We live in an age when newspapers are posting videos on their websites and TV news channel websites are publishing articles and long-form editorials. They are turning into each other and what they are becoming is something entirely different from what either used to be. What is missing from the equation is words on paper.

Newspapers seem to have lost the race for breaking news. Where they haven’t lost this race, growing internet penetration will make sure that they eventually do. The reason, for the most part, is limitations of paper as a medium. That is not to say that television media is not dying. TV news is evanescent — it flickers past the screen and is gone forever. The viewer can’t go back to what he saw a moment ago and he can’t look up what he saw a few days ago. TV media has a time limit and has to function within it. Much like newspapers have to function within their respective space limits.

The web, as a shared platform for all manner of content — written, audio, and video — offers traditional media outlets a stable replacement for their old and limiting containers. The condition of course is that they stop being what they have been till now. A TV channel will not remain a TV channel once it embraces the digital envelope, nor will a newspaper continue to be a newspaper once it gives up the limits of its paper body. They will simply be media outlets — one next to another — with no differences except those that they choose to wear for purposes of identity.

People (often journalists) grow sentimental at the mention of newspapers dying, but they are thinking more about paper than about news. Your copy of the daily newspaper may very well be replaced by a mobile app pretty soon, but this does not necessarily mean the death of all things print. It just means that print will stop being the vehicle for content that the web is a better vehicle for — information on real time events. Print can still be a solid presence in the market by focusing on content that is perhaps slightly more timeless than daily news.

In newspaper terms this means that the front page, which until now had been dominated by headlines screaming about what had happened the day before, will need to accommodate opinion pieces and editorial analysis. Print publications, in order to survive, will need to turn themselves inside-out. They will need to highlight authoritative opinion and devalue fact-based reportage.

In case you haven’t heard — and you probably haven’t because our “national” news channels think celebrities, the 9/11 anniversary, and random Delhi/Mumbai happenings are more important than a flood that has devastated hundreds of villages — Large parts of coastal Odisha are suffering the effects of severe rains and extensive floods. The only reason I know of this is because all my friends and family are in Odisha and I keep getting updates over phone from them. The only other source of news about the ongoing flood situation in Odisha is the OTV channel and the OrissaDiary.com website. People in whole villages are stranded on their rooftops, waiting for relief material from the government to arrive.

I am not here to complain about the floods. I want to point out something more general than that — the “national news channel” label and how it distorts more than just our information priorities.

Why exactly do the likes of CNN-IBN, Times Now, and NDTV call themselves “national” channels? All they ever seem to do is dance around the metros and sing about metropolitan concerns. Every broken branch and water-filled pothole in Delhi and Mumbai is flashed as ‘Breaking News’ while LARGE parts of India, especially the villages, remain absent from our TV screens (unless some gross “human rights violation” takes place which city-bred studio pundits can then pontificate on). Heck, when they are not doing politics (which is at least relevant), they would fill in the moments with garbage on celebrities and the occasional brainless sportstar caper, but far be it from them to spare a glance at the rest of the nation. Unless there is a scam (flavour of the season), anything outside of the metros seems undeserving of their attention.

Any citizen of India with half-a-brain should be able to tell that the matters that are served to us every weeknight as national concerns are anything but that. At best, they involve the political fates of a couple of hundred people and at worst, they are flimsy little bits of nothingness that have caught the personal fancy of a celebrity news anchor (editorial meetings my ass!). But such is the state of affairs that a large number of us have started equating the state of Delhi with the state of India.

One of the phone calls I have made in the past 24 hours has been to my friend Adi in Jagatsinghpur, Odisha. He is a school teacher who cycles 20 kilometres to a school in neighbouring Kendrapara everyday and back (that’s 40KM in total). He teaches kids spoken English. His village has been officially warned of possible flooding and he, along with his extended family (parents, younger brother and his wife and baby, and Adi himself) have moved all their stuff to the rooftop. They stay awake during nights for obvious reasons. Hundreds of neighbouring villages in the region are underwater by now and the coming 48 hours will decide what shape things will take.

Adi called me a few days ago, while his village was still being battered by rains, and asked me how I was. Puzzled, I asked him what he was talking about and he told me his TV was showing him images of Delhi under severe rains and that the voice-over was saying “aam janjeevan ast-vyast”. I laughed and told him not to believe the news channels as what passes for “severe rains” in Delhi would not even be called a drizzle in Odisha.

Adi took what the channels were saying at face value. It’s on TV, he thought, so it must be important. This, by the way, is also how most of us think, even if unconsciously. A news channel’s choice of topics is very likely to influence our own ideas about what is important and what is not. Day in and day out, TV convinces us that some things are more representative of “the nation’s mood” and that a studio anchor has his “finger on the pulse of the nation”. Horse shit! Adi, in spite of being under rains (REAL rains mind you, not Delhi drizzles) thought that the rains in Delhi must somehow be worse than the rains in remote old Jagatsinghpur. It did not occur to him that maybe TV exaggerates things, or lies, or is just plain stupid as far as prioritising information is concerned. It should have.

I am not asking the “national” channels to change. I know they can’t. I am only pointing out the mislabeling at work here. Central solutions suck in general. News channels are no exception. This applies more to limited media like TV (time limit) and newspapers (space limit). On the web, one is at least free to choose his news and go local if he/she wants to.

Our “national” news channels are national only in that they have their headquarters in the national capital and other national hubs. Odia channels show me news of Thailand more often than the national channels show me news of Odisha. Their view of the world is their business, but their view of India is indeed much in need of an update.

Shamans are links between human civilisation and nature. This duality is called the Purusha-Prakriti struggle in some Hindu texts, Purusha means man and Prakriti means nature. Human civilisation survives in spite of the existence of the relative brute chaos that is nature. And yet, it can’t destroy nature because that would mean destroying humanity itself. So a constant conflict exists and a balance must be maintained.

A good way to explain the Shaman’s job would be by use of the aboriginal village as an example. The village people need to go into the forest to hunt animals for food, to gather fruits and vegetables, and to cut trees for wood. But if they do it too much they will end up damaging the forest beyond repair and bring ruin upon themselves.

The forest on the other hand, needs its animals to be safe and its trees to stand tall as that is its purpose. Its concerns go beyond the well being of human beings. It is responsible for much more. So it protects itself as much as it can by being a dangerous place. Humans who enter it are frequently mauled by wild animals and fall prey to dangerous diseases. But the forest will not wipe man out as man too is part of the cycle of nature.

The Shaman is the link between these two bodies. He is a human who does not live with the others. The Shaman’s hut is often quite some distance away from the village. His job is to be on neither side and yet be on both. He mediates the interactions between man and nature.

The shaman leads human hunting parties into the forest and tells them which parts to hunt in so they do not disturb the forest’s balance of life. He gathers this knowledge by communicating with the forest’s spirits and by his experience as a semi-forest-dweller. The villagers heed his voice in these matters. Thus he helps the forest survive. On the other hand, it is he who heals those who the forest has wounded and helps human society survive the forest’s as well. He does this with help from his knowledge of herbs and drugs that the forest itself provides.

I think this shaman-link is a grave loss in modern societies. Our disrespect for nature stems from this loss. Thousands of years ago, before modern scientists discovered the delicate thing we now call the ecosystem, these forest dwelling tribes understood the value of not killing animals and cutting trees out of arrogance.

Empires are a manifestation of influence. This influence can be hard (military) or soft (cultural). The hard variety involves use of force to subjugate and/or occupy colonies. Force depends on many things and never remains with a party for long. Eventually, force alone becomes incapable of sustaining influence. This is when secrets come in handy.

If an empire is to expand (an empire that does not expand, dies), it has to allocate resources to its centre in order for it to remain the centre. This becomes difficult if all of the empire’s strength keeps getting spent in holding the colonies down. Significant amounts of attention also needs to go into holding the empire’s conscience down at home (seeing as how domination is a generally seen as a bad thing).

The secrets come into being as rationalisations. The true intent behind the empire’s domination is hidden behind rhetoric regarding justified cause for what the empire is doing. In time, these rationalisations become somewhat mainstream and the facts they hide become bona fide secrets. The unveiling of these secrets becomes the largest possible risk for the empire.

Things require given cause. Without known and accepted cause, no structure can endure. The empire is a result of man’s desire to dominate, but it can’t be referred to as such. Hence, secrets become invaluable.

The Gaia hypotheses, as it was originally proposed by James Lovelock in his book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, suggests that the Earth self regulates. Let me elaborate.

Through the course of its life, planet Earth has undergone many changes. Sometimes, frequent volcanic eruptions have overheated the atmosphere by filling it with ash and greenhouse gases, sometimes external forces like massive asteroids have seriously damaged the atmosphere and the geography of the world.

Lovelock noticed that in spite of all these factors, the proportion of gases in Earth’s atmosphere has remained more or less the same, ever since life took off as a dominant phenomenon. I think the technical term for this is “homoeostasis”.

This is a very important observation because the state of life on Earth relies to a heavy degree on the balance of gases in the atmosphere. Even seemingly tiny shifts in this delicate balance can seriously affect the planet’s life-supporting capacity. Lovelock compared this to atmospheres of other planets like Mars (which was a curiousity among scientists back then as far as life is considered) and predicted that Mars is a dead planet. The planet’s atmosphere didn’t reveal any signs of homoeostasis upon telescopic observation. Later missions proved him right. Mars is dead, as far as life of the Earthly kind (carbon-based, oxygen-breathing) is concerned.

Lovelock came to the conclusion that there is something about the Earth system that constantly regulates the state of the atmosphere to keep it in that delicate life-supporting state. Gaia is simply the name he gave to that phenomenon.

While the theory was strongly contested when it first came out, recent years have found many new takers for it. Because of the obviously semi-religious connotations of the theory, some quarters have interpreted it differently, giving it a magical colour. But for anyone interested in knowing more, I recommend Googling “James Lovelock Gaia”.

Lovelock also makes some dire predictions for our future as a species. He says that global warming (regardless of whether it is man-made or natural), is pushing the boundaries of the Gaia principle. Gaia moderates the balance of life by switching species on and off. For example, if a certain species of rodent becomes too numerous in a certain habitat and starts to seriously threaten the balance by consuming its resources too quickly, nature brings into being forces that may eradicate or contain the rodent species. This can be in the form of a superior hunter species, or a disease-carrying virus that would wipe the species out without affecting much else.

If humans continue to be a threat to the balance of life, it is entirely possible (says Lovelock) that nature would quickly and quietly wipe us out while letting the rest of Earthly life remain.

Such arguments always pop up. But poverty vs space exploration is a false choice. India’s space program has actually helped the country’s prime concerns in many ways.

Some of India’s poorest districts owe their primary schools to ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation). Some tribal villages are simply too remote to have education establishments in. India’s EDUSAT program (educational satellites) has enabled beaming of the government’s UGC education channel to the children of these villages. The school has a TV set. That does it.

Also, satellites have been put in geostationary orbits that scan India’s geography for mineral deposits. These deposits when mined, provide employment to entire villages for years.

Similarly, weather monitoring satellites have helped streamline agricultural endeavours and government agencies advise farmers regarding crop seasons based on the estimated dates for the arrival of monsoons. These satellites are also a big help when it comes to storm warnings in coastal regions.

India’s defence of course is deeply dependent on satellite imagery. I don’t think this point needs elaboration.

There are plenty of ways ISRO helps make India work. I would suggest picking up a book called Touching Lives: The Little Known Triumphs of the Indian Space Program by S K Das.

Should India invest millions in space exploration while much of its population fights poverty on a daily basis?

Suppose a thief stole something from you and you want him caught and punished. You come to me, a moral relativist. I work on the idealistic plane. I tell you that, if you had been in the thief’s place, you would have done the same. If you had been pressed for money, or faced with the prospect of your children starving to death, you would have stolen too. This is moral relativism.

This approach is considered wrong by some because while it helps put things in perspective as far as morality is concerned, it does not help solve any real world problems at all. Perhaps you would have acted exactly like the thief if you had been in his place, but the truth is that you were not in the thief’s place. You did not steal. The thief was in his place and you were in your place. According to the laws of your society, it was the thief who committed a crime and therefore, is deserving of punishment.

People think stories are content and books are the form they take. But it is not true. Stories are form too. Only ideas are content. Stories, most of the time, are envelopes that carry ideas because a particular idea won’t work in another form.

Most of what passes for content is actually only form. Form that carries the content that is ideas. The words that go into the making of a story, and the order they follow, are only design elements.

Ideas need containers. Without things like stories, they would remain mere thoughts in individual minds. Stories are to society what ideas are to an individual. An individual grows when he thinks. Societies grows when they tell stories.

A friend came over to my place and decided to stay the weekend. Then he remembered the newspaper waala and called him up. It was a 30-second conversation. The man recognised my friend by voice, said okay when my friend told him not to deliver the next day’s newspaper, and that was it. As an afterthought, my friend told him to bring the bill the day after. That was it. They were done.

I got to thinking how the same task might have worked out if the newspaper distribution system was run by a large company. My friend would have had to call a customer support line and talk to an automated voice on the other end. After a lot of key-pressing, he would have had to enter some sort of customer ID and specify the calendar date on which he did not want his newspaper delivered. Then he would have received an SMS confirmation of the request with a code which he may or may not have to produce at a later date if it turned out that the whole process had failed. I will not go into the details of what he might have had to go through in order to get his bill the day after. Use your imagination.

When my friend talks with his newspaper waala, he does not need to get into specifics. Their conversation works out just fine without numbers, confirmations, and registration. A very human kind of understanding permeates it all. Human conversations are illogical, irrational, and human beings communicate best when there is an element of ambiguity involved. The elaborate customer service mechanisms that I have to deal with every time I call up my phone company can’t simulate a human conversation because they work in the service of an “organisation”. Organisations, by definition, are organised. They can’t not be organised. They can’t adapt to easily deal with ambiguity as easily as a human being can.

The music industry was changed forever when mp3 files came to be the default unit of music media. Before the single soundtrack became the fundamental unit in the music market, that position belonged to the record. That is why the sellers were called “record companies” and not “song companies”. Music lovers bought a CD of 10 songs and ended up truly enjoying only one or two of them. They couldn’t choose to buy individual soundtracks unless they illegally ripped songs off a purchased CD. In an ideal world, a record company would have noticed the demand for such a market model and embraced the mp3 format, but it didn’t happen that way. The companies fought legal battles against teenage downloaders and spent money on advertising campaigns that made downloading music seem like a mortal sin. In due course of time though, the single song did find its way into the record companies’ good books. They slapped DRM tags on it and went about their way in the usual fashion.

The good thing that came out of all this was that no longer could a bad song ride into people’s music libraries simply by being in the same CD as a good song. Good songs get downloaded, bad songs get ignored. That is what the new single-unit model made sure of.

Oddly enough, the flexibility of the web hasn’t done much to the market that deals in words — book selling. This is especially odd because the web is fundamentally a text-based environment. The web is different because it is based on a whole lot of words (text, code, source etc.)

The default unit in the book market remains the paper book and the nature of our favourite genres hasn’t undergone much of a change either. Novels are still long and chapters are still the building blocks that go into their making. This is not surprising since, even in the music market, it was the distribution mechanism that changed and not the form of music.

But that is not entirely true, is it?

The record can be split up into songs and the songs can have their own independent existence. The novel loses everything if the chapters become independent. This is why it is unrealistic to expect the web to change the book market. The form factor does come into play when we consider web compatibility. Forget book-length narratives, people won’t even sit through a 5000-word article.

What the web CAN do is become a field for short fiction. The single short story can become the equivalent of the single soundtrack. In the minds of those who read fiction, the short story is still part of a collective — an anthology, a collection, or a series. While the idea of a short story collection may not be something evil, this collective does not have to be a tangible construct. It can simply be am identifier — a label — a title or description to help contain a mass of short narratives.

What that means is that the short story does not have to be part of a physical book. It can exist on its own as a work of fiction. If it needs context, then that can come from a label. Each Byomkesh Bakshi detective story is an independent work, but it gets context from the title and the shared character set. A reader, if/when he finds a Byomkesh story, does not need a physical construct (like a book) to be able to place it in the right folder in his mind. In the music market, such contextualising happens by way recognising artist names. In the book market, it can happen through author names and franchise names.

Think about an online marketplace where you go and find short stories listed. Some are independent of franchise context, some belong to a particular series (Byomkesh Bakshi?) and all stories are brand new. You read excerpts and click on the buy button next to the stories you find interesting. You pay… what? about 10 rupees for a story and it is added to your library.

The problem is, we don’t have suitable micro-payment systems in place to make such a marketplace possible. In addition, I have a feeling that such a market will work more for short fiction that falls under some manner of concept umbrella. For example, people will be more likely to buy stories featuring their favourite characters or stories by their favourite authors than go for something standalone (both in idea and author terms). Think about it — Would you rather buy from DetectiveStories.com or ByomkeshBakshi.com? A story’s presence is felt not just in the words it uses, but also in the anchors it places in the backs of our minds.

It is possible to free fiction for the web, but it will take some serious thinking and a rather adventurous spirit among publishers. Heck, if the micro-payment thing wasn’t in my way, I would have done this myself by now.