I don’t cry often. But the other day I was moved to tears by nothing more consequential than a reality show on TV. I saw Asha Bhonsle crying. Yes, the same legend who moved us to tears with her magnificent Umrao Jaan numbers! In those songs were contained enough pathos to move a nation of fans to tears, and we didn’t need to watch Asha herself crying that time.
So what made Asha Bhonsle cry on TV now? No, no great leader had passed away. It wasn’t a show about the hungry children of Somalia either. It was just a reality show. She cried because one of the participants – sure, one of the more passionate and deserving ones – was disqualified from entering the finals. Because, guess why? Why, he didn’t actually sing quite well enough! And it was a competition. Someone else sang better. So the camera focused on Ashaji, tears flowing down her cheeks, while the whole show went dead silent and a tragic, deeply melancholic music played in the background. Going by the moroseness of the situation, the participant himself should have neatly committed suicide, or at least plunged into chronic irreversible depression.
I mean, what else can life throw at one? It can strike one with a torturous, slow-killing ailment, dish out hunger, insult, deprive one of his near and dear, or even prevent one from qualifying for the finals in a reality show! Wow! So many reasons, one better than the other, to switch on the old lachrymals.
And that’s the point when my own eyes welled up with tears. How pathetic, how degraded must a society be, if we think it’s time to cry when someone fails in a game. Haven’t the same people gone out on any of India’s streets? Haven’t they seen the suffering, hungry masses who share this planet with us, shouldering an unfair amount of simple bad luck? What keeps the same people from having their hearts broken immediately at the sight of so much unmistakable suffering? If they are indifferent to the real suffering out there, what is this reality they are switching on and airing on TV?
I agree that the value of a TV show shoots up phenomenally when the stakes are shown high enough to be worthy of a celebrity’s tears. If a candidate fails and people, including the esteemed judge, shed tears, it means success would have been that much more sweet, more coveted. It means it’s tough, very great, very vital to win at such an important show. Loss is unbearable. Defeat, unthinkable. So let’s all cry because someone lost. Someone else won, but that shouldn’t stop us bawling. We are such simple souls, we can cry when someone loses at a game. And yet there will be no Buddha reborn among us while the real woes of the world continue to call out to us, from all around, from day to night.
The act of crying is a God-given way to manifest one of our deepest, sincerest, most spontaneous emotions. Should we train ourselves to cry at will? I think not. And purely for show sake, what do we do if we exhaust this symbol and then come across a genuine reason to cry? If we are really sad, really sorry, we’ll only have to shed the same old tears if we want to show it. All the world is a stage, but we simply won’t be able to live up to the drama of that one moment. Would we make poor actors then!
So it’s time we stopped crying and tried to help out those in real misery. Meantime, if we need to watch something more real than the world around us, let’s play the Hiroshima bombing over and over again. 1,40,000 people were burnt to death in that one. Surely that’s more of a tragedy than what a reality show can entail. And the tears that’ll come from watching it will not be entertaining. They’ll be scalding tears we would rather not have shed. Of course, our hearts would still be unbroken. We’ll still get on with our lives. But in all probability, we’ll learn to cry a lot less frequently, a lot less in vain. We’ll learn to cry with a lot more respect for the real reality that surrounds us.
