Thursday, September 23, 2004

Armchair journalism or journalist

When someone said I was an armchair journalist I had to bring proof to show that I was not. Now recently, that word popped up in my mind again after seeing living proof of armchair journalism. I just witnessed an armchair journalist in the making.

Now I would not mind if someone were copying verbatim from a press handout because MOST journalists have mastered this art, but writing on something as sensitive a subject as child labour from the confines of your office workstation raises my hackles no end. To top it, this journalist, I dare say that this journalist is a blot on the sacred word, cheekily admits that the report was just a hotch-potch not serious stuff, not focussed. This is really taking armchair journalism to new heights.

Now if I was the sub-editor, incharge of the supplement where this child labour story was supposed to be taken, I would have just thrown the story out of the window. I would not have even kept it in the waste bin. (On second thoughts, it is probably because of this wild side in me, I am still subbing copies on the General Desk.)

When writing on sensitive subjects like human rights, the least I expect the writer is go to the field, not to interview those children who are scavenging in the dust bins of Bangalore, but atleast for name-sake to go meet someone outside the office. You know, just to remove the tag of armchair journalism. But no, there is this armchair journalist (AJ), happily typing away some emails to some other armchair activist (AA to make things easier for me) sitting in some airconditioned office, who probably has never seen a starving and undernourished child slogging it out for a square meal. Then that AA promptly replies to the mail by AJ. For good measure, that AA calls up on the mobile telephone (yea, our AJ has given the contact number which is a mobile number, what an irony) and they are speaking to each other as if they can save the whole lot of children. Then, I am told that this AA is fighting for the rights of some child who incidentally laboured for a television ad. IF this is not ridiculous, then tell me what is? A child figured in a TV ad, who would have got enough money to act in that, making the child's parent feel proud and they will probably be laughing all the way to the bank. And here we have this child rights activist who wants to fight against child labour on television. Great going.

Coming back to our AJ. So the email is over. Then the browsing begins. By the way, now these sequence of events of how to become a good armchair journalist need not be followed in the order that I am describing. So our AJ hits the google button on the internet explorer. Hey presto you have a whole lot of dough at the click of a button which tell you all about child labour. No sweat man, good going. Just copy paste all the relevant data and your story's word count is swelling to a respectable number. And you are just beginning to warm up to the subject.

Having exhausted the google info, now we turn to good ole books. Now they are the veritable bank of information, all hard copy. It cannot be wrong. Now a book can be in any size, shape. It could even be just a tiny lil' booklet. Does not matter, as long as it contains what you need, mind you not what the reader needs, or for that matter not what the child on the street thinks should be told about them. So there you are, just flip the pages here and there and then just begin the clickety-clack exercise of rattling up a lot of noise on the computer keyboard. After all, everybody should know that you are working, is n't it? Even if nobody is there, atleast you get the satisfaction of banging the keyboard instead of banging your head over the lack of ideas and the lack of focus.

Having done all this, now is the time to take the coffee break and get some fresh air to clear up the guilt of having done a story without moving the butt an inch.

(more on AJs in part II)

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Name: Wynoma. Year: 1990. Class: Chemistry

A letter to the class of 1999

The internet has intruded into our lives and we have forgotten the good old art of sending greeting cards by the Indian Postal Service.

While I was in Goa with my wife, her name is Stuthi for those who need to be reminded time and again, I happened to stumble upon the old letters and greeting cards I had received from all our People's batchmates. I must tell you guys and girls, that those greeting cards and letters sent me on a nostalgic trip and I was literally in tears. By God, I am longing again for those good old days, what with the flurry of letters and greeting cards that found their way to each other's houses.

Those cards and letters were pregnant with feelings of love, joy, happiness, sadness.
They contained everything. Some of those letters and greetings cards were indeed a stamp of the sender, their emotions palpable between the scrawls of lines inked on the paper. All of that is missing in this internet world. I have letters from Harsha, Vivek, Maria, Samir, Neville. I wonder whether Vivek is reading this mail now, where is he but I was surprised to find his card. Those were the days.

It was good to have people write to you because you could identify with them through their handwriting, their style of words, their state of mind etc. could be seen in the writings itself. All the letters I received from the guys and gals in Peoples HSS, I have stored them. I just happened to read some of the letters and I found that certain incidents in my life which I had forgotten were all there in the letters. For e.g. Harsha wrote to me that I had not visited her on one of my visit to Goa from Bangalore. Now the fact that I used to visit Harsha at her house had totally slipped out of my mind. then I remembered that I used to go to Harsha's place whenever I went down to Goa.

Another thing those letters also reminded me was of the times when the intensity of our friendship was at its highest. It was just after we all had finished our 12th and were branching out to different colleges with various aims and different priorities in life. But we had that longing and desire that the threads of our friendships and companionship and camaraderie that we enjoyed while at People's should not be broken.
You will not believe it my dear friends, but some of the letters which I have with me told me of a time when we treasured memories of our days in People's HSS and we wanted our memories to continue. It was like as if some unseen eraser was about to erase our memories and we were like frantically racing against time to pen them down in ink and paper before the memories got wiped away.

Then again the letters spoke of a desperate attempt to catch the fading light of our memories. An attempt to close the distance between our friends and us as slowly each one of us took a different turn at the next bend in life, as our careers carried us to different shores around the globe. It was as if we were running after a kite which had snapped from the thread. We wanted to desperately catch the last string but it was just beyond our grasp and finally we just stand still and watch it dip, flutter, flounder and disappear into the horizon. But we know fully well that the kite which we lost would be found by someone else in the street beyond or somewhere else.

Similarly in those letters, there are talks of tearful farewells, of a hope that we will meet again someday, of promises to never forget a friendship, of journeys across the seas to different countries. And between the lines is an unwritten story that we have to give up some things to attain and obtain some other things. While some of us have got married and settled into a life with our spouses, some of our friends are still fighting the lonely battle.

When I read those old letters again, I felt a twinge of guilt because having got a wonderful and understanding spouse, I probably would have forgotten all my friends and classmates who at some point of time would have been the dearest thing in life in those uncertain years of teens and adolescence and the twilight zone between childhood and adulthood. Those friends or classmates in our case would have been the next best thing to have happened to us during those 11th and 12th days when the chemistry practicals under Wynoma were just an excuse to chat with each other across the shelves lined with bottles of acids and neutral agents. When we would have used our friends to pour out our woes -- both tales of love and sorrow.

But now the times have changed and the modes of communications have also changed. Our priorities too have changed, our goals and aims have changed, our friends, our thinking and perspective would have changed and probably will change as the time goes by. Those old address books containing the names and addresses of all those who were close to us which we carried everywhere as if they were the passport to our happiness are probably lying unused in some attic somewhere or they probably would have been destroyed because of the fact they were not used.

But should we allow the ravages of time to overtake us and allow the relentless winds of change, technology and distance to restrict our freedom of expression and thought to just a few emails here and there and an occasional cold and impersonal b'day wish on the internet?

I am surprised by the thoughts and emotions what a few old letters brought up in me.

Now that I know what a letter written in ink and paper can convey, I am more than willing to spend a few rupees to write a letter to each one of our friends and classmates if only we can collect all our house addresses and compile a list to be circulated on the mailing list.

What say Buchun.

So here goes...
=========================================================
Dearest .......
I trust that this letter of mine finds you in the best of health as the same attends to me over by the grace of God and your prayers. I received your letter on April 30th in the middle of my exams. I just came home and the post man dropped the letter through the door.........
==========================================================

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

The walking canteen

If the waste bin besides your workstation contains empty wrappers of Menthos then you can be sure that a woman has arrived.
Now women have invaded every sphere of the men's domain robbing them of their happiness, so you may ask whats the news about a woman having arrived.

Now this woman in question is a cut above the rest of the pack, literally and figuratively. She has a tendency to give a complex to most of the men with her never-give-importance-to-men kind of attitude.
But the best part about her is that she is a bundle of contradictions. If you tell her that she can turn on her charm on any man then she will flatly deny it, yet in the next breath she is ready to admit that she is an eternal flirt but within the limits. Now tell me how can a woman flirt without turning on a bit of a charm to attract a man.

Then as I said earlier, there is a constant interaction between her hands and her mouth, no matter how busy she is with work. You see, it is the hand that feeds the mouth with the menthos. If not menthos, it will be some munchable thing or the other that she will be carrying around. So someone rightly said that she is a "walking canteen". NOw she claims that this label is an insult to her gourmet abilities.

At the top of the list in this bundle of contradictions is a word called "compromise". One fine day she coos away nonchalantly, "I never compromise on anything". In fact she says that there is no word called compromise in her dictionary.
Now will somebody please explain to her that the very fact she is happily married is in itself a compromise. She compromised on her bachelorhood to tie the knot.
Who doesn't know the famous expression, "they were caught in a compromising position". Now what does this mean?? To put it mildly, they were caught copulating, isn't it?? Now I do not know how to tell this woman that when she gets a bit romantic with her husband in the cold of the night, she is really compromising herself.
Hows that for remaining uncompromised?

Thursday, September 02, 2004

Lonely Hearts

The spiders have a field day. Its not hard to believe if you see the hazy hue on the walls. The newspapers are piling up everywhere. There is one pile of newspapers six-foot high in one corner the room waiting for the raddi-wala. The raddi-wala comes shouting "paper, paper, old paper" everyday, but the only the price is not right and so the 6-ft high pile remains. Unwashed clothes have spilled over from the laundery basket, as there is no one to pull up the maid for stretching her weekly off till the next Saturday. Then the kitchen is full of empty two-litre Kinley water bottles, what else do you expect when there is no one to cook up some delicious biryani.

This is not a description of a bachelor's house but of a single bedroom house. Its more like a cave with no ventilation or sunlight and the lights have to be on all the time, day or night. But then hasn't man evolved from the cave men to the present tech savvy self?

The point over here is that the occupants of this cave-house are only two people. And they are married but are on compulsory and forced bachelorhood for some time. And that's where the loneliness creeps in. Its not an ordinary loneliness but is about 500-miles long and two-months old. Not counting the number of rupees pumped in a vain attempt to bridge the loneliness with some amorous talk over the BSNL cell phone. The standby time in the cell phone gets exhausted within 12 hours because of the overload of chatter. The urge and desire to talk to her are not bound by the clock and the sun. It is only the urge that matters. You pick up the cell phone and just press the redial button when you can control it no more. And lo and behold, your better half has been thinking on the same lines and was about to lift the receiver to dial your number. Our thoughtwaves are tuned to the same wavelength. Then you miss those 5 o clock rings asking to find out what you had in the canteen.
The SMS inbox and outbox are crowded everyday and have to be deleted everyday because of the heavy volume. But all this does not help in any way but it creates more loneliness as it makes you acutely aware of your state of forced bachelorhood. Oh by the way, forced bachelorhood is self-made not by any external force which makes it all the more painful.

There is huge pile of photo albums which suddenly descend from the shelf and perch themselves on the bed. They are so lovingly and ever so slowly flipped through to have a look at the loved one in order to dispel the loneliness. There is a faint flicker of hopeless hope that maybe as you scan the snaps which have been frozen in time, the one you are pining for might just materialise in front of you. But that does not happen, our modern science is still after all still so ancient??!! As a see those pictures of the two of you kissing each other with the mountains as a background, the erotic senses are tingling but you have to suppress them. All those albums are soon sent back to the top shelf. Then the favourite books read by your cherie are opened but not read because unfortunately and in a cruel twist she reads in a language that is total greek to you.

Then there is the bread and butter part. You scan the food columns and the favourite eateries mentioned in the newspapers and try to savour some of the food in those places but they dont measure up to your taste palate. It is funny though, because these are the same places you frequented with, your partner in tow, and you were actually asking her to make some of those dishes at home. But now they are so bland, probably the loneliness is eating you up and the tastebuds have retreated into a shell. They might surface at a later date when the aroma of the lover and her lovingly prepared dishes beckon from the small cofeetable-cum-dining table. Not satisfied with those swanky restaurants, you try out the small dhabas and the mobile food carts. They don't measure up to the familiar taste but atleast they dont burn a hole in the pocket. That's some consolation to your loneliness.

Then there's the music. Before the loneliness descended on you, it used to be the soft and lilting devotional songs that woke you up. After you woke up the music would stop, because you hardly had any time to listen to the music, you hardly had time to talk with each other. Sometimes you spoke in silence, sometimes loudly. All the same, as you planted a goodbye kiss to her before you went and logged into the office computer, she would demurely say that there was not enough time to talk. Now there is no one to talk to and only the loneliness whispers in the mind's ears. The hard disk deep inside the brain is on a loop, playing its own medley again and again which does not lock the loneliness outside. So you switch on the music system which in this case is an assembly of a walkman, a bass and treble booster and some speakers. One of the speaker is kept on the mouth of an old plastic waterpot which enhances the bass.
All the cassettes which have been tied up and thrown into a bag by the better half are now crying out for attention. Tied up and thrown into a bag because she will not hear a single lyric or strain from the "worldy casettes" as she calls them. So their redemption only comes when she is not around. What an irony, the cassettes are redeemed, albeit temporarily but I am shackled by lonelinees. So there they are all the cassettes neatly lined up in the box and the plastic cover. So I am forced to think of the old Shammi Kapoor number: Kiss ko sunoo, eh bhhi hai, woh bhi hai. Then I calmly console all the cassettes and tell them, every cassette has his listening hour. So the hour before and immediately after the "Quiet Time" (Quiet Time is spent with the Bible and in prayer for an hour or so after waking up) is spent with some of the devotional songs. Then those casettes which will whip up my mind into a frenzy before I leave for work will be engaged by the walkman. Some of these include the heavy trance like "Sphongle" etc. Then to cool off, some of the World Music like "Cyber Tribe" will be played. Otherwise, the good ole classical musicians will be carressing their flutes and tablas with their nimble and fast fingers and hands to belt out some really soothing beats.

The only plus point in this lonely world is that there is more time for the Bible and more time to pray to the Lord Jesus Christ. Because when she is around, devotion time is rationed which is actually wrong but cannot be helped.

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

The Sadist

Marquis de Sade would have turned in his grave not once but a hundred times yesterday worrying to death over the insult he has been heaped upon by a mere mortal. It is no ordinary insult because if he (Sade) was alive he would have surely committed one last act of gross injustice and hurled himself under the wheels of a chariot or a horsebug.
The fact is that I was honoured to be called by the name of the great Marquis de Sade sometime yesterday night. Probably I am Sadist IVVXXI (you know like in Edward I, Edward IV) but whatever it is I am not fully qualified to be called a Sadist that too by someone who till the other day claimed that I was his best friend.
This best of friend of mine it seems has no spine of his own because his actions and words had been dictated by some comment made by some anonymous friend of his. And what follows is that my friend believes what his friend said about me. Therefore he believes that I am a Sadist. What is appaling but certainly not surprising is that this dear pal of mine cannot make a judgement of his own. (Perhaps much learning has made muted his faculties to the point of skewed thinking, something like a chip which received excess electricity, got short circuited and started behaving in exactly the opposite of the programme code).
Our friendship was more than two years old, quite a long enough time, in this age of quickies like fast food, one night stands etc. We relished biryanis and beef pickles together, shared the obnoxious smell of deo sprays combined with sweat in overcrowded BMTC buses. We shared secrets with each other, I shared his cancerous habit of smoking, me being the passive smoker. There were so many things we knew about each other. In fact there is only one another friend who is across the seven seas with whom I have opened my heart as much as to this friend who called me a sadist.
Coming to think of it, this dear friend who believes I am a sadist, i shall call him as "hoddo" for convenience sake, used me as a sounding board on numerous occasions. Hoddo used to talk to me about torn or massacred underwears too. After all this he thinks I am a sadist and decides to treat me as one and talk to me as one.
This is how he "sadistised" me.
One fine day Hoddo walks in to the office and calmly says, please help me with this assignment, because he has just completed his training and he is still reeling under the training hangover. This innoucous request for help turns into an hour of horror for yours truly. Because this hoddo goes on to say some of the most unseemly remarks about me, goes on to belittle me and in general exposes his Mr Hyde qualities. On second thoughts now, I also feel that he has this feeling that I am a threat to him, in what way I do cannot fathom.
All this shit I calmly took in my stride, because I was not sure which side of the bed he woke up in the morning before his trek to the office. It could also be that Hoddo was in a foul mood because the roaches back in his bathroom used his toothbrush without taking permission from him or maybe one of the elder cockroach cheekily used his unwashed coffee cup as an emergency loo. So you see I probably would have forgotten everything, in any case I have this habit of forgive and forget.
But his last remark was the most disgraceful and a blemish on the sacred and sanctified word called FRIENDSHIP.
Hoddo said: "Oh I can be rude and dont forget that."