‘While We Watched’ review: No better time to celebrate Ravish Kumar

Unlike other media-created icons, Kumar does not believe in being—or behaving—larger than life. He wants to get on with the increasingly difficult job of telling truth to power. Shukla’s documentary, a film that plays out like a melancholy thriller, is set over 2018 and 2019, a time when Kumar’s employers NDTV were harassed by government regulatory bodies and forced to cut jobs. Kumar’s 9pm Prime Time show mysteriously found its telecasts interrupted across the country. Death threats. Budget cuts. Colleagues moving on. Through it all, Kumar holds his ground and tries to reason with his audience.

Also read: News and other battles: Vinay Shukla on ‘While We Watched’

“Throw out your television sets." In 2019, I remember Kumar pleading. “The elections are upon us, and I appeal to you to stop watching television," he had said in Hindi, at an event organised by The Wire. “For two months, stop watching. This is the least you can do, and the easiest demand I can make on behalf of our democracy."

Indian television news has become a sick, shrill place. In Shukla’s film, Kumar looks morosely at screens where hysterical anchors from rival channels parrot the agenda of hate, condemning critics of the government as anti-national. He looks exhausted driving past an India TV hoarding with editor Rajat Sharma boasting about viewership. “Kar lo jo karna hai," mutters Kumar under his breath. Do what you want.

“What can I do?" Kumar asks his wife. “I just write every day."

While We Watched is a sobering watch, particularly because Kumar looks disillusioned. When he’s witnessing murderers flaunt their crimes on camera, for instance, or when he has to say goodbye to a resigning colleague. He’s stunned when producer Swarolipi Sengupta announces that she is leaving, telling her he couldn’t have dreamt that she would move on. At the end of that night’s broadcast, Kumar requests his audience to watch the episode again, because it’s been produced by Swarolipi, the best news producer in the country.

“What good is a newsroom without intellectual capital?" Kumar muses, hurt by the growing lack of resources and reporters. Indian TV news, going by the faces on screen five years—and one election—after this documentary was shot, has become even worse. A pliant journalist is a true coward, who, for profit or convenience, keeps enabling authority to flex its muscle. By misleading those who may not know better, they have made “journalism" a dirty word in India.

Kumar is surrounded by ratings-hungry savages, eager to vilify and to further political or corporate agendas, and Shukla’s film leans too heavily— sometimes repetitively—on clips of hyperventilating hate-mongers. It works far better when staying on the calm Kumar, the way he puts together a story, the way he finds the truth.

One insight While We Watched gave me, for instance, has to do with unemployment in India. Unemployment, which was awful then, has only gotten far worse, and Kumar’s investigative conversations imply that this may not be accidental or inevitable, but perhaps more sinister. The unemployed, you see, are easier to turn into a mob. For those robbed of their livelihoods, even lynching becomes a purpose.

Kumar—a man so simple he may well have been sketched by R.K. Laxman—is anything but anti-national. Shukla confines the film claustrophobically to the journalist and his newsroom, with no origin story or background. It is not about where Kumar came from but what he does. While We Watched unashamedly valorises a man who refuses to bend. “Not all battles are fought for victory," Kumar says in the film when receiving the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2019. “Some are fought simply to tell the world that someone was there on the battlefield."

We must speak. What we say may well be drowned out, but as Kumar says, if even one viewer listens and asks the important questions, a difference is made. Today Kumar’s YouTube channel has over 10 million subscribers. Just write every day. Share important articles on social media, fact-check the WhatsApp groups, argue loudly with NRI uncles who believe fake numbers. All our voices matter.

In a lighter moment, Kumar sits at his desk before the 2019 Lok Sabha election results begin to pour in. His co-anchor jokes that before the numbers come in, at this every moment, everyone is currently tied at zero, that all the parties are neck to neck. Kumar laughs, somewhat sardonically.

I am writing this column the night before the 2024 election results, which means that as of this minute, everyone is, once again, neck to neck at zero. By the time you read this in the paper on Saturday, everything can change. Everything. We can only hope. As a nation, we will keep returning to this start-line, level, over and over again. That is reason enough to keep on believing.

STREAMING TIP OF THE WEEK

Aaron Sorkin’s drama series The Newsroom (JioCinema) assaults the viewer with a sanctimonious idealism—and some rigorous fact-checking—that feels too fictional and naive today, but maybe we could all do with some overt sentimentality and, for lack of a better word, hope.

Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.

Also read: ‘Panchayat’ Season 3 review: Not a comedy anymore