How facile our obscenity laws are, was amply proved today in the way Indian news channels treated this story.
With the Milan Fashion Week just kicking in, the photos of 27-year-old French model Isabelle Caro, shot by photogapher Oliviero Toscani for the no-anorexia campaign, are big news in Italian newspapers. Billboards across Milan have brought traffic to a halt as the extent of Caro's illness ruptures all certainties.
Caro has been this ill since she was 13 and had posed willingly. She wants to eat but can't.
Fashion capitals around the world have been on an anorexia alert ever since the death of a Brazilian model last year. Not that the Indian fashion industry is, by any stretch of imagination, run by the no-eat, stay-thin brigade, but what is wierdly funny is the way most national channels here chose to run the story, with the actual billboard carefully blurred out.
Thus, you had visuals of Milan-ites looking up at billboards that were under a big image-blur. Point totally lost.
The sensibilities of the Great Indian Middle Class, it would appear, are so fragile that Caro's illness would have been mistaken for a show of obscenity. Indeed!
I is obscene. Therefore, I is.
4 comments:
We were taught, in some journalism class that I can only abscurely remember, that it is the responsibility of the media to guide their audience in the right direction, to lead with the written word and not just 'report' facts. The photograph stirs deep within me a sense of disgust, abhorrence and ............fascination almost. I am tempted to look again and again. It reinforces the horror of the situation. Well said!
Dear Vani,
That is typical of the way some groups in India HAVE to react. It is some form of an obsessive compulsive disorder to establish a holier-than-thou moral standing over the rest of the world. In a way such an attitude acts as an oppressive influence on the society which keeps all its passions underground when it comes to sex and sexuality.
These negative reactions from India (I am just guessing, I am seeing this picture for the first time and hearing about anorexia for the first time from your blog which has been a bit educative) are in a sense good. It draws attention to the fact that there was a nude photograph somewhere and more people came to hear of anorexia and some who have no idea of this slimming disease as BBC calls it http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/769290.stm search for the picture, and more people get to see it and become aware...
Personally I am shocked that there is such a syndrome...It wouldn'take long for this syndrome to be discovered in India, not just among fashion models, if we don't watch out ...
And I fed your entry into one of my blogs, relevant or otherwise..
thanks for sharing..
www.izmirmatbaa.com
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