Propganda - Did You say?

It was the year 1985. I was in England for three months. As it was my first foray outside India it was an eye opener, in many ways.

While there, my colleagues and I had the opportunity to talk to many people. We talked about various issues and often both they and we had to question our basic assumptions about various things.

One day, I said something about what I had read about ‘Russia’ – the Soviet Union, in fact. Alan, a genial Scot, dismissed it with, “Ah, there is so much of propaganda there”. That was a red rag to the bull in me. “Do you mean to tell me that you people in the ‘west’ are not propagandised?” He felt that there was no propaganda in the west.

I asked him to do an experiment. “Watch the news for the next one full week and observe the camera work carefully, whenever there was any news about the Soviet Union. Come back after that and we will talk about it”, I said. He agreed.

At the end of the week, he was back and had the grace or honesty to admit that there was, in fact, propaganda on British TV too.

What you would see is this. There is some news about the Kremlin. The camera slowly zooms in on the tall tower inside with the red star on its apex. But the camera is behind a fence. There is a large tree nearby whose branches have bowed low and you see the Kremlin through the fence, through the leaves of the low hanging branches. This unconsciously gives you the feeling that the cameraman is actually hiding while shooting.

You come away with the feeling that Russia was a very secretive place (Compared to the west, it was) where the brave BBC team went and shot at some risk (completely incorrect).

Propaganda, did you say?

I am guessing here when I talk of the two following incidents, but I have strong suspicion that my guesses are correct.

One of my senior colleagues from the marketing department had to go to the Soviet Union on business. On his return, he was describing what he saw there. “It is such a drab place. Apartment blocks after apartment blocks, all alike, like stacked boxes of matches.

My guess is that he had never sat in the window seat while flying to or from Bombay. If he had, he would have seen the slums stretching for kilometres in all directions. Then, he would have probably found the drab identical apartments beautiful.

Another instance was when a director of the company visited Japan and came back with glowing stories about their quality consciousness and the training everyone he met had undergone in matters quality. “Ask anyone and you get the same answer. They have been trained so well” was how he enthused about it all.

My guess is, if he had been to the Soviet Union instead and had seen something similar, he would have come back and wrinkled his nose and said “Aw, they are all brain washed. You ask anyone and you get the same answer”.

I guess, I guess right.