Remember Joginder Sharma바카라™s famous last ball in 2007? Or the Kashmiri boy, Qazi Touqeer, who won Fame Gurukul in 2005? How about the young computer graphics trainer, Rizwan, who ended up dead on railway tracks near Dum Dum? Or the Shivani murder eight years before that? Maybe hazily바카라¦for we live in amnesiac times, pockmarked with phases of sensory intensity, as the news tickers strafe our minds. The wish to document every second runs through us like a compulsive obsessive disorder바카라¦yet, strangely, our experience of living has perhaps never been as fragmented and elusive as it is now. We don바카라™t see the swirls and indents in our morning cup of tea바카라¦unless digitised in our phonecams. Out on the streets, we see people as atoms in motion, non-phrasally, as it were. Bursts of coherent feeling come only on Twitter, with that same explosive T20 brevity.
When did we become what we are now? We have a dramatic, if rough, marker: the turn of the millennium. The more we look at it, the more we see a cusp phase where the old and the new collided. Take two episodes of violence from two decades ago. The villages of Jehanabad then stirred national horror with caste massacres: feudal violence, from an older world. Around then, a Hindu zealot in Odisha바카라™s Kandhamal burned a Christian Âmissionary along with his two sons. A new genre of violence was inaugurated that바카라™s still with us. Difference? In 1999, it evoked collective shame; today it바카라™s a numbing normal.
That was the nature of churning a nuclear power was undergoing. Then, the media too detonated. TV news boomed, the call centre universe bloomed, reality itself became a show. Everything became miniaturised. ODIs begat T20. Riots devolved into solitary lynchings. Instead of singular experiences, we have an assembly line of blurred Âmemories. What do we rescue from that abyss? Prince, the five-year-old who sat in the pits of a 60-foot-deep borewell till he was saved? While TV news reached its lurid depths? We revisit that moment, and Prince too.
In our angry, fleeting, perversely post-truth world바카라”one with a surfeit of information, but no ethos바카라”the big is diminished, and the small rescaled to bring to us the proverbial 15 Âminutes of fame. For simplicity, we anoint the last two decades as 바카라˜recent history바카라™, and hunt down people and episodes바카라¦a random selection of not the biggest events, but ones with a Âcertain symbolic mystique. Little hooks through which we can read ourselves. We also reach out to some of those who were at the centre of these last bits of experiential permanence; to discover what the kiss of media did to them, what the increasingly slippery nature of our age did to them, and try to fathom what they have done to us.
Read about the 12 forgotten newsmakers who faded out in the past two decades
