The undercover boss

I was, as is often my wont, watching TV the other day, not really looking for inspiration or enlightenment, but sort of floating along in the hope of being entertained, when I came across this program called Undercover Boss on BBC Entertainment.
This is not a program ,as you may wrongly surmise from the title, about the CEO of Victoria’s Secret. This is about the czars or at the very least paid satraps of various enterprises who purportedly go  incognito  to meet their humble minions and see for themselves what happens, as you may say, in the belly of the beast. There they find  hidden truths, real insights and the like which, in the wonderfully sugar coated world of television, transforms them  and their companies. Care and nurture and sympathy  then flows from every pixel of the screen.
I am usually sanguine about these things, believing as I do in the innate goodness of people  with few exceptions. Vlad the Impaler springs to mind.
(I am of course curious as to how these CEO’s remain unidentified, given that there is a camera crew following them around. I presume there is a cover story for this undercover work, which is readily credible.)
But it is television after all, reality now passing for art.

This of course started me thinking. ( Amazing how I can start thinking like this with such little to go on.Impressive.)
I thought about ancient kings and apparently even queens who would descend from their palaces  cloaked as commoners or disguised as mendicants and who would wander the streets and villages of their kingdom revealing themselves to no one, trying to measure the satisfaction index of their rule.

It is presumed that this resulted in a kinder more  benevolent realm. One can’t say for sure since this was chronicled by fawning royal historians.
In a sense this is like today’s TV and you can’t really be sure.
But it is for sure that when Akbar wandered the alleyways of Old Delhi, he didn’t announce it with sun-guns and boom mikes.

And now in my enchanted land, i see the Overcover Boss at work: The politician who says he will undertake a ‘Padayatra’,  a journey on foot across the rural landscape of a  federal state or two. He may or may not actually walk, and may be ferried by helicopter to convenient staging points. Or there is the more flamboyant ‘Rath Yatra’ which has signifying nods to Royal Chariots, nay,even to the temple chariots of Jagannath from whence we derive the word juggernaut. So we have our versions of the Popemobile which are flamboyantly decorated campers which drive the politician from town to town , village to village where quote adoring unquote citizens come out in thousands to cheer  and exhort their hero. This form of the ‘boss’ wandering his lands is always as the politician will tell  you, issue based. As in,they have an issue with the the other party and they would rather get the voters to duke it out than roll up their sleeves and fight it out like knights of yore.
We also have the heartwarming stories of the youth icon who sups with the lower caste  villager, photo-op and all thrown in. I of course think why would this even be written about, if for example he had dined with a not low caste but equally poor villager. Or going further, in extremis, if he had dined with a non-poor,non-low caste person.:Me for example. 
The answer is that it makes for good TV as Murdoch might say. We don’t seem to realize that we only perpetuate the idiom of high and low caste by harping on their unfortunate accident of birth, economic circumstance becoming a secondary footnote.
Hey, but that’s just me, being contrarian as usual.
The reason for all this al fresco dining is apparently so that one can truly understand the nature of what ails these people.( I could tell you all that in one word but I wouldn’t make for good copy.)  It is amazing that the media begins to talk of how finally, here is a person of the people, who has descended  from on high to walk the earth with mere humans.

This too is reality TV. 
In all fairness the youth icon is a darn sight better looking than half the tv stars. And he does seem to want to have the visceral experience of poverty, so maybe he does care?  Maybe he is a prisoner of incumbent publicity? I don’t know, and I remain hopefully doubtful, waiting to feel the flesh of the wound as Thomas before the risen Christ.

So from the anonymous and concerned truth seeker to the well publicized vote seeker: what a journey we have made my countrymen.

We seek no truth about what the poor man is going through, beyond the advantage we perceive in its newsworthiness, or that we can use to cast aspersions at the others who also live in glass palaces of power. 
If we really wanted to know what people thought of their so-called leaders, we might have considered the anonymity of modern day market research.
But we already know what people think of their ‘bosses’. And most of it would be unprintable and eminently ‘bleep able’.

Unfortunately, we don’t even seek  the saccharine transformation of the undercover boss.