Amusing Ourselves to Death By Narendra Pachkhédé The spectacle of entropy of truth on prime time television in India did not come without a forewarning. In 1985 Neil Postman augured that “we’re a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are now given form by TV, not by the printed word.” To add to the burden, dystopia lurked in the backdrop as we would turn into a captive culture, in George Orwell’s opinion, while Aldous Huxley’s concern was that the truth would be lost in a sea of meaninglessness. Night after night in the orgies-porgies around the prime time television where knavery was decanted as truth, television became the end of conversation. In the times when we are surrounded by images, everyday lives saturated by images, why do we lack imagination? What is this relationship between politics and our capacity to imagine? And by an extension, does it deter us from defining a new politics for our social? On the night of April 15, a posse of police were escorting Atiq Ahmed and his brother Ashraf to a hospital in Prayagraj in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Atiq was a gangster and a former elected member of the UP assembly and Indian Parliament. Television cameras captured the killing in full view and telecasted live. The brothers were handcuffed to each other at the time. As Atiq answered a question posed to him by a journalist, a hand pointed a gun at his head. The shots were fired in quick succession. Live television in India had never seen anything so horrific and dramatic. The live incident took over the mediascape as snippets of video reels of the killing went viral to satiate morbid curiosity of people. It reminded me of the photograph that changed the course of the Vietnam War. What came to be known as the Saigon execution, Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer, caught the precise moment in his frame of Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem.