On the third day of the international conference on Interrogating Masculinities at St. Stephen’s College, along with other sessions, the third session was very interesting. It was focused on “Through the Looking Glass”. Dr. Karen Gabriel delivered a special lecture on ‘Intersecting Gender-Sex(uality) : Notes on the Sexual Economy’. The way she presented all the aspects of relationship between knowledge and eye, Indian Income Pyramid, India : Chronic Conflict and many more things, it was almost meditation for me to listen to her. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

When she was speaking, some random thoughts were coming to my mind. Though some of its part doesn't find direct connection with the lecture, yet I'm trying to correlate them. In the age of audio-visual medium,when we start playing with information and tampering with facts to make news unnecessarily interesting and sensational, the whole purpose of medium gets badly affected and it loses its autonomy. Marshall McLuhan says, “Medium is message”. Seeing has been considered as believing. But the distortion of image and lack of totality in its presentation are the great threat to the credibility of media. In the country like India, people live not only below poverty line (BPL), but also below media line (BML). Information is power in itself. But due to lack of right and useful information, they don’t take well-informed and wise decision.

The social reformer and revolutionary Hindi poet Kabir said, “तू कहता कागद की लेखी / मैं कहता आँखन देखी”। But what to see and what to believe is the question in the present era of information overload or information garbage. The limitation of our seeing due to lack of availability of true and integrated information with an eye to the uses and gratification of audience is the challenge of the day. Once G. B. Shaw commented on British media, “Today newspapers miserably fail to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.” Today, it won’t be wrong to say in the context of Indian visual media.

So, through which glass should we watch the world ? Yes, the best, efficient and trustworthy camera available to us is human eye, made by God. Our insight and foresight can help us to observe and understand the activities and happenings of the world right way. It is also unfortunate to believe that the images in the books of NCERT which play an important role in shaping the sense of history in children, are also changed. When the government of a particular party comes to power, it adds two pages in the book of history of Rajsthan and contrary to this when the govt. of other party comes to power, those two pages are torn and removed from the book. This is the unfortunate present reality of the presentation of our historical facts.

“Five Broken Cameras” is a worth watching documentary on a Palestinian farmer's chronicle of his nonviolent resistance to the actions of the Israeli army, directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi. It deals with how the things are happening and being shown. Finally I remember and want to believe a philosophical couplet :

है देखने का जौक़ तो आँखों को बंद कर
है देखना वही कि न देखा करे कोई.