Indian Media, Commonwealth Games and Sainath...

An amended text of an email exchange with a friend: Journalism is a demanding vocation. As appealing as it is, it lays your soul open to the world. Unlike most professions that are becoming micro-specialized and super-skilled, Journalism marries two diametrically opposite skills.

First - Judgment of the external world – all the contemporary events, people, perceptions et al. As a Journalist you are required to see, assess, and judge the world with all its hosannas and gravitas; it’s not easy especially so as you are required to do all that being aware of your own biases and prejudices. You are required to be gregarious, extrovert and open. Any wrong call anywhere in this process, you’ll end up looking a fool. The other skill is writing – how very distant it is from the first. Can you think of any other act that can be more intimate and personal for a human being ? ( Hmm , sex you may say but sex is motor, not cognitive i.e not exclusively human) So, whatever you have seen and assessed, you have to reflect in your own mind, arrange the facts, perceptions and arrive at a judgment. Then you have to express it clearly so others can see what you have seen.

Indian media – We all know the writing / presentation in Indian media is above average for a race whose language is not English. But it is at the judgment they are so poor. It’s not that they refuse to see it, they quite simply can’t see it. My intense abhorrence of them stems back to this - their utter lack of judgment. And not just that, their Indian sense of completeness: they are perfect and beyond mistake.

Many a months back when I passed through India there were enough reports to raise concerns about the shoddy preparations and siphoning scams involved but media failed to mount any pressure whatsoever to get the job properly done. Instead they were all busy covering M S Dhoni’s wedding or yet another utterly unremarkable cricket series in Sri Lanka.

Incidentally as it happens – the weekly I had read in transit in India was the first weekly to carry an article about the games scam. Here are the links for the archives of the three national weeklies:

India Today This is the one I had read. August 2 edition. That’s 8 weeks before the kick-off.

Tehelka Cover Story August 28. Think of it, this is the group which congratulates itself on investigative journalism.

Outlook None that I can see. And hover over April 12 edition. It sounds of singing praises about the game.

Kalmadi and co are old hacks. They’ve built a career sucking off public money. I hold the new Indian media equally if not more responsible. The first report of any mismanagement and corruption came in summer, when the whole infrastructure was scheduled to be finished before summer. Millions had been allotted over more than five years ago and the Media accounts for the public money just two months before the event. But then Indian media is nothing more than deadlines, plagiarism and scratching backs. It is an assembly of semi-educated dimwits who can’t sit down and think. They neither have any influence over the legislature above nor can they touch the masses below. They are an enormous unaccounted waste of ink and bytes.

You have to bear in mind this is not an event that is to be held in a distant no man’s land. These people - the journalists and the politicians, both are mostly based in Delhi and would have been seeing each other regularly – both professionally and socially. Today no one speaks of what media owed the people. If Kalmadi and Co didn’t do their jobs properly so didnt the media. Slagging off Kalmadi is totally useless, leopards and spots. He should have been disciplined long back by building political and public pressure around him. The Media didn’t. Now they just ‘report’ the happenings. Usual Status quo. They deserve each other. Though it’s not something to be proud to state, I don’t hesitate a minute to say I really wish as many countries withdraw from the games. There are many ways of learning and for some the harder way works. It’s just how it is.

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Also find this wonderful article about P Sainath during his recent visit to Canada.

Finally, this is a bit dated but still relevant thoughts by perhaps the only man in India who understands the meaning of the world Journalism. Not that I endorse all of his views but I admire that he is serving no one but himself - a fundamental requirement to be taken seriously in journalism. His anger is plain obvious.

The First DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

The DSC prize for South Asian Literature has been instituted by the infrastructure firm DSC. They are also the main sponsors of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

The ten member advisory committee has the writer Nayantara Sehgal (whose mother Vijayalaxmi Pandit was Jawaharlal Nehru's sister), the economist and British MP Lord Meghnad Desai, journalist Tina Brown and historian Urvashi Butalia among others. It is this committee which chose the five person jury. The jury includes Lord Matthew Evans, Ian Jack, Amitava Kumar, Moni Mohsin and the chairperson Nilanjana S Roy.

The award is for English novels from South Asia.

The longlist for the first DSC Prize has been announced. It consists of fourteen novels. Here they are, in no particular order:

From India:

Amit Chaudhuri's 'The Immortals'

Chandrahas Choudhury's 'Arzee the Dwarf '

Upamanyu Chatterjee's 'Way to Go'

Rokkaiah Salma's 'The Hour Past Midnight'

Anjum Hassan's 'Neti Neti'

Tania James' 'Atlas of Unknowns'

Manju Kapur's 'The Immigrant'

Sankar's 'The Middleman',

Jaspreet Singh's 'Chef'

Aatish Taseer's 'The Temple Goers'

From Pakistan:

Ali Sethi's 'The Wish Maker'

Musharraf Ali Farooqui's 'The Story of a Widow'

H M Naqvi's 'The Home Boy'

From Sri Lanka:
Ru Freeman's 'A Disobedient Girl'

What can one say? May the best work win. That's all.

p.s. One must add that it is pleasing to see a USD 50,000 literary prize for South Asia.

Source: Outlook Magazine. Click here

Notes from America

Terry Jones has chickened out on time. Rauf wouldn't give a hoot for his proposed quid pro quo. In the end, a few flags were burnt and angry rallies came out in familiar places shouting slogans like "rasist America v/s victim Muslims".

The talking heads went into a tizzy right from white house to the basement blogger introspecting on the bigot within, need for bigger concessions and chiding ignorant Joes and Bobs for their misplaced fears. From the right, speculations of global religious war carried a little more space than usual. The casualties this time have been the stand up comedians sense of humor and the average Joe's right to ignore the bigotry and carry on with his everyday dysfunctional debt ridden life in the time of regressive economy.

Even on the day of another memorial of September 11, its interesting to find how the debate invariably is about the secular credentials of the other, including religions and agnostic ideologies, but not about the intolerance and fanaticism of Islamic belief. It is always about the heightened sensitivity of every believer, but not the indifference of its majority when the passionate few among them assaults humanity in grand expressions of cruelty. Why there is never any movement from the "moderate" to fight the political and killer ideologies of its extreme member? Why is it easy to hide behind the status of minority and scuttle dialogues within the community or outside of it, even in the west where security and freedom of speech are held in higher standards?

Fundamentalism is always about the measure of the others liberalism until it vanquishes the other. Modern discourses and philosophies find it hard to counter fundamentalist ideology of Islam. Christianity and Communist ideologies went through intellectual and moral turmoils over centuries through inquisitions, church-state strife, world wars, collapse of states and on and on. However with Islamic ideology, there is no space for introspection or conversation. Its practitioners reject any critique and tactically attack all of it by bringing (amoral) equivalence of similar bigotries committed by the ideology or religion its critic purportedly stands for.

It is this turbulent True-believer syndrome, deafening rejection of dialogue and reforms from within make Islamic faith potent that seeks to carry the entire planet to a regressive monolith through great bouts of neurosis and pain.

Serious Men by Manu Joseph

I remember reading many well written articles by Manu Joseph in the Indian weekly Outlook edited by Vinod Mehta. Serious Men is his debut novel and has a Brahmin astrophysicist and his Dalit assistant as "the interdependent poles" (New York Times).

And this is from the review in The Independent (UK) by Peter Carty: "Manu Joseph's first novel elegantly describes collisions with an unyielding status quo, ably counterpointing the frustrations of the powerless with the unfulfilling realities of power. With this astute comedy of manners he makes a convincing bid for his own recognition as a novelist of serious talent, the latest addition to a roster of Indian writers who are creating fine literary art from their country's fearsome contradictions." Click here to read the review.

It will be interesting to see how his first novel fares.

Of Veil and the new Message

"In public gardens and in other places in this new town (which used to be old colonial town) can be seen young village Malays dressed as Arabs, with turbans and gowns. The Arab dress - so far from Pakistan, so far from Arabia - is their political badge. In the university there are girls who do not only wear the veil, but in the heat also wear gloves and socks. Different groups wear different colors. The veil is more than the veil; it is a mask of aggression. Not like the matted locks of RasTafarian in Jamaica, a man dulled by a marginal life that has endured for generations; not like the gear of the middle class hippie, who wishes only to drop out; these are the clothes of uprooted village people who wish to pull down what is not theirs and then take over. Because an unacknowldged part of the fantasy is that the world goes on, runs itself, has only to be inherited. "

...

"The West is eating itself up with its materialism and greed. The true believer, with his thoughts on the afterlife, lves for higher ideals. For a nonbeliever, life is a round of pleasure. "He spends the major part of his wealth on ostentatious living and demostrates his pomp and show by wearing of silk and brocade using vessels of gold and silver."

The new islam comes , and to the new men of the (Malay) village it comes as an alternative kind of learning and truth, full of scholarly apparatus. It is passion without constructive programme. The materialist world is to be pulled down first, the Islamic state will come later - as in Iran, as in Pakistan.

And the message that starts in Pakistan doesn't stop in Malaysia. It travels to Indonesia-120 million to 12 million, poorer, heterogeneous, more fragile, with a recent history of pogroms and mass killings. There the new Islamic movement among the young is seen by its enemies as nihilism; they call it "the Malayasian disease". So the Islamic passion of Pakistan, with its own special roots, converts and converts again, feeding other distresses. And the promise of political calamity spreads as good news."

- V.S. Naipaul (Among the Believers - Conversations in Malaysia)

Naipaul's Banquet Speech: 2001

An accidental discovery. Sir Vidia Naipaul's speech at the banquet during Nobel week 2001. Short and sweet.

Tweet on Vishy

For a change Vishwanathan Anand seems to have got a fair amount of media attention this time. But most of India continues to be in mourning because of India's early exit from the cricket T20 World Cup. Prolific blogger and columnist Amit Varma has compared Vishy Anand's World title triumph to a man with a Maruti 800 winning a Formula 1 car race. An apt comparison. Read the post by clicking here.

Novel uses of the Internet

One of the greatest advantages of the internet is it’s infinite potential to accommodate any venture. Over the last few years, with the growth of numerous 2.0 sites there have been many efforts to use the web for a more specific, goal directed and referential purposes. I have always thought that one of the important subjects that the web could act as an useful medium is - History - an academic, obscure, often regarded as a boring subject. In recent times, one such effort to make it more accessible directly to the seekers has been the British Library digitalising the vast archive of 19^th century newspapers. You can access it here. I am sure one can find many interesting stories hidden in those archives there.

The other, exciting and impressive effort is from India - called The Indian Memory project. It is an assortment of historical photographs sent by netizens to make a grand collection of Indians and Indian history across times, cultures and classes. Started by Anusha Yadav it is one of the most novel uses of the web I have seen in a long long time. Have a look here and contribute if you can.

Salim Baba

April 10, 2010: One of the offerings on the Youtube Screening Room.

"Salim Muhammad is a 55-year-old man who lives in North Kolkata with his wife and five children. Since the age of ten he has made a living using a hand-cranked projector to screen discarded film scraps for the kids in his surrounding neighborhoods. "

Duration - 15:15

When Karthik Calls Karthik Does He Need A Psychiatrist?

Hindi cinema tries to portray mental illness in 'Karthik Calling Karthik.' I am sceptical of mainstream Indian cinema trying to take up a serious issue like this. And subjects like mental illness can be used to make films which appeal to the voyeuristic instinct in the audience. I doubt that this film will make a mark among the classes and definitely not among the masses. Farhan Akhtar (the son of Javed Akhtar and the step son of Shabana Azmi), the protagonist in this film, shows that he is a good actor besides being a director with a professional touch. And the dusky Deepika Padukone who plays his girlfriend is lovely but thats all that she was supposed to be in this film. She was meant to portray a modern urban Indian girl who is going through her own heartbreaks as she searches for a 'gentle and caring' man.

Farhan Akhtar's acting is the redeeming feature and I would watch the film again just to see him. The end does became a bit text-bookish what with all the explanations. Nikhat Kazmi gives the film a 3.5 out of 5 in his review in The Times of India. Click here to see the review. I would give it a 3 (grudgingly).




[A promotional poster for Karthik Calling Karthik.]


The film also exemplifies something which has especially been seen in recent Bollywood films - technical excellence and a certain slickness which was totally absent till the 2000s. Call it a positive fall out of globalisation. Its a level playing field now as far as technology and gizmos are concerned. However most Bollywood films continue to remain of the kind that make one feel like gnashing one's teeth. The difference nowadays is in the number of good films which are being produced. This was impossible in the single-cinema days, the multiplexes today are able to absorb the loss which such films may incur thanks to the 300 plus crore rupees that '3 Idiots' can rake in in three weeks or the 120 crores that 'My Name is Khan' can bring in in a week.

I do not remember any really good mainstream Indian film about mental illness. I do remember a Kannada film I saw during the early nineties which was, if I remember rightly, about a man who got his kicks by making his wife have sex with other men and then hearing her talk about it. Girish Karnad had played the role of the psychiatrist in the same film. There was also Khamoshi, a Hindi film, in which Waheeda Rehman plays a nurse in a mental asylum who gets too close to a patient.

p.s. I realised later that Feb 26, the day I saw the film, was the date it was released all over India. This is another novelty. Couldn't imagine this some years ago. Hundreds, nay thousands of prints, being released in theatres all over the country and downloaded through satellite. The balcony ticket in Dreamland Cinema, Mhow costs Rupees Thirty. And the snacks in the canteen were all within Rupees ten a piece. The ambience of a small town, including the odd mosquitio, while watching the latest film. What more does one want? If only I were a fan of Bollywood.

Born In India...

I was thinking about British writers born in pre-independent India. These are the ones I know of:

(1) Eric Blair (George Orwell) Motihari, Bihar.

(2) Lawrence Durrell - Jamshedpur, Bihar.

(3) George Durrell - Jamshedpur, Bihar.

(4) Spike Milligan - Ahmednagar, Maharashtra.

(5) Rudyard Kipling - Bombay (now Mumbai).

Am sure there are more. Keep watching this space.

The Last Scotsmen on Earth?

"The last Englishman on earth would be an Indian," - Malcolm Muggeridge.

What about the last Scotsman on earth?








The pipes and drums of a battalion of the Rajput Regiment, Indian Army

The fragrance of Rajnigandha....

I bought a VCD of the Hindi film Rajnigandha a couple of weeks ago. This film, directed by Basu Chatterji, was released when I had just entered my teens. We were living in Alwar, Rajasthan at that time. I never got to see the film but it certainly made an impact on me. The beautiful songs, the stunning beauty of Vidya Sinha, the charming boy-next-door hero Amol Palekar along with the artistic looking Dinesh Thakur all added to the beauty of this film.

The film is based on a story Yehi Sach Hai by Mannu Bhandari. It is about the dilemma a young woman faces when she meets an ex-boyfriend and old memories get revived. She is caught between two men who are head over heels in love with her.

The Bengali gentleman Salil Choudhary was the music director of this film. He had also composed the music for the National Award winning Malayalam film Chemmeen. The song Kai Baar Yun Hi Dekha Hai ... sung by Mukesh encapsulates the dilemma so well. It talks of the mind transgressing the boundary line which the mind itself had drawn and flirting with danger. It has been sung so beautifully by Mukesh I am not surprised that it won a national award. I must admit that I have listened to this song time and again. The words towards the end are "Kisko meet banaoon, kiski preet bhulaoon?" ("Whom should I make my beloved? Whose love should I forget?" )

Rajnigandha had won the 1974 Filmfare award for the best film. Try to see it if you haven't already seen it.


Writer Mannu Bhandari. [Pic courtesy www.abhivyakti-hindi.org]

Awaiting Kerala Cafe

Malayalam cinema has been dead for a long time - notwithstanding the fact that Adoor G is still alive. After all Dada Falke award is nothing more than an invitation to one's own funeral!

Kerala Cafe - is the new Malayalam incarnation of Dekalog by a Krzysztof Piesiewicz ingénue - Renjith. Instead of a project house/apartment complex, the general setting is a cafe in a railway station. A sneak peek here.

I haven't seen the movie yet. But it has managed to spark a bit of anticipation. I have always thought of malayalam directors as capable but weighed down by the pulls of market and bizarre perceptions of neurotic distributors and prejudiced producers. Bringing ten of them with individual plots together relieved them of the pressure of carrying a two hour enterprise to the far end of box office. From what I've seen from the promos, it promises quite a bit. The compositions appeared tight and rhythm taut with an unmistakable thread of a theme. After a long time, the actors looked really the part!

Looking forward to watch it.

Globalisation and IWE...

The effects of globalisation on IWE (Indian Writing in English)?

"As the Indian novel in English, assisted by India's rising profile in global affairs, finds an audience wherever English is spoken, it often seems to sacrifice the particularities of Indian experience for a watered-down idiom that can speak to readers across the globe.." - Chandrahas Chaudhury writes about the Indian writer in English no longer being seen as someone who panders to the tastes of the West. But at what cost?

Click here to access the full article.

apropos Dalrymple

Take off from a review of malayalam colonial era movie, Pazhassi Raja - a royal nemesis of East India Company from the erstwhile kingdom of Kottayam.

...18th century Kottayam, a royal house otherwise renowned for producing Sanskritists and Kathakali playwrights. On the map, it’s approximately where William Dalrymple was doing his research at approximately the same time. Why, if he had wandered on to the sets of this multi-culti Company-era epic, there surely would have been a walk-on part for a cherubic Scotsman. And by offering to impale himself on a quivering Kurichiya (tribal) spear, he could have atoned for the sins of his ancestors at one stroke and spared himself the rigours of ethnography!

The Sad Inevitability of War

Pakistani battle tanks destroyed by the Indian Army, displayed as war trophies in Mhow. I wonder how many men died in these two tanks. A google search showed me that the Pakistanis have also displayed destroyed Indian battle tanks as war trophies.

India and Pakistan fought a bitter war in April - Sept 1965. Both sides lost around 7000 men totally. Both sides claim to have won the war.Many independent analysts claim that the cease fire saved Pakistan as it did not have enough resources to sustain a long war. It also taught them a lesson that India could not be defeated so easily. Similarly India also learnt that defeating Pakistan was not a cake walk. The stalemate continued till 1971 when India defeated Pakistan and liberated Bangladesh.

I was a pre-schooler in 1965. But I remember my father, who was then posted in the Army HQ at New Delhi, and his colleagues talking about the war. As a matter of fact it was impssible to not know that a war was on considering one lived in a defence colony like Dhaula Kuan. I also remember how our windows were blackened for safety from attacking aircraft at night time. Luckily no enemy aircraft reached Delhi. In an ideal world there would be no wars - something which is impossible in real life. Like the Jews and the Arabs India and Pakistan will always remain at loggerheads. Their common history has gifted them confrontation. Only, today both have nuclear arms.

No Indian Writer in this year's Booker Shortlist

I had never thought that this would happen. But it has. There is no Indian writer in the shortlist this year. Was there an Indian in the long list? Not sure. As a matter of fact there is no South Asian writer shortlisted this year. Ah well, maybe we will be back with a bang next year.

Click here to read Neel Mukherjee's brief views on each of the shortlisted books this year (The Hindu Literary Review Oct 4, 2009).

Twittering Gandhi

The greatness of Gandhi is that he proposed there are ways to liberate the victim and oppressor without vanquishing the other.

Don't you think?

Mahatma Gandhi, Aijaz Khan, General Bob and Bhagat Singh

If there is a Nobel Prize for fooling others the 2009 prize must go to Aijaz Khan the 29 year old techie from Mumbai. He morphed his face onto a photograph of Gandhi and Jinnah by substituting his face instead of Jinnah's. And all this on the front page of The Times of India dated Friday July 12 1945. The caption he put below the picture is priceless: "Congress President Mahatma Gandhi and the president of the Azad Hind Party Aijaz Khan" It also says: "Mumbai: Congress President Mahatma Gandhi and the president of the Azad Hind Party Aijaz Khan together in the rally at Mumbai Azad Maidan. And after the rally they went to meet General Bob to discuss about the arrest of Bhagat." (emphasis mine) Phew!!! And this many years after Bhagat Singh had
been hanged to death by the British. And General Bob of all people!!!! Oh God, it pains when I laugh too much!!!





Using this photograph he was able to con many people to the tune of Rs. 50 Lakhs. He convinced them that he would be investing the money they gave in government schemes and they stood to double their money.

It is unbelievable that nobody questioned him.
Read more about this believe it or not case by clicking here.

Source: Amit Varma's blog India Uncut.