aditya kumar's weblog

Last night, in Bangalore, a suspected terrorist attack, and the government has stepped into action now. But why were the security arrangements “light”, when New Delhi Police had already warned the State Government, of something like this happening, beforehand? Why is the security situation being reviewed by the state now, after the attack has happened? Why was this not done when the warning was issued? Why do incidents like these have to happen for the Government to wake up and take “precautionary” measures?

In the middle of the Bihar election results, one news initially went without notice.

Manjunath, a manager with the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), had ordered the closure of a petrol pump in Lakhimpur Kheri (State of Uttar Pradesh) sometime back. He was murdered.

The petrol dealers in the area never followed the norms. They sold adulterated fuel. Manjunath had the authority for closing these pumps down. Eventually he ordered the closure of three petrol pumps in the area.

Manjunath had informed his father about the area he was posted in. It was unsafe, full of gangs and a mafia order was in place. He told that he did not get “proper official support”. His father asked him to let some things “go by”. Manjunath resisted, insisting that he wanted to change things, this was his challenge.

As a student, Manju financed his own education. Perhaps, that goes on to say the kind of person he was.

As a graduage of IIML (Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow), Manjunath had the choice of leaving the job and getting himself something else, much safer and more attractive. It is the drive that fuels the majority of young professionals. But he chose not to. He wanted to change the system, giving all he can to his first job.

And this is what the system gave him.

Satyendra Dubey and now Manjunath. Anyone who knows our system would agree that what Manjunath and Dubey found out, was just the tip of the iceberg.

Is this what our political and administrative system gives to whistleblowers? Can the Government offer anything more than the condolences?

Links:

Friends of Manjunath have created a blog in his memory, here (I request you to please sign the online Petition in this regard, to the Prime Minister of The Republic of India, link to which is given on the blog) [Link via Sonia Faleiro]

Manjunath’s father, talks to the Indian Express, here.

Sonia Faleiro’s post here

Gaurav Sabnis, Manjunath’s junior at IIML, writes a moving post here.

Nilanjana Roy points out in her article, what I have always believed- that, Rushdie, Seth, Ghosh and Mistry have been the best that Contemporary Indian Writing has had to offer. Add to it, Authors like Jhumpa Lahiri and Suketu Mehta now having come of age, it is this group of writers, that will continue to provide the best in Indian writing for the next few decades.

Roy’s excellent article also mentions the (almost ironical) fact that most of the Indian writers have set up base outside India and continue to spend a good part of a year away from home. This same point has also been mentioned by Laxman Rao, who featured in Guardian’s (www.gurardian.co.uk) article.

Now that I have mentioned Laxman Rao, you may wonder who he is since the name does not seem to belong in literary circles. Laxman Rao is a Novelist who writes in Hindi. In the last 20 years, he has written about “18 novels, plays and political essays”, all in Hindi.

Laxman Rao does not stay outside India. He stays in New Delhi. He sells tea, on a road side tea stall, somewhere in south Delhi.

Rao asserts that to write about India, one has to stay here, in this country and write about the “India” every Indian knows. The words of Indian Authors who stay in foreign lands do not reflect the ground reality here. Read about it here. (Link from Indianwriting)

But then again, for our Authors to stay here, an encouraging market needs to exist. A good environment for literature, a book release and the world gives the Author the notice s/he deserves.

Also required is a “literary sense” existing within the masses. Of course, it does not live in our society. Instances of its absence were evident in the quality of questions asked by journalists while their mobile phones sang amidst Vikram Seth reading “Two Lives”.

Indian Literature is not (yet) in a state where we would ideally like it to be; but at least it hasn’t got any worse. In fact, I would assert that in the last 15 years or so, the overall state of Indian Writing has only improved. Some credit for it should go to Arundhati Roy’s Booker prize winning work, The God of Small Things and the Pulitzer prize winner, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Of course, shortlisting of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey (1991) and A Fine Balance(1996), for the Booker Prize, within a span of 5 years, has only helped the cause of Indian Literature.

Things are not too good, agreed, but they are not too bad either.

I remember Uma once wrote a post about the worst books ever written (worse still, published!) and Anurag Mathur’s “The Inscrutable Americans” fitted the bill for quite a few, including yours truly. Now, it would be almost ridiculous to compare the likes of Mathur to modern Indian literary giants like Rohinton Mistry, Amitav Ghosh and Jhumpa Lahiri but the fact is that Mathur’s story telling was, in the end, good for the financial health of his publisher. That he writes prose which is in no way exquisite and miles away from being called “good literature” is a different matter altogether.

Such is also the case with Chetan Bhagat, author of “Five Point Someone”, who has “One night at the Call Center” as his latest offering. I feel here is a new breed of writers emerging and they are quite content not being in the same class as contemporary English writers. Their prose is not poetic and surely you can keep the dictionary at bay. In fact, at times, their writing style is almost swaggering and often full of dark humor. They strive by making the reader flip pages by exploiting the plot, the storyline, rather than employing an effective use of the prose. (A good example would be Dan Brown, who, with his ordinary writing in the highly overrated “Da Vinci Code”, must have smiled all the way to the bank while we were left chasing the holy grill.. or was that the grail? You may not like what I say, but I thought that book was a pure waste of time.) Comparing Anurag Mathur’s (or for that matter, Bhagat’s) prose to Rushdie’s or Jhumpa Lahiri’s would be comparing a David Dhawan movie to Meera Nair’s. Almost a crime.

It’s an altogether different style of story-telling. For starters, books like these are often read in one go. People who have not read a book in ages complete it in a matter of hours. Read alright but read by whom? Teenagers, young adults, in fact just about everyone. From a literary sense, these is nothing to gain from books like these. Nightmare for readers who cherish the flawless prose of authors like Salman Rushdie, Rohin Mistry. In fact, Bhagat’s target audience is not that class of readers. But the most startling fact about these kind of books is that in a society where reading is a dying culture, they are like a shot in the arm. That is the only reason why I am not cynically critical about authors like Bhagat and Mathur. (Or am I?)

The rain kept on pouring on the bus, in all forms. There were brief periods when the breeze had some private moments with the bus, but overall, the rain intruded most of the time. I could see the windshield and have the driver’s view on some occasions. The wipers kept working overtime.

The view on the Driver’s rear view mirror often revealed the grinning face of our driver. The smile showcasing the bright white set of teeth in the darkness. The smile that also managed to hold a lit bidi that was an important accessory with this man who had already driven us close to 300 kilometers. The same smile that probably had a few hundred stories behind it. Stories that were an important aspect of his life (and probably someone else’s life too), for they fuelled the fire in him to drive 17 hours a day.

I chose to turn my face towards the window. Droplets of water decorated the brown glass pane on my right. The city cars zoomed past, leaving behind a tail of colorful lights, owing to which, the droplets of water, for a moment or two, acquired the effect of hundred mini-rainbows.

And when not mini-rainbows, they were the stars. Small, silvery, glittering and existing within my hand’s reach. I was so much in my own little world. Isn’t that what everyone wants? Isn’t that what you want?

But then the bus stopped, and the imagery acquired a different shape. A beggar child, in the bare minimum of clothes, both hands on the window of a car. His workplace, this muddy, traffic congested road. His plea, in his eyes. His desperations, too many to count. His thoughts, he could not afford.

His hands on the window’s glass were taken to be intrusions into another world. His gestures were met with hatred. On an open window, the glass made way up, securing the world of someone inside. Nothing, but a pure matter of convenience.

If I could make eye contact with the child, all I had to offer was another pair of cold eyes.

The difference between his world and mine? A Glass Pane.

Then I noticed, it was only the breeze now — the rain had gone and so were the droplets. My world looked so bleak without those stars.

My little world now ceased to exist.

PS: Thank you, Mr.Nair, for your suggestions on this.

Readers, Happy Deepawali.

Hope this year is great for the people of Blogosphere, for you all — The readers I know, the readers who post comments and the readers who follow this blog but prefer not to comment.

I am travelling right now, will post something on that soon.

I get to see the “Breaking News” banner (With a Red colour background) almost every other day on news channels. In earlier days, this was a rare sight, to see this flashing banner which almost covers half of the entire screen when on display. But now we have a “Breaking News” so often, it seems we are nearing the end of the world or something.

So, this evening I switch on the TV again, and I see the “Breaking News” flash again, and I decide on to hold on to this channel which was “Zee News”.

The news was about the Delhi Bomb blasts that happened yesterday. These were the “Breaking news” feeds:

1. Koi thos saboot ya suraag baramad nahi hua hai
(Police has got almost no evidence/clue till now)

2. bomb blast mein shaayad abc group ka haath, lekin is baat ki pushti nahi
(abc group may be involved in the blasts but it can’t be verified)

3. cyber cafe owners customers ka record rakha karen
(Cyber Cafe owners requested to keep record of the customers)

Most of the points mentioned above were “tentative” in nature. And this was Breaking news.

This news is relevant, yes, but is this “Breaking News”? I thought that phrase was used to tell about events that could shock me. Those events that could leave me stunned. But like many others, Zee News is cheap. Flash the red banners and the channel surfers are bound to go back and take notice.

A few days back we had similar news, a bomb blast and the news presenter was talking with a reporter who was at the site. A brief excerpt of what I heard:

News Presenter: xyz-ji, yeh bomb dhamaka kaafi zabardast tha, ab tak kitne logon ke marne ki aashanka hai wahan par?
( This bomb blast was a big one, how many people have died till now?)

Reporter: ji kaafi log ghayal hue hain, lekin kisi ke marne ki koi khabar nahi hai hamare paas
(Many are injured, but we are not aware of the number of casualties)

News Presenter: aisa kaise ho sakta hai, itna bada dhamaka aur ek bhi aadmi nahi mara? fir bhi aapka andaza kya hoga, kitne log mare hein, kuch to bataiye?
(Such a big blast and none dead? How is it possible? What’s your estimate, how many, do you think, must have died?)

And I wondered. Sitting in his air conditioned room, facing the camera how settled this news presenter was, while he actually hoped that someone had died there at the site. How convenient it was for him to add some more spice to the news. How thick skinned had he become after reporting the bomb blasts and the dead, and how he almost took a certain pride in it while he announced them on national television. How cheap it was, this human life, for him.

More from Rajeev Shukla, the congress MP from the Rajya Sabha, a respected media-man, as he wrote in his column published in yesterday’s Indian Express. Allow me to quote him here:

” Hard news are being sidelined even as peoplelike Kunji Lal, a non-descript astrologer from a remote village are able to take two national news channels hostage for hours. Lal predicted his own death at a precise time last week and our news channels went hysterical; putting all news on hold while relentlessly broadcasting what were deemed to be the last few hours of an otherwise healthy old man. Unfortunately for them, the man proved to be a fraud and lived past his deadline to the channel’s embarrassment”.

What do you say to that? I am so sad I missed that important “news”. I am sure this one was also accompanied by the Red coloured “Breaking News” banner.

Why are we treated with this trash? Or is the average Indian TV viewer too obsessed with the saas-bahu soap dramas that s/he looks for an element of drama even in the news? I do not understand, why would an astrologer’s prediction of his own death be relevant to me? When the police requests the cyber cafe owners to keep records of their customers, why does it become “Breaking News”? Why are the gory details of the dead telecasted live on national television?

Update: In the rare case the above post interested you, please read Alaphia’s post here.