The news as the Neighborhood Auntie

Tuning in to one of the local news channels some days ago, to get a sense of the weather, I found the newscasters enthralled with a really sleazy story about an affair between a priest and a stripper turned sordid. The sleaziness in the story lay solely in the hypocritical moralizing delight that the journalists were taking in the story. It was, frankly, a non-story, with nothing to recommend it as newsworthy other than its prurient character, which, as is the wont of mainstream media, was masked by a veneer of false piety.

A rhetorical question from my wife captured, I thought, the situation perfectly. " Since when," she asked, "did the news become the neighborhood auntie?"

The Neighborhood Auntie, as every person of Indian provenance knows, was the dreaded local surveillance machine, circulating news about anything and everything that happened in the neighborhood. Which girl was talking to which boy; who was seen surreptitiously smoking a cigarette; who was cutting classes at 11 am, when they should have been in college; who landed a job with which firm; who scored how much in their class 10 or 12 exams; who was having an affair with their secretary; who was running a mild temperature last week; who had stopped their yoga classes; who had a fight with their domestic help; who had purchased a new pair of spectacles or car; whose son or daughter had an inter-religious marriage.

The Neighborhood Auntie's preferred perch was a seat at a window, at which, with infinite patience, she could sit for hours observing all who passed by. In Calcutta, where I lived for several years, there were numerous such Neighborhood Aunties to be found at their respective windows each day for several hours in the mid-to late-afternoon. The ostensible reason for their being there was to spot their children coming back from school and, later, to monitor them while they played with other children in the building compounds or roads. But the hours of the watch far exceeded the time really needed for both objectives. (The Neighborhood Aunties also creeped out the security guards in sleepy Lake Gardens, and deprived the poor sods of chances to sleep on the job).

Neighborhood Auntie was not beyond embellishing stories she had heard in passing them along, and, if you were someone she did not like, well, she was not beyond concocting stories outright to slander you. Years later, kids from the neighborhood, now grown up, would sorely recall some scurrilous narrative about their 'loose character' spun from the malignant imagination of Neighborhood Auntie.

Neighborhood Auntie, in short, was a Weapon of Mass Destruction, Terrorist, and Department of Homeland Security all rolled into one.

She was also the purveyor of information that was utter garbage, without any redeeming social value whatsoever.

Which pretty much sums up much of the average news broadcast--- especially on a slow news day.

Incidentally, the channel got the weather wrong that day. They predicted a heat wave for the next three days, which turned out, stubbornly, to be overcast and cool.