Don't mean to be a negative nancy, but I **really**, really, dislike this trend of some Punjabi artists in the West now churning out artwork by making their own "covers" of popular magazines with photos from the protests.

Lot of genuine problems with this

For one, when these are shared on social media, the image is what captures attention, not the caption - a LOT of people are sharing these in groupchats/posting online with the assumption that they're real. Have had to correct some of my fam in India saying it's just artwork
This just adds to general misinformation, which is really not ideal at a time when we see coordinated efforts to spread that - the facts should stand out above all
Secondly, this gives really easy currency to those saying that farmers are protesting the bills because they're unknowledgeable; some Indian media outlets have already scored points off the National Geographic cover, "fact checking it", and inferring all info is as such.
Another problem is a lot of the "headlines" are lifted from other news stories - for example, the Rolling Stone "cover" literally copied the headline of IP Singh's great article (covered here). Give coverage to the people actually writing these stories!

https://t.co/NtgREE0rhF
These are my main substantive problems, but I also have a more of a meta-critique; I dislike the draw of such covers on an artistic level in the first place.

Is a movement only validated if it's covered in a magazine for Western audiences?
We're already seeing protestors take their narrative into their own hands with their own newspaper and independent journalists equipped with nothing more than a phone pushing out crucial information; so why do we still crave that Western validation? What purpose does it serve?
There's a whole world out there, with multitudes of topics to cover and politics to discuss. Sikhs, IMO, need to stop demanding tokenized representation in the mainstream as if it's owed to them and write their own narratives as they see fit
National Geographic ran a spread on the Green Revolution's ills in Punjab and I remember as a kid it was like two worlds colliding; I followed NatGeo for my "NatGeo interests", but this one article satiated my "Punjab interests". But they don't owe that to you and they shouldn't.
On that note, I think a great example of Punjabis/Sikhs in the West owning their own narrative and telling their own stories is going to be this initiative - I hope it can get as much traction as these covers did, as there'll be a lot to engage with:

https://t.co/LpGafXQZ3Y

More from India

You May Also Like