Jagathy Sreekumar's Cognitive Dissonance

If you are a Malayalee, you have by now seen that video in which Jagathy Sreekumar speaks his mind about how anchors or presenters should behave on television. The venue was the grand finale of Munch Star Singer Junior - a reality show on Asianet. It is plain to everyone who is familiar with any amount of Malayalam television that his scathing attack on anchoring was directed at Ranjini Haridas. His problem with Ranjini’s style of anchoring is that she speaks a line or two about the previous performance before going to the judges to hear the scores announced. He argues that no one except the judge of the event has a right to speak about the performance of the participant and if an unqualified speaker such as the anchor says something about it, it is blasphemous and unacceptable.

Fair enough, I accept that as his personal opinion. Except, it isn’t. Moments before he launches the verbal tirade directed at Ranjini, Jagathy says “I like Yadhu (one of the participants) the most” and later he follows it up with “I was at a function earlier this evening and all the housewives in the audience asked me to tell the judges to give the prize to Yadhu. And I am saying this because the public opinion should be heard”.

Wait, what? So essentially he is saying

• No one should, on any stage, make a comment about the performance of the participants except the judges but I would love it if ‘Yadhu’ wins the prize.
• And an unqualified speaker does not have right to say stuff when there are qualified judges around and then he plays to the gallery saying their opinion is what matters the most.

Pause. Deep breath. What? Okay, Cognitive dissonance QED.

To me, as a person who has done a fair bit of anchoring, an anchor is well within his/her rights to express his/her opinion on the previous performance and especially so in Ranjini’s case because she rarely uses anything except encouraging language. If you just want a person to call out the next participant’s name, you might as well use a tree.

What is even more WTF is the fact that there was unanimous applause to Jagathy’s statements and Berly the popular malayalam blogger wrote an open letter to Ranjini Haridas in which he tries to shred Ranjini’s take on the same in Deccan Chronicle. Now this, I cannot stand. Berly’s whole argument seems to be based on this premise: Jagathy is a wonderful actor who is deeply loved and respected by all Malayalees. True. Ranjini cannot speak good Malayalam and speaks only English. True. Therefore Jagathy can say anything he wants about Ranjini and she and everyone else should accept it. False.

What irks me most about Berly’s post is the usage of words such as aanatham (manliness) and nattellu (backbone) in his piece on the same. It is clear that such a piece does not target the opinion expressed by Jagathy or Ranjini but the people involved at a personal level. It is most unfortunate that such statements are made in public domain and people are allowed to get away with it. There is a very strong tendency among Malayalees (sorry for the stereotyping) to pull down a person who does good work but is not yet an established personality, even more so if that person can speak some good English.

When God was designing his own country, he got two things wrong on the configuration machine – he turned up the humidity rate to double of what it should have been and turned down the humility quotient to half of what it should have been - a simple typo between humidity and humility perhaps. The basic problem with Malayalee (me included) is his sheer arrogance and inability to accept something good for what it is. The Malayalee has a beef with almost everything (*mild chuckle*), except the widely accepted superstar. And so there is and always will be a lot of negativity surrounding Ranjini Haridas.

PS: Minor edit - I have changed the last line of this post since it was distracting readers from the point at hand. Perhaps it calls for another debate at a later stage.