Selfie and sensitivity
As tourists, do we have a moral responsibility towards the history of a place?
I was struck by an image I saw recently, of tourists at the Tehran International Book Fair posing in front of a photograph of a destroyed Syrian town, as though they were part of a victorious army. A man wore a green helmet and a military vest and sat on a motorcycle, talking on a walkie-talkie, flashing a V sign; behind him was the scene of an utterly devastated city. In another picture, a woman in a hijab had her right arm raised high, with what looked distinctly like a grenade in her fist. Another young man looked as if he was going to start the motorcycle. And the fourth image showed a woman with a headscarf (a helmet on top of her head), smiling as she posed on that motorcycle. Jenan Moussa, the Arabic network Al Aan reporter, who tweeted the photographs, found those images insensitive.
It reminded me of a macabre experience I had had at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, the museum of the Cambodian genocide where, until a few years ago, the curators had prepared a map of Cambodia made entirely of human skulls. Their aim was to horrify visitors; on my first visit there, in 1995, I remember seeing tourists flashing the V sign as they posed in front of the map. When I mentioned this in response to Moussa’s tweet, Jon Lee Anderson, the correspondent of The New Yorker magazine, quipped, “Selfie culture is all about amoral narcissism."
Amoral narcissism—for that’s what it was. Vidya Krishnan, an editor at The Hindu, recalled seeing teenage girls pout and pose like teenage models with the late South African president Nelson Mandela’s “matchbox-like" prison cell in the background. I have seen other such acts, steeped in illiteracy—of tourists in Berlin racing up and down the grim, undulating steps of the Holocaust Memorial.
Martand Singh, who was secretary of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, once said, “Ultimately, a god becomes an ashtray." My late mother, who was a tourist guide in Mumbai, used to get annoyed with tourists who tossed cigarette butts near the sculptures in the Elephanta Caves. Those caves mattered to her not only because they were divine for many, but because they were part of a continuous link of stories that connect India with its past.
What makes these tourists behave this way? It is a desire to leave one’s mark; the wish to be important, to matter. We live humdrum lives. Being at an exotic location is adventure enough; making that place part of our narrative, in which we are central, plays to our vanity. It allows us to forget our insignificance.
There is a scene in the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail where Tom Hanks tells Meg Ryan: “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino."
Coffee at Starbucks may no longer cost $2.95, but the sense of purpose that decision gives the man, however temporarily, is crucial in allowing him to forget his insignificance. The tourists who take bizarre photographs at least don’t scrawl their name on a monument—as many do at historical places in many parts of the world—but they leave an indelible mark of their presence at a historic spot, even if it is only in their own photo albums.
But even if it is a private act, it is done in public; and in doing so, they demean the place. They won’t fight a war; they won’t be affected by it. But they want to see themselves in that history.
There is a Walter Mitty-like character in all of us, imagining ourselves as fighter pilots despite our meekness; some of us are naive like Forrest Gump, from the film of the same name, accidentally bumping into history, unaware of where we are; some become chameleons, like Leonard Zelig (played by Woody Allen in the film Zelig), placing ourselves at the centre of history. These photographs show two aspects of human behaviour—imagining ourselves to be bigger than we are, or decontextualizing a place from its history, turning a prison cell into a catwalk, treating god as an ashtray.
I’m not suggesting that each tourist undergo a rigorous history lesson before embarking on the journey. But sensitivity helps. By seeing a devastated city as a mere prop, a backdrop, the tourist reinforces his alienation from the broader reality that surrounds us. It isn’t immoral; it is amoral. And it is narcissistic, placing the self at the centre.
Maybe nothing is sacred any more, but must everything turn profane?
Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint. He tweets at @saliltripathi.
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