'Journalistic ethics'!

I had promised in my last post to give a glimpse into the world of journalism, as I have seen it. I could cite a lot of hilarious (or disgraceful) incidents from my own direct experience, but for now let two incidents suffice, things that happened within the last decade in my own town.

Several years ago, some outgoing girls had gathered in their school (very well known hereabouts) to bid farewell to one another. Girls being girls, they had to do something ‘exciting’, so many of them had brought over their old shirts and told one another to write parting messages on them with indelible ink. Naturally they were ‘expressing themselves’ by screaming their heads off, until it attracted the attention of the irate headmistress, who confiscated many of these offending shirts and sent the whole class out of the campus, telling them to go directly home. Next day some of the papers carried the news that a lot of schoolgirls had been stripped by the authorities and sent home déshabillée!

Then there was this fracas among parents and staff in the school where I had once worked, a few years ago. There was some angry talk, a lot of abuse was bandied about freely, and one or two staffers were pushed around… nothing much really. Many of these boys came to my tuition, and I heard the details from them. What is relevant here is that they had heard some journos prodding them to spill the beans about what was going on in the school, with the following words… tora kichhu bolbi, na amrai baniye baniye likhe debo (are you going to talk, or shall we make it all up ourselves)?

From long personal experience (my family has been in close touch with the media world for more than thirty years now) I know that this is the norm rather than the exception (remember the posto I mentioned in the last post?) So much for lofty ethical standards.  This is the reason that what you get if you google 'News of the World scandal' comes as no surprise, at least to the likes of me. No profession more deserves to be told ‘physician, heal thyself’…I think it was Desmond Doig, a celebrity journo himself, who famously said about Mother Teresa that she never read newspapers, so she knew better than most just what was going on in the world!

[My strategy seems to be paying off. The last post has attracted 500-odd visits within a week. However, I am waiting for more comments here, and the members count topping the 100-mark]

P.S.: If you are a complete stranger and are commenting here for the first time, start with a short self-introduction, specifically mentioning your age. I expect the same good manners on the internet as in the outside world: courtesy is a must, especially if you are someone far junior. That's orthodox Indian tradition, and I am a very orthodox person in these matters. If I am old enough to be your father or teacher, you will use language that is appropriate for your own father or most respected teacher. Otherwise, stay away...

What happened in Guwahati?

[Nothing in this post should be construed to mean that I have the slightest sympathy for people who gang up to harass, abuse, hurt and humiliate the weak – by which I mean not only young girls but children, old people of both sexes, the disabled, the ill and even the lone man against the mob… we too easily forget that young girls are not the only victims of abuse! A lot of people of the type who are now up in arms in defence of this girl find it quite right and enjoyable to beat a petty thief to death or close if he is unlucky enough to get caught: I have seen this again and again with my own eyes]

The more I read up on the net (click here and here) about what happened that night in Guwahati, the more I smell something very, very fishy.

For one thing, the so-called video looks much less like a genuine molestation scene than a grotesque pantomime in slow motion: in this age of the uncouth and the absurd, courtesy kinky cinema and mindless ad flicks, surely most sane readers will agree that much weirder things can be ‘arranged’? This suspicion grows strong when one sees how quickly politicians have got into the mutual mudslinging act, how the police still haven’t picked up the main accused, and how the National Commission for Women seems at a loss about what to do (this evening I heard it has recommended that the government ‘rehabilitate’ the girl with a job. For god’s sake!)

Secondly, molesters rarely allow themselves and their dastardly act to be filmed for the record at length – unless the whole thing is premeditated for a purpose (Amitabh Bachchan has asked in his blog how a TV crew was so promptly on the spot). I have been on the news beat (real news, not covering models doing the catwalk or launching new brands of shampoo), and I know that the far commoner reaction is to take away the camera and beat up the man behind it.

Thirdly, ‘assaulted and molested for half an hour before she was rescued by some passers-by’? How could a girl be assaulted and molested in public for half an hour? And who were these ‘passers-by’ who then rescued her? Were they a bigger mob, or armed policemen, or a few braveheart do-gooders? What took them so long, and how did they persuade the ‘molesters’ to let the girl go?

Fourthly, some reports say the girl was a minor: so what was she doing in a pub? Why did they throw her out only when she couldn’t pay? It even seems she had been brawling drunkenly on the street with some of her friends, and it is some of these ‘friends’ who then turned on her (some are even saying that one of these friends was the reporter who told the cameraman to start shooting; the fellow has resigned from his job even before formal charges have been brought against him!). What kind of people did she choose as friends? Everybody is screaming about her rights and how they have been violated – what about some talk of responsibility? What kind of responsibility did this girl take for her own safety? What kind of parents let their 17-year old kid out for a night on the tiles? Why don’t people who want that kind of ‘fun’ – no matter whether they are young or old – calmly accept the fact that it goes with certain kinds of risks? Nobody accuses ‘society’ of neglect or abuse when a bungee-jumper dies because the rope broke!

And finally, all this talk about how journalists were involved, and what they should and shouldn’t have done fills me with deep disgust. Any honest reporter admits in private that ninety per cent of what they are accused of is true: they are only concerned with finding or actually creating sensation, because that alone sells, and that alone is what ultimately matters. In the newsroom we talked about posto – slang (in those days, I don’t know what it is now) for concocted or grossly embellished news, and how most of our pages were routinely filled with such stuff.  I shall narrate just two fairly recent incidents here, both in Durgapur. But let’s keep that for the next post… 

So what am I missing here? Those who have been following the unfolding story more closely, would they care to enlighten me? Catcalls, wolf-whistles, lewd remarks, surreptitious groping in buses, yes (disgusting as all that is), but girls are not as a rule suddenly molested on city streets by gangs, else all the hundreds of girls who have been coming alone to my classes for years would have stopped coming long ago. Why did this happen? And what really happened? 

Sayan and Rashmi's blog

My old boy Sayan and his wife Rashmi have started their own blog. 

I should like all my readers to visit them, become members, and write sensible and encouraging comments every now and then.

Also, though only 85 people have become members of this blog as yet, I know that far more people visit (the number of members on the other blog is now 275). So how about cheering me up by joining the members' list? It's not a crime. Go on, it takes only a minute...

Only Man is vile

The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interr’d with their bones…

(Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

There were these parents of an ex-student who had come over for a chat, and they happily and gratefully recalled the time they spent when their daughter was a pupil here. I do not like to boast, but it made me feel good to see how well they remembered all the ‘special’ favours that the girl and her friends had been treated to as a matter of course – things that were special only because they had neither expected nor got the same treatment at any other tutor’s: a large, well-lit and airy room to study in rather than a dingy garage, a clean toilet always available, filtered water to drink, medicines whenever someone felt ill, our own clothes for them to change into when they came in from the rain dripping wet, the meals upstairs when some child was hungry, the assurance that the kids were safe indoors with us when a parent couldn’t help being late in picking them up, the punctuality which made things hugely convenient for them and their parents alike, the stories they heard, the games they played, the movies they watched, the quizzes they enjoyed, the countless jokes they laughed over, the meticulous correction and commentary on homework, the habit of disciplined regular work well within deadlines, which, if picked up here, helped them to do better in all subjects, the books they borrowed to read, the new vistas opened up of so many things they had never even heard before, things which came in tremendously useful later in life, whether they were taking a vocabulary test or participating in a group discussion or an impromptu writing contest, even at university level or while entering working life…

I told them that the real wonder was not that I did all this, but that they remembered still, long after my immediate utility was exhausted, and had even bothered to come over to thank me for it. I am not ungrateful to Providence: certainly for years and years lots of ex-students and parents have spoken well of me; nothing else can explain why such big numbers come over unfailingly to enroll with me at the start of session after session, despite all my failings, all the outbursts of temper, all the scathing remarks, all the worst that the scandal-mongers have spread. What makes me wonder is that so few people thank me directly for what they have got from me (even over the phone or the internet), and also that there is a sizeable number of people who, after having enjoyed and benefitted from everything good that I did for them, have decided, once they found out that I had maybe one fault or two, that I was an entirely forgettable person, or not a nice man to know. And this is not peculiar to someone like me: titans all through history have faced the same weird treatment from the people. One fault or shortcoming discovered (you know, Gandhi had sexual urges for women other than his wife!!!), and all the great and good about them is instantly forgotten. Talk about selective memory. Which is why I tell everybody that to praise someone is infinitely harder than to abuse. Anybody can speak ill of you, however noble you might be, and however petty and despicable a character he might have himself. It is hard to live long and not become a misanthrope. I think it was in this frame of mind that the poet wrote of a beautiful natural landscape ‘where every prospect pleases/ and only Man is vile’!

A 'forgetful' nation

In this front-page news item in yesterday's newspaper, I read that 'forgetful' Indians have left behind Rs. 60 crores worth of hand luggage at various airports in the country over the last four years.

Although the reporter has blamed 'stress' and 'multi-tasking' and that sort of 'in' garbage, the psychologist he took the trouble to consult has hit the nail on the head: 'People all over the world forget things but we Indians more so, as we are (by breeding-) less organized'. 

I guess that that explains an awful lot of things about why this country is so messed up. From pupils 'forgetting' things that they have been told a hundred times over to people having accidents on the road because they 'forget' to give the right signals to doctors 'forgetting' to write detailed case histories before prescribing medicines... 

Powerless in Washington, D.C.

Read this. In the capital city of the world's most powerful nation, citizens are beginning to find out what misery means, misery of a sort that virtually all Indians are only too familiar with.