Tag: vrushali lad

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Patrakar types

Security? Who’s that?

Fresh out of a serial bomb blast strike in Hyderabad, you’d think the police everywhere would wise up, right? Wrong.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the police are a bunch of dodos. What else could explain what I’m about to describe next? And, trust me, this has happened before as well.

A few days ago, I was looking for a Borivli-bound train at Churchgate station. If you’ve been to Churchgate station, you’ll know it is characterised by three things: its subway, its Wimpy restaurant right opposite the public restrooms, and the benches on which bored policemen and policewomen sit and chat with each other, occasionally taking down details and checking bags of random commuters.

It was to two of these policemen that a scared-looking young man, probably on his way home from work as well, ran up to, breathless with excitement. “Sahab, wahan ek bag pada hai! (Sir, there’s a bag lying there!),” he said, pointing in the direction of Platform 4. His face was flushed, and I noticed a tremble in his hands. “Please come with me,” he implored the two cops.

To his chagrin, the two cops merely glanced at each other sleepily. “Tu jayega ki main jaoon?” one asked the other. (I swear I am not kidding). As if by some tacit consent – one of them probably owed the other some small debt – the sleepier of the two rumbled to his feet. “Chalo,” he said to the young man.

I followed the two to see what would happen next. If there was an unidentified bag with a potential bomb in it, I wanted to witness the action.

The cop followed the young man, unhurried and supremely bored. The young man, meanwhile, raced ahead looking for the spot that he had seen the bag in. When he found it, his face lit up with the glow of achievement – he was, after all, rendering a great public service by pointing out unidentified baggage, which is what public service announcements exhort us commoners to do all the time.

The bag was finally found, and I confess my heart sank when I saw it. A black rucksack, placed next to a pillar, adjacent to Platform 4. It was bulky and could have held practically any kind of explosive. The young man pointed at it and backed away, eyes wide.

The cop, whose name should ideally figure in next year’s Gallantry Awards list, nonchalantly approached the bag, and I swear I am still not kidding – poked it with a finger, then pulled open a zipper and started rummaging through its contents.

The young man backed away, horror written all over his face. With a last look at the cop happily emptying the bag of its contents  (a few books, some loose papers, an ID card, stray stationery), he walked away and soon melted into the crowds. I wanted to stop him and tell him to not be horrified. Because I have seen cops do exactly the same thing every time a citizen points out suspicious baggage on railway platforms or on the streets or inside trains – they start by tapping the baggage with their lathis, then poke and prod with their fingers, then empty out its contents before pronouncing, “Kuchh nahin hai ismein.”

At the risk of sounding extremely uncharitable, if there ever is a time for a bomb to go off, that time is when a lazy, foolish policeman approaches suspicious baggage and starts poking it. Too bad we citizens are not empowered to call the bomb squad ourselves.

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so.

(Picture courtesy stockpicturesforeveryone.com. Image used for representational purpose only)

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Read

‘Stop looking for love’

Rupa Gulab speaks about her latest book, why she prefers writing short stories and about telling it like it is.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

That Rupa Gulab is a very good writer is stating the obvious. The writer of three books – Girl Alone, Chip Of The Old Blockhead and The Great Depression Of The 40s: A Novel, and a columnist with a flair for the comic touch, Rupa is a revelation with her newest book, I Kissed A Frog.

In an interview with The Metrognome, the author talks about writing on love and friendship, how her most poignant tale in this story is an ode to her best friend, and why one must stop looking for love and let it come when it has to.

Why a book of irreverent short stories on love?

Why not? I enjoy telling it like it is! I must say that with I Kissed A Frog I discovered that writing short stories is so much more fun than writing a novel. You have so many different characters and situations to play with – it’s great entertainment for a writer. But I’d just like to point out that this book is not merely about love – friendship plays a huge role here. And friendship (to me) is just as important as love. I pointed that out in ‘Hell’s Angel’ (one of the stories in the book), where the heroine is gutted when her best friend moves to New York.

You mention in the book that some of the stories were published earlier in magazines and websites, and that you made changes to them before they went into I Kissed A Frog. What is it like, re-visiting something that is written and published?

What can I say? I get bored rather quickly. My first novel, Girl Alone, was based on a column called Dating Diary that ran in Cosmopolitan for two years. When I decided to adapt it to a novel, I made many changes. Like, for example, in the column whenever Arti (the heroine) goes through a spot of trauma, she glugs antacids. In the novel, I changed it to cough syrup because that gives it a more dangerous dimension. I have to refresh things to keep myself interested. Then there’s so much more freedom when you’re writing a book. You can use swear words liberally without worrying about nasty letters being sent to an editor. And there’s no word count limitation – you can write as much as you want.

That’s why I made a few changes to six of the stories in I Kissed A Frog that were published earlier in mags and websites.

Are any of the stories in I Kissed A Frog autobiographical?

Not at all. Girl Alone was the only novel in which I let a part of myself show.

Of all the stories in the book, ‘Au Revoir’ stands out for its very different tone. In fact, I was startled by how searing this particular story was, not what I was expecting after such funny ones as ‘Diet Wars’. What inspired this particular story?

When I was writing stories for the Friendship Diaries section of I Kissed A Frog, I decided to put in one about my best friend, Ranjona Banerji, too. See, Ranjona and I have always joked about the fact that she will outlive me because of my lousy lifestyle choices. Which means she’d be the person to contribute to my obituary, and I’d be off the hook for her obit, right?

So I decided to write her obit in advance – Au Revoir is just that. It’s a tribute to our long friendship that goes back to school days. Not surprisingly, the emotions flowed naturally, and dark humour set the tone. I sent her a cryptic text message while I was writing it, saying that I had just murdered her.  As far as I’m concerned, my job is done. And she owes me an obit, and I want it now! Hell, I’m longing to read nice things about myself before I die.

Have any of your family and friends featured as characters in any of the stories?

While there are shades of some members of my family (including my husband) in my earlier novels, I Kissed A Frog is free of family-based characters. And I bet they’re all heaving a sigh of relief! This book really is about different kinds of love and a celebration of friendship. And, as I mentioned before, the story ‘Au Revoir’ is based on and for my best friend.

Of all the stories, which one is your favourite? Why?

I have three favourites: ‘The Ex-Files’, ‘Au Revoir’ and ‘Rapper N. Zel’. I enjoyed writing ‘The Ex-Files’ because of the gradual changes in the heroine’s prickly relationship with her mother after she got dumped – exploring relationships is my thing! I loved writing ‘Rapper N. Zel’ because it’s all about how women have to struggle to break the glass ceiling and how bitter they become because of it – and in my mind, this story is dedicated to all my friends who’ve faced that problem. And as for ‘Au Revoir’, I’ve already told you why it’s special for me.

Of all the stories, which one is most likely to have played out in your own life?

Oh, ‘Hell’s Angel’ – definitely! I worked in the media (as a copywriter in advertising) for many years. The heroine’s lifestyle could have been mine.

What is the nicest compliment you’ve received for ‘I Kissed A Frog? 

A review by a male blogger who started out by saying how much he disliked chick lit, and ended up saying that I Kissed A Frog changed his mind about the genre. I seriously love this guy! (Read his review here)

What is your honest opinion on love and the various ways we go about looking for it? 

I’d say stop looking for it! Don’t waste your time. It will come when it has to. And if it doesn’t come, who cares? Look, you have friends you can rely on for companionship, FB and Twitter are great interaction spaces, and then you have work, books, music and movies to lose yourself in. Life’s crowded enough already. When I was in college, I’d put up a lovely paragraph from DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover on my bedroom wall. It says everything I believe about love. Here goes:

“It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times.”

Not surprisingly, I put this quote in Girl Alone as well!

On the subject of your sister Kushalrani (aka Bunny), who you say is a ‘horror, and your worst critic’, how has having a writer sibling helped you when you write?

Well, most writers always show their first draft to family and/or close friends. I have a small core group: my sisters Roma Circar and Kushalrani Gulab (aka Bunny), my husband Salil Sadanandan and my friend Ranjona Banerji. The reason why I chose them is because we share the same sense of humour and irony. Incidentally, all of them are writers. While my husband is not a full time writer (he was cruelly shoved on the IIT, IIM path by his parents) he occasionally writes on eclectic subjects (humour, design and travel) for various publications.

When I share my first draft with them, my brief is very stern: “Do not waste my precious time by telling me what you like about it. Tell me what you hate about it. Be savage, rip it to shreds!” I must say that this is the only time they ever listen to me. I grade them on the ‘savagery’ index:

Roma is the gentlest of the lot. When she doesn’t like something, she informs me firmly but apologetically, starting her sentences with nervous “umms.”

Ranjona is tougher. No “umms” for her. It’s always a grim “hmm” which is followed by a bald statement. Our biggest arguments are over the placement of commas. We both have strong views on the subject.

Bunny and Salil are the most frightening – and frankly, I don’t know which one is worse. Let me start with Bunny. When she goes through my draft she ruthlessly deletes sentences/paragraphs that she believes interfere with the flow of the story, ignoring my howls of anguish. Hell, some of my funniest jokes have been killed by her and she’s always unrepentant. “The story comes first,” is her heartless mantra.

Clichés are bigger sins than murder according to her, and my God, if she happens to spot something like “as white as snow”, she hisses menacingly and explodes like an angry pressure cooker. I have, however, sneakily slipped in an “over the moon” in one of the stories in I Kissed A Frog. An act of defiance, just to prove to her that I have a backbone!

If Bunny does the pressure-cooker-exploding act to frightening perfection, Salil is like one of those raging Pamplona bulls you really don’t want to cross paths with. He gets furious, absolutely livid, if he comes across bits he doesn’t like. I am ordered (yes, ordered!) to rewrite bits of stories, change a character’s profession, change a tone of voice, et cetera. And though I’m complaining bitterly, I have to confess that his feedback on the draft of I Kissed A Frog was marvellous. Bunny’s softer when it comes to rewrites. She merely offers suggestions that I am free to ignore.

At the end of it all, I’m a quivering mess and I go with my gut. Sometimes I give in, sometimes I don’t. But I’m always thankful for the advice from all four of them because they are the critics I respect most.

What is the kind of writing you are most drawn to? Who are your favourite authors?

I grew up in a house that had more books than furniture because my parents were voracious readers. Humour was their preference and we had practically every single book written by PG Wodehouse, Richmal Compton, Anthony Buckeridge, Lewis Carroll, etc. As I grew older, I added a few more humour writers to my personal book shelves: Woody Allen, James Thurber, George Mikes, Richard Armour and Gerald Durrell, to name a few. At the same time, I have to confess that I sighed deeply over Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom Of The Opera, William Saroyan’s beautifully brilliant The Human Comedy, Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley (my dad’s favourite book), most of DH Lawrence, some of Thomas Hardy and other  books that do not fall into the humour category. And as for the girlie moments, I still fall back on my mum’s favourites: Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer and Jean Webster who wrote my absolutely favourite growing up book Daddy Long-legs. Oh, and I have finally learnt to appreciate Charles Dickens! My parents loved him so, and they were shocked that I hated his books when I was in school and college.

What are you working on next?

I can’t say yet. I’ve got two novels for drastically different target audiences in mind, but I really have no idea if and when I’ll get down to it. I’m not a disciplined writer anymore.  Take I Kissed A Frog. I suddenly decided to write it in April last year and finished it in three months flat. I’m pretty much worn out after that frenetic burst of activity.

Lastly, if you had to change the endings for any of these stories, which ones would you choose and how would you change them?

I wouldn’t change them at all.

 _________________________

About the book:

I Kissed A Frog is a collection of not-so-perfect love stories, dealing as they are with ex-boyfriends, current boyfriends hooking up with best friends, aiming for a man who doesn’t love one when another who does is right in front of one, friends and colleagues engaged in diet wars, and in a really funny vein, love and relationships through popular fairy tales set in contemporary times.

I particularly liked ‘Love in F Major’, where a girl starts seeing a married man and hopes he will make the ultimate choice, ‘Welcome to the Sisterhood’, which discusses sex change, ‘Wannabe mum’, in which a woman’s biological clock decides the course of her stable relationship, ‘Au revoir’, in which a dying girl says goodbye to her best friend, and all of the ‘Not-so-grim fairy tales for big, bad girls’.

Rupa keeps the tone conversational and sometimes flippant, bringing in different dimensions to love, romance, inter-office rivalry, personal insecurities, and of course, friendship. This is a book to be read by all women – those who have a gang of girls to hang out with, those who slink off home after work to watch TV and eat ice cream straight from the container, those who wonder why their mothers and best friends oppose everything they say and do, and especially those who feel that the world ended with their one great romance.

In fact, the book stands the very real danger of being picked up only by women – and all the stories are written from a woman’s perspective. Maybe Rupa’s next book of short stories could be about what men want.

Send us a love story to editor@themetrognome.in, and you could win a copy of Rupa Gulab’s I Kissed A Frog. 

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Patrakar types

The devil wears (borrowed) Prada

…and throws her weight about like nobody’s business. Why do women bosses in the media model themselves on Miranda Priestley?
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

If you’re anything like me – that is, a girl who likes to work because she likes to work and has no other girly interests, such as the latest fashions and whether brown is a colour Indian women would ever prefer whole-heartedly – do not ever work for a woman’s lifestyle or fashion magazine.

From personal experience, I can tell you that you will be expected to dress like a model. Wearing footwear other than stillettoes is a crime punishable by hanging from the ceiling by your toes. Using a scrunchie to keep away your unruly hair from your face is also a crime fit for the guillotine. Wearing denims to work will get you ostracised till you came back wearing linen trousers or a very expensive skirt. If you wear flats, they have to be ballerinas, not flip flops or something equally foul. You never repeat an outfit for at least two months, you eat at only the most expensive restaurants and you network only with those in your circle.

Speaking in any language other than English will get you transferred to the mail sorting department. And where I worked, you couldn’t speak to the boss at all, even when you were dying of a terminal disease and needed a day off to arrange for your own funeral, because the boss was too busy to look up from the computer screen where a furious game of Angry Birds was in progress. I am not kidding.

I find that women heading magazines catering to women consciously model themselves on Miranda Priestley. They would have modelled themselves on Anne Wintour directly, but most of them are not sure if Miranda Priestly is Anne Wintour, and Meryl Streep is more famous. Of course, Miranda Priestly is a bi**h, but she is a bi**h who is on top of her game, knows exactly how to produce issue after issue of stellar reading material, cannot be fooled by fancy story ideas that are essentially a rehash of last year’s covers, and who shows up for important events and photo shoots because all she cares about is that the magazine looks good.

The women I worked for in magazines ignored the rest of these qualities and concentrated only on being bit**es. It didn’t get them very far with the staff, but it got them the editor’s chair, so all was good. These women dressed fancy, spoke Oxford English, some accented Hindi when telling the office boy “thoda chai leke aana, bhaiyya,” never spoke to the staff unless to yell at them in front of the entire office, never showed up for magazine events unless they were covered by the Press (in which case they showed up only with their cronies) and were shameless enough to demand freebies such as jewellery sets and iPads from PR agencies liaisoning with the magazine for stories.

If only they cultivated Miranda Priestley’s class as well.

Compare this state of affairs with the few women editors in newspapers. I’ve heard glowing reports of Ranjona Banerjee as the boss at DNA a few years ago. I’ve found Sumana Ramanan (Senior Editor, Hindustan Times) to be soft-spoken and clear about her expectations from a story. Deepali Nandwani was a capable editor at Yuva, always taking the trouble to discuss each story idea at length before giving the go-ahead to work on it. Carol Andrade was a gem of a person to work under at Times Response. Several tales are still told of Dina Vakil’s class and good manners, and the woman’s not been around for quite a while now.

Nobody’s saying these women are/were perfect editors, but at least they didn’t make themselves out to be jerks. Which is what anyone expects from an editor in the first place.

I was once speaking to senior journalist Mrinalini Naniwadekar about the tendency of women bosses to throw their weight about, sometimes for no reason at all. Mrinalini thought it stemmed from an old struggle that the first women journos in the city faced when trying to get themselves assigned on important beats such as crime and politics, which used to be denied to them. Probably the resentment still lurks. Probably several women have been thwarted in their ambitions by men. But these situations don’t exist any more, at least not in the big cities – though most editors today are still men – and with so many women already in the profession and so many more joining the ranks every day, it is inexplicable that women bosses would still need to show any measure of ‘toughness’ by being total as***les.

And why be rude and unkind to appear tough? Is there any call to treat people like dirt just to show that you are the boss? Since when has it been cool to make ‘no’ your favourite word, not grant people you don’t like an audience, not sanction leaves that the employee is entitled to, and generally go on an unnecessary rampage against the world because you want to first cultivate, then reinforce the image of a no-nonsense go-getter who suffers no fools?

Worse, why try to be tough when your entire staff comprises women? If you were out to fight the men in a men’s world, why are you giving such grief to women as well? Or are you really just nasty?

If anyone’s figured this out, do let me know. *ties her hair up with a scrunchie and goes about her business in Osho chappals and last week’s clothes.*

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so.

(Picture courtesy news.com.au)
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Learn

Why children must be (cyber)smarties

Three Mumbaikars are teaching school children in the city and outside it to be safe and responsible on the Internet.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Renuka Sharma (name changed) met a boy on Facebook and decided that she was in love with him. A few months later, the 16-year-old ran away from home to be with him. Fortunately for her, the boy, who did not know that she was a minor, did not take advantage of the girl; instead, he escorted her home and explained the entire situation to her distraught parents.

Most children are not as lucky. Drawn to social networking and gaming sites that also help them stay connected with their friends and strangers over chat windows, young children are increasingly falling prey to Internet predators, or being drawn into unsavoury bullying online. Often, unsure of how to deal with the situation, and afraid to talk to their parents for fear of censure or being misunderstood, they allow the problem to escalate out of hand.

All of this can be remedied by children knowing how to behave online. But who will teach them Internet etiquette, and what constitutes bad online behaviour?

Cybersmartie will.

Conceived in 2011 and set up in 2012 by three Mumbaikars – Shekhar Tripathi (24), Sayantan Sen (30) and Neha Doshi (37) – the company aims to educate children on responsible Internet behaviour, in an environment known to them (their school) and in a way that engages them. Speaking to The Metrognome, Neha (in pic on right) said, “The thing is, today’s children get access to the Internet at a really young age. Soon, they spend long hours online, signing up for Facebook or playing virtual reality games. There comes a stage when children find it difficult to differentiate between their real and virtual lives.”

The first problem area is cyber bullying, says Shekhar. “It starts off as a fun activity, with several children ganging up on one child. But it soon crosses acceptable limits of social behaviour. The interesting thing is, several children do not know that this is cyber bullying and that it is wrong,” he adds.

What Cybersmartie does is impart this knowledge in an interactive manner. “We hold workshops for four different topics – cyber bullying, digital responsibility – what to post and what not to post, sexting and online predators – and make them really interactive. We cite current examples when we speak to them; for instance, there is no point discussing what email is and what it means, because children today have email accounts only to sign in to Facebook. We talk about the technologies they use and address their online behaviour patterns, so that the workshop becomes relevant to them,” says Shekhar.

Why Cybersmartie?

Shekhar and Sayantan first decided to embark on this project after they accessed the latter’s nephew’s FB page in 2011. “There was a child with glasses who was being bullied online,” Shekhar remembers. “We saw that eight comments had been posted at 2 am. By the time we checked again at 8 am the next day, there were over 40 more comments, which meant the kids had been at it all night on a weekday. And the comments were mean and abusive.”

The two friends – they used to work together at at Pricewaterhouse Coopers – started researching this behaviour. “We learnt that it was called ‘cyber-bullying’ and that it could have far-reaching repercussions for the victim. We realised that nobody taught children about this, and there was no discussion on preventing it or dealing with it. Our schools, even our Government, does not have a policy on Internet bullying,” Shekhar (in pic on right) explains.

Neha came on board the project a bit later. “We met clinical psychologists, teachers and school principals to understand what schools needed. After researching and interacting with experts, we designed a curriculum for the workshops we would conduct,” Shekhar says. Their very first workshops happened at Lilavatibai Podar Senior Secondary School, Santacruz.

The workshops include a short video on cyber bullying, and the trio make sure to get the children to talk and share as much as possible. “They are very receptive and quick to share their experiences. However, when dealing with older kids, we engage in role playing and a quiz game-like scenario to first get them involved, then to get them to share,” says Neha.

Some problem areas

Most teachers are not even aware of their students’ Internet habits, says Neha, who is a teacher herself. “Which sites are the students accessing? When they say they are on Facebook, what are they doing on it? What is the communication like on Whatsapp? Teachers must be involved in these things, so as to be able to help a child who is being troubled by his peers or a predator,” she explains.

She adds that a lot of children operate multiple FB accounts, apart from posting such information about themselves that can be exploited by miscreants. “We teach them not to declare their holiday plans, or reveal their whereabouts all the time. If a child comes to us and tells us that he/she is facing a problem, and several children have already done so during the workshops, we take the problem to the school authorities so that it can be resolved.”

Shekhar adds, “We must update ourselves all the time, because cyber bullying may also change its form every three months. Besides, we must recognise and accept that children will be exposed to pornography and violence on the Internet, but that they should possess the knowledge to deal with bullies or tricksters.” He cites the example of a boy who befriended another ‘youngster’ – who was actually 30 years old – and soon began confiding everything to him on FB. “The man started blackmailing the child, and started extorting money from him. Finally, the child was forced to tell his mother when the man demanded Rs 20,000 from him. Children must be made aware that they should inform their parents or teachers at the first instance of such blackmail,” Shekhar says.

What they teach

The workshops deal with such topics as plagiarism and how to use others’ material for project work, how to use FB’s privacy settings, hacking, why passwords should not be shared and what to do when you’re being bullied, among other things. “We send a family ‘tip sheet’ after the workshops are over, for parents to look at. We have a module for teachers and schools too,” Shekhar says.

For more details on the Cybersmartie programme for school children, write to shekhar@cybersmartie.com or call at +91- 96193 22618.

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Patrakar types

Who have you ignored today?

The media that complains of a Government ignoring its citizens can’t really talk, since it deliberately, subtly ignores certain ‘others’.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Oh yes, the Government’s a bi**h. It doesn’t care about you, it doesn’t want to hear your views, it steadfastly ignores your protests and it sweeps every matter, however monumental, under the rug. It doesn’t care if you’re dead or alive, as long as you rally around and vote it back to power in 2014.

There has been a round of protestations against the severe (mis)handling of things by the Government with regards to the Delhi gang rape issue. The country’s newspapers and channels have gone all out in their criticism of the Government’s workings, and several media houses have launched campaigns for justice, organised self defence camps for women, dug out old compilations of rape statistics all over the country, and stepped up their coverage of every crime happening against women.

In the midst of this noisy reportage of the state of affairs in this supposedly rape-happy nation, the media continues to turn its back on those it has always turned its back on.

Since the New Year, there has been a huge bunch of people protesting at Azad Maidan, Mumbai. This group comprises displaced slum dwellers and those affected by the decisions of the State Government, a group that is on a relay fast till its demands are met and its leaders given adequate time for a meeting with the higher-ups. The group marched to Azad Maidan in huge numbers, prevented from advancing at several stages by cops, denied a meeting with the CM more than twice, but it still camped out at Azad Maidan, and is still there. Headed by fiery activist Medha Patkar, this group is gathering strength with each passing day, and at least 30 of its members, at any point of time, are on a fast.

Did the papers and channels cover this momentous protest?

Slum dwellers in Mumbai are an active lot, forever demonstrating against demolition drives and demanding meetings with authorities. As the population of slum dwellers in the city swells and they get official sanction as vote banks, what logic dictates that their issues, their demands, indeed their existence, must be denied by the media?

One reason for this studied silence, and this is a reason propagated by managements and editorial staff in almost every city media house these days, is that the media must cater primarily to those who read their papers or watch their channels. “We are catering to the South Bombay crowd,” my chief reporter told me during my orientation at a city tabloid years ago. “You are on the health beat. You should get news from private hospitals, not civic or government hospitals.”

I can agree in part, but are we journalists or middlemen for business houses? If we are one but not the other, why pretend otherwise?

This same arrogance was the reason why several media were slow to pick up the pulse of the Anna Hazare-led agitation for the Jan Lokpal Bill last year. It was an agitation led by a little villager, so what? But when the numbers began to align with the same man, the media pounced. Even yesterday, at the ongoing Azad Maidan agitation, the media deigned to cover the proceedings only when Anna Hazare landed at the spot to offer his support. And even then, the questions remained largely restricted to his views of the Delhi rape case. As journalist Javed Iqbal, who is covering the agitation tweeted yesterday, “Anna holds press conference. More media today than all the media I have seen @ demolition drives in past 3 yrs…And during press con, not a single question abt Rajiv Gandhi Awas Yojana, SRA scams, only questions about Delhi rape, irrigation scam & Anna’s anti-corruption campaign.”

In its bid to cater to the ‘upper’ classes of society, the media willingly ignores the poor and the marginalised, in fact those same people who are genuinely in need of the media’s help. It assumes that the poor are not reading the papers that the rich are buying. In demarcating readership thus, the media creates a clear ‘Us v/s Them’ divide, it sees development only in the building of glass pyramids and gorgeous townships for the elite, not in the housing of the city’s poor and the generation of employment for them. This divide further points at the poor being the enemies of development, and hence, the elite. This explains why you will see lengthy stories of new slums being recognised, of water connections being granted to certain slum pockets, but not much about deliberate irregularities committed by the builder lobby (or the advertising lobby). Several editors are known to address issues such as an entire area receiving muddy water only when the taps in their own homes spew smelly water and the domestic help (who stays in the neighbouring slum) tells them that she has clean water in her shanty.

In its flawed reasoning of what constitutes development, the media inadvertently and, sometimes subtly, blames the poor for whatever backward spirals our cities occasionally fall into. For rising crime. For increasing poverty. And to complete this pretty picture, it goes and ignores the poor some more, choosing instead to outrage for days on end over rubbish statements made by the country’s politicians and spiritual gurus. It’s almost like an entire class of people just does not exist in our collective conscience. The only times ‘they’ are receiving any coverage these days is if ‘they’ annoy ‘us’ in some way. And then all of us yell ourselves hoarse for being ignored.

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so. 

(Picture courtesy youthrelationships.org)

 

 

 

 

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Patrakar types

Editors from hell

Could sub-editors please be more careful while editing articles? And giving away e-mail IDs and phone numbers is not cool.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Okay, first off, Mid Day. What were you thinking with this story of a boy arrested because he sent a photo cake to a girl he liked? Your story is eminently readable, but what was your sub-editor and page editor doing when they overlooked one important detail while checking the story: your paper printed the email ID the boy used to send the girl’s picture to the cakewallahs.

What’s worse, NDTV‘s website picked up your story, and printed it as is. No, not really as is, because NDTV changed the story’s headline to the puzzling: ‘In trouble for sending photo of cake to a girl’. A question to the NDTV sub-editor who changed the headline: Why did you change Mid Day‘s headline to read ‘photo of cake’ when you clearly meant ‘photo cake’? (An aside here is that the story would be doubly interesting if the boy had actually sent just a photo of the cake and not the cake itself. If somebody did that to me, I sure as hell would go to the cops.)

A few days ago, a Mumbai daily carried the headline, ‘Man shoots dead builder’. At first glance, it seemed like a case of extreme cruelty – I mean, why shoot a dead man? Another news item last month, about a man making prank calls to a woman at work, gave away the telephone number the calls were made from.

All of this makes the police’s precaution of hiding an accused’s face from public pretty redundant.

And it’s not just newspapers, it’s also television. A few days ago, IBN Lokmat did a charming special on Dev Anand’s birth anniversary, and showed the late actor’s songs and a few interviews of people who had worked with him. Each song was accompanied with the lyrics of that song being flashed across the screen. But when the song ‘Ek but banaoonga…’ from Asli Naqli started, IBN Lokmat’s lyrics read, ‘Ek putar banaoonga…’

A rather funny and insensitive editing error occurred recently with The Times of India placing an ad for Good Day right in the centre of a grim news story of a man killing his own kids (see pic on left). Other regular offences that editors commit are publishing pictures of minors, whether accused of a crime or the victims of one, without blurring their faces or changing their names, and often choosing to blur the faces of women and not men.

And it’s not just obvious elements like headlines and what goes in the main story that comprises editing goof-ups. Several times, reporters write an article with an obvious slant – for instance, political and crime stories, in which the writer’s biases clearly reflect in the article he/she has written – but editors checking those copies let the slant remain. The result is stories such as the Bidushi Dash Barde case, in which most reports blamed the dead woman’s husband without actually saying so, with phrases like, ‘He called her only once in the morning despite knowing that she was ill’, and ‘He was calm and answered all questions without breaking down.’

When I still worked with newspapers full time, I had an almost daily run-in with the paper’s editors. Once I waged a war against a particular sub-editor, who had not only mangled my story, but changed the headline I had given to the story with the sensitivity of a speeding truck. Imagine my chagrin when I read the papers the next morning and saw that the sub-editor had altered my headline ‘Youth win award for propagating gender equality’ to ‘Youth win award for fighting molestation’.

I used to think sub-editors and editors above them are people with eyes like hawks, and the brain capacity of an encyclopedia. At least, that’s how they used to be. Earlier ‘deskies’ were people who used to be reporters, and journalists who read constantly on a variety of subjects. This sharpened their intellect – an editor had to know more on a subject than a reporter – and gave their language an edge. And you couldn’t become a deskie just by applying for an editor’s job; you had to slog your way through the reporting ranks before being elevated to a desk position.

For the last five years or more, however, newspapers and channels are increasingly hiring desk personnel for their knowledge of English alone. Proofing of articles has now been reduced only to grammar and spell checks, which even the reporter himself can do on MS Word. And then there are new concepts such as Rewrite Desks that are operational in major newspapers – this Desk’s job is to go batshit crazy on articles that have not been written well. In other places, we are told, there are three levels of editing to pass through before the article is considered final.

And despite all these precautions, we still end up with gems like ‘Photo of cake’.

May be we should have a Corrective Measures Desk above the sub-editing desk…?

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so.

 (Feature image courtesy ipjtraining.com. Picture used for representational purpose only)

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