calcutta which relied on street theatre, songs and paintings for its circulation J. Jain , ; the Nanavati case relayed through press photography and through the national presence of Blitz.

It is worth noting that not only did Blitz anticipate the tropes of tabloid television in post-liberalization India but the piracy of its stories by other newspapers caused the Nanavati case to gain an unprecedented audience File photographs of all the three characters became extremely important in order for Blitz to establish the character of the people involved. Gadihoke explains that by alternately using Cdr. Not just them, the photo display used in The Indian Express juxtaposed Nanavati in his car against the mise-en-scene of thronging crowds to show visible evidence of his support.

Not only this, wherever, they failed to find a photograph, the tabloid compensated with textual portraits and superimposed illustrations thus trying to add a layer of speculative richness to overcome the limitations of press photography. Gadihoke concludes that where the flat, expressionless photos proved to be inadequate, the illustrations and text intervened. In the context of South Asian cultures,Francesca Orsini suggests that the mapping of love could be productive to build a history of private life since it allows us an insight into emotional expression and verbal exchanges that are strictly exchanged in deep confidence.

Orsini My discussion on the new media scandals will draw upon the above mentioned forms to generate a thick description of the events as received from various sources.

Foucault replies that he is anti-structuralist but that events should not be placed at one level, they exist at different level and produce varied effects. Unlike the Nanavati era, these scandals are pitched in an oversaturated media economy where hundreds of television channels in English and every regional language serve news round the clock.

Also, it has been more than a decade since the digital explosion and India is close to being the largest population on popular digital networks like Facebook and twitter. Also, from being the prized possessions of a few photographers and filmmakers, recording devices have virtually reached every citizen in the country in some form or the other, through small and grainy cameras and audio recorders embedded in mobile phones, web-cameras installed in personal computers, surveillance cameras in shops, markets and public places and so on that are capable of documenting practically every minute of daily living.

Another important development that has influenced the investigation of crime is the relatively easy access to as well as increased reliance on forensic evidence and testing that are regularly employed to determine criminality. In April , Aarushi Talwar, a teenager was brutally murdered on the cusp of her 14th birthday in her own house in Noida city on the outskirts of Delhi. It would be an understatement to say that tomes were produced on the proceedings of the case. Hundreds of articles, television programs and social media discussions were churned out in the five year period as the case took thousands of twists and turns.

Singh was transferred for his defamatory utterances but his story laid bare the erotic tension around the incident involving a young teenage girl. From then on, everything was allowed. I will now attempt to chart the new registers of live video footage, forensic evidence, self-documentation and online utterances as well as speculative media investigations that constructed the media sensorium around the case. Live Next in the montage, were still photographs of the blood soiled mattress, Rajesh Talwar being arrested, intercut with a video clip of people carrying a dead body.

After exhausting the actual footage over thirty seconds, the segment moved to a graphic reconstruction of the scene of crime and ended with an interview with a retired police officer who criticized the poor handling of forensic evidence such as vaginal swabs of the victim. Compared to the Nanavati scandal, one realizes that while the former relied on sensational writing and repetitive use of the same photographs of Nanavati, his wife and her lover, the new media event is characterized by a plethora of sensorial material on demand.

Every visit that the Talwars made to the court was recorded and endlessly played on loop for the day, interspersed with interviews and photographs of their neighbours, police personnel, legal and criminal experts. Did [Aarushi] stumble across a dark and dirty family secret? The crime has been committed by skilled, educated, clever people — that much is obvious… Even if the culprit is eventually found, and the Talwars get off the hook, the country will continue to be stupefied by their stellar performances on television night after night.

No tears, no sorrow. Updated: Mar 19, This New Narco.. The Aarushi verdict has been overturned. For now. Nupur and Rajesh Talwar have been freed. The court has ruled there is insufficient..

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