Last week’s post might have left some
doubtful about the Cultivation Theory. Did it mean that only the rural people
were affected by it? Must be or how else would something such as the media
affect urban, highly educated and sophisticated people. Right? Wrong.
When a
team of more than a hundred students from a college in Mumbai got ready
for a field trip to a village in the interior region of Maharashtra, they were
unaware of what to expect in that village far away from the cacophonies of a
city life.
 |
| Viewer's delight |
The bus
ride was a long one which gave one enough time to think about the place that
awaited them. Many huts lined up together just like the slums in the city with
unclean people loitering around to make their ends meet. No proper water or
electricity supply, it would just be like a scene from a movie set in rural
India. Why of all places go to a village? Would they be able to answer if they
ask the villagers something or would a Marathi translator have to interfere?
These were just some of the questions which would be answered only on reaching
there.
Through
many narrow roads the bus travelled with the students in it, looking out at a
view which they rarely saw. A luscious green scenic path which was a feast to
their eye delighted them. And soon they were there- the so-called ‘village’-
Mahalunge.
 |
| TV Antenna- Rural Style Statement! |
Unlike the scenes from the many movies that the
students had seen, here was a stretch of a beautiful village with small but
beautifully decorated huts with a dish antenna overhead on almost every hut
there. Clean and green sideways, LCD/LED television sets and people more or less similar
to the ones in the city- what then was the image that had formed in those
impressionistic minds?What was
surprising was the fact that it was no unclean, smelly congested village with
people lacking manners but some really warm people who in fact knew better
about keeping their surroundings clean. Unlike
Mumbai where one can see slogans like –‘Clean Mumbai, Green Mumbai’, the people
there actually proved it. To the extent that they won prize money of twenty-
five lakhs for keeping their village clean! Now this was a village worth
visiting.
So
different was what the media usually portrayed about villages in general and
here was a village so different from the image formed in our minds thanks to the mass media. No matter where we belong to, media does affect us all in
some way or the other. It shapes concepts of social reality for us.Over a period of time, it shapes our understanding of a particular subject which might or might not be completely true.
- Divya Nambiar
