Journalism

Mischa Barton vs Rajan Zed

The WTF report of the day, by ANI, begins:

Actress Mischa Barton has enraged Hindus around the world, after she cribbed on her blog about not getting a sitar teacher in India.

Hindus around the world? That seemed like a tall claim to me, so I read further, expecting details to support this strange assertion. But no, the text then went on to elaborate that Barton’s comments had “enraged leading scholars,” and then quoted exactly one self-styled leading scholar on the subject, “US Hindu statesman Rajan Zed.” Given Zed’s history of seeking publicity (1, 2, for example), I don’t think Barton should worry too much about what Hindus think of her. Hindus around the world are not enraged. In fact, some of them are probably searching for nipslip pictures of her as I type these words.

More Zed: Check out these recent headlines where Zed claims to be speaking out on behalf of Hindus:

Tantra is not just sex: Upset Hindus tell actress Heather Graham
Hindus Consider Worldwide Sony Boycott

The dude who writes his press releases must be quite pleased with himself.

The Creaking Fan

It’s news when a rich industrialist’s wife spends a night in jail like this:

In the barrack, [Name Redacted on request] was made to sleep on a thin, prickly coir mattress with around 50 hardcore criminals and a swarm of mosquitoes for company.

The creaking fan overhead, jail sources say, moves too slowly to beat the collective heat of bodies and the stench around, thanks to gutkha-chewing undertrials.

But it’s not news when other undertrials, innocent until proven guilty, have to spend nights, even weeks, months, perhaps years in such conditions. That’s the real scandal, but we take it for granted, we know the system’s broken. But when Mrs [name redacted] has to spend a night in such conditions, going chheee in a prison cell instead of mua at a party, that’s newsworthy. See now.

Nice Guys vs Bad Boys

The Daily Mail reports:

It seems that nice guys can finally rest easy as scientists have discovered that bad boys do not always get the girl in the end.

A study of a South American tribe that once had the highest murder rate known to anthropology found that the most aggressive men ended up with fewer wives and children than milder men.

I’m not sure how the journalist who wrote this can draw the conclusion in the first sentence from the results of the study as reported in the second sentence. I’m sure nice guys in that South American tribe “can finally rest easy,” as if they were stressed out all this while, but why that study has any relevance to the rest of us beats me.

But journalists need pegs, so there we go: Nice guys finish first.

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In this internet age, ‘nice guys’ can be ‘bad boys’ too. Blogging and Twitter and even Facebook help us to create online personalities for ourselves that often have little relation to who we are in real life. Much fun comes just watching this in action. But that’s a subject for some other post.

(Link via email from Sruthijith.)

The 50 Most Powerful People In India

Business Week has just come out with a feature entitled “India’s 50 Most Powerful People 2009”. India Uncut readers will be pleased to know that I’m on that list. I come between Sachin Tendulkar and Lalu Prasad Yadav, and am not quite sure how to respond to that honour. What have I done to deserve this?

I was quite surprised, and much delighted, when I heard that I was on the list. I’m not sure I deserve to be there, but I guess my inclusion is Business Week‘s nod to the potential that blogs have for shaping public opinion, as also to the power of words in general—my columns for Mint, and otherwise, have been cited as a reason for my inclusion. I get quite cynical sometimes about the alleged power of words, and it’s nice to see that others are more optimistic. I hope they’re right.

This immense honour means that now I have to display gravitas and responsibility, and blog about serious matters that affect the nation. No more cows, no more WTFness, no more sex, no more imaginary dialogue. I’m going to be a full-on pundit now.

Ok, chill, I’m not.

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In case you’re wondering why I come so far down the list, it’s because it is displayed by alphabetical order of last name. Heh.

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And just take a look at Lalu’s magnificent ear hair. I don’t like his politics, but man, he is one stud machine, he is. No?

Throwing The Shoe

We all know what it means to throw the book at someone, and now it seems that dictionaries will soon have to make space for a new phrase—‘throwing the shoe.’ The origin would be the journalist who threw a shoe at George W Bush a few months ago, and it seems to be becoming a trend now that a journalist in a press conference has hurled a shoe at P Chidambaram. (In a PC, at PC, as it happens.)

The Home Minister was referring to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots when the journalist, Jarnail Singh, asked him a question regarding the CBI clean-chit to Congress leader Jagdish Tytler.

When Chidambaram averted the question, Jarnail Singh – who works with Hindi daily Dainik Jagaran – threw a shoe at him.

In case you were curious, the shoe missed, which might well lead to informal courses in shoe throwing being conducted in the canteens of journalism schools. Now, what would the phrase ‘throwing the shoe’ actually mean? One possibility: ‘An over-the-top act of protest born out of the frustration of the futility of other forms of protest.’ It could, thus encompass acts that don’t involve shoes at all—though if it involves throwing other things, it could lead to confusion. Like, imagine if a protester throws a TV at a politician, and a journalist reporting it files a report beginning, “In Hazratganj this morning, an irate protester threw the shoe at politician Jagdish Tytler.” And his editor hauls him up.

Editor: Your report begins by saying that some dude threw a shoe. But it turns out that he threw a TV.

Reporter: Yes, sir, that’s a figure of speech.

Editor: Figure of speech, my ass. Which idiot says it is a figure of speech?

Reporter: Sir, I read it on my favourite blog: India Uncut.

Editor: Well, now you will have more time to read your favourite blog. Much more time.

Reporter: [Worried that he’ll be sacked] Sir, please don’t throw the shoe at me!

(Link via email from Gautam.)

Update: I didn’t realize that throwing shoes at politicians has already become a trend, and Wen Jiabao and an Israeli ambassador have had shoes thrown at them recently. I hope this practice doesn’t spread to book launches.

Churidars And Leggings

One of the things I hate about the Indian literary scene is the writers who set their stories in India but write for a foreign audience. So instead of ‘dal’ they write ‘lentil soup’, and instead of ‘silk kurta’ they write ‘loose-fitting silk shirt’, and so on. I call them ‘tourist-guide writers’, more concerned with catering to Western demand for exotica than to the authenticity that would be true to their subject matter. Whatever. At least there is some rationale to their approach.

But why would an Indian publication, catering to Indian readers who know what Indian words mean, adopt the same approach? My readers know how very fashionable I am when it comes to clothes—except those who have met me personally—and I’ve been following the local coverage of the fashion weeks pretty closely. And time and again, I see Indian clothes being referred to in Western terms. For example, churidars are constantly being described as ‘leggings’. This is understandable if someone is writing for the US edition of Vogue, but all the local newspapers, as well as Rediff, which caters to an Indian and NRI readership, have taken to this.

I find this inexplicable for two reasons: One, ‘churidar’ is a lovely, sonorous word, and all Indians know what it means. Two, leggings tend to be form-fitting all the way from the waist to the ankle, while churidars are generally looser at the thighs. Besides being unnecessary, the substitution is also wrong.

There is similar confusion over salwars. Consider the outfit Shah Rukh Khan wore at the Manish Malhotra show a couple of days ago, which has been described variously as ‘pathialas’ [sic], ‘an Afghani salwar’ and ‘black harem pants’. Now, folks over in Patiala and Afghanistan can argue over the first two, but how is that thing he’s wearing ‘harem pants’? Why do we need to make our writing Western-friendly even when writing for Indian audiences?

Is it because the correspondents in question are so enthralled by coverage of Western fashion in foreign magazines that they find it necessary to stick to their glossary of terms? Or that Indian words, somehow, have become infra dig?

Also, does this attitude reflect something broader around us?

IQ And Alphabet Soup

Here’s a headline today on CNN-IBN:

Six-year-old has IQ higher than Einstein

Leave aside the dubiousness of the concept of IQ and the measurement of it—two thoughts strike me here:

1. Given that IQ, such as it is, is something that we’re more or less born with, a luck of the draw, why is this a matter of pride for anyone? It doesn’t represent an achievement of any sort, and if anything, the parents of that kid should be humbled by the good fortune they’ve got, and determined to make something out of it and then boast.

2. Why does that article tell us that the kid “loves alphabets” and “recite[s] alphabets backwards”? A, B, C all the way to Z are letters of the alphabet, not alphabets. Indeed, A to Z is one alphabet. Now, it is entirely possible that the kid, being so terribly smart, can actually recite alphabets like the Hanunó’o, Aramaic, Ge’ez, Abakada and even Roman backwards. But somehow, I doubt that’s what the writer meant.

(Link via email from Deepak.)

Defecation Statistics

In an article about sanitation in India, Jason Gale describes how a lady named Meera Devi rose before dawn each day, went to a patch outside her village, “pulled up her sari and defecated with the Taj Mahal in plain view.” Gale writes:

With that act, she added to the estimated 100,000 tons of human excrement that Indians leave each day in fields of potatoes, carrots and spinach, on banks that line rivers used for drinking and bathing and along roads jammed with scooters, trucks and pedestrians.

That is quite a sentence there, and I have two questions about it.

One, how was that estimate of “100,000 tons of human excrement” arrived at? What was it extrapolated from? How was the research to arrive at that figure done?

Two, given how specific Gale is about this, does that figure then not include excrement left in fields of rice or maize? Only “fields of potatoes, carrots and spinach”? Or is that detail thrown in only so that the prose seems descriptive?

I have no problems with the piece, mind you. Just in a quibbling mood, that’s all.

(HT: Nimai Mehta, who has a paper on the subject here—pdf link.)

“Like Dogs Being Thrown A Bone”

Aakar Patel writes:

It is quite easy to manipulate India’s television news channels, because they are open to being used.

Imagine a criminal telephoning India’s television editors. He tells them of a violent crime he’s about to commit, where his gang intends to harm people. He tells them the location and the time of the crime and asks them to send their crews to cover it. His motive for calling them is publicity. What would the journalists do? Warn the victims and call the police, one would think. And stop it when they saw a crime happening before them.

Here’s what India’s TV editors actually did on January 24. A Hindu group named Shri Ram Sene told the editors they would attack a pub in the southern city of Mangalore, and that they could get the footage. The news channels scrambled their camera crews and went with the attackers.

At the pub, called Amnesia, the men manhandled the youngsters inside. The group said it was doing this because of moral reasons; that going to pubs was not Indian culture. The attack was savage and it was filmed in vivid detail. Girls and boys were slapped about, thrown to the floor, hit on their head, kicked as they fled. Their helplessness and their shock was deeply disturbing. Just as disturbing was the animal frenzy of the men attacking them.

The cowering girls in particular were humiliated as the men hunted them, with the camera crews following the men to get the right angle.

“Like dogs being thrown a bone,” writes Patel, “the television journalists have chased the stories that Muthalik has tossed in the air after that day.”

Now, I don’t really blame a dog for chasing a bone. (Or for being a dog.) The media chases sensational stories, and Muthalik gives them just that, as do the likes of Raj Thackeray. What really gets my goat here is the apathy of the police. If Mangalore’s cops were to beat up Muthalik’s goons just as the goons beat up the girls in the pub, and called the TV channels over to film that, the TV journos would be there as well, tongues hanging out, jostling to get the right frame. If the police arrested Muthalik, the channels would do anything to get footage of the man being taken away in handcuffs. But the problem is that when mobs go on the rampage with political backing, the rule of law ceases to exist. Blaming the media for covering that, then, amounts to shooting the messenger.

But do read Patel’s full piece, he makes some excellent points, and I fully agree with his diagnoses of what ails Indian journalism: “The quality of their journalists” and “internal integrity.” Such it goes.

Indians and Indians

The Times of India reports:

Police in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest are investigating three native Indians suspected of murdering and eating a 21-year-old handicapped man in a rare case of cannibalism, local authorities said on Tuesday.

The Indians of the Kulina tribe near the Peruvian border are accused of having killed and eaten the insides of Ocelio Alves de Carvalho, a 21 year-old student in the town of Envira in Amazonas state.

What surprises me about this news is not the cannibalism or suchlike, but that The Times of India is carrying this news in its ‘Indians Abroad’ section. Yes, there is a really a website editor there who does not understand that native Brazilian Indians are not from India. (In Portugese, native Indians are called Indios and people from India are called Indianos, but the English language using the same word for these two is no excuse for such confusion.)

In my view, there is only one apt punishment for the editor who made this error: he should be eaten.

(HT: Nikhil Apte.)