AIR Talk Aug 9, 2012 A Fish Mart Inside A News Vendor’s Recollections ഇംഗ്ലിഷ് പ്രഭാഷണം മലയാളത്തിൽ തുടങ്ങാമോ? വിഷയം ധ്യാനിച്ചിരുന്നപ്പോൾ രണ്ടു മലയാളവരി ഓർമ്മ വന്നു. ഇങ്ങനെ: അർഥവും സംബന്ധവും അറ്റതാം ഏറെ തുണ്ടുവാർത്തകളുടെ നിരന്തരമാം ചിലക്കലാൽ ഉൾക്കളം മത്സ്യച്ചന്തയാക്കുമിപ്പത്രം… ഉൾക്കളം മത്സ്യച്ചന്ത! A fish mart, indeed. That is what my mind becomes when I struggle through the morning rag, much like the man in Krishna Warrier’s poem. There are those inevitable, and interminable, dispatches on the usual subjects: who grabs how big a slice of power, who loses out, who stabs whom from back and front at once, who grieves his dad’s gaddi hasn’t been gifted to him. It is all a chronicle of a dozen people’s shenanigans, their big career wars for small crumbs of power. Their rise, or fall, hardly matters to you or me, less to your grandchild. Yet almost obsessively, we devour it, what Warrier termed as ലോകത്തിന്റെ ചിരിയും ചെറ്റത്തവും, world’s laughter and pettifoggery. This is plain, and unashamed, denunciation of the way one has covered over half a century. It has been so, more or less, always. For forty years I have been a vendor of news, and a commentator on its content, not compulsively observing Scott’s maxim, ‘facts are sacred, comment is free.’ I see that sometimes it takes long, almost a lifetime, to recognize that much of what one did was an approximate waste, and the rest wrong. Facts I ferreted out to feed my clients were, of course, bad facts: rapes, frauds, failures. The worse, the better. Such sordid tales were what, I assumed, would excite readers, not Ramana Maharshi’s prayers or Jesus Christ’s homilies. News is, essentially, bad news. Normal people may take ‘no news’ as good news. For newsmen, who are arguably not normal, bad news is good news. A punctured reputation, a crash in the sky, a massive embezzlement, a mother selling her baby, a star turning dust--everything bad is good to newsmen, and their addictive readers. Bad things go well with good readers. It may be a dark view of human palette but that palette has gone through no mutation since Darwin or before. I recall a dry day, shall we say, newsless day, in AIR’s newsroom. We were starved, desperate. Anything was apt to be a headline. There was just nothing. The old wall clock ticked away, furiously. Then someone looked at the teleprinter for a hundredth time and screamed that some busybody somewhere had popped off with an uncanny sense of time. Our harried news editor sprang up from his chair and exclaimed: “Very Good….” What, pray, could be better than a death worthy of a headline! After an uneasy pause, all of us laughed too, joining in his exultation. Death is good news--when not yours. Good things could be boring. That epic equation of സത്യം, ശിവം, സുന്ദരം may be valid for epic times, not ours. Recall those nineteen months of the seventies when we spoke and heard and read only good things. Anything bad, even unseasonable, was censored. I remember seeing the venerable A D Gorewala helped up into the witness box in the Shah Commission. The former ICS officer, editor of an austere magazine, Opinion, was weathering his eighties. Gorewala narrated, none too bitterly, how a Gita line in his journal was scored off. Nothing that hurt or didn’t make sense to censors would pass muster. Only good things we published and broadcast. Good news of new roads, punctual trains, falling prices, lengthening phone network, statistics of vasectomy and what have you. I doubt if many liked it. As it happens, some such stories I wrote still throb in my memory. I wrote about the unremarkable life of Panki, who broke stones on the roadside of Kovalam, from sunrise to nightfall, earning in a lifetime what a five-star bar in her village made in a week. My story of a disabled girl from Purakkad, who did not get on time some prescribed contraption from the physical medicine mandarins, brought to her money orders from strangers. Rajan Babu, poet and literary editor, tells me he has just written about how my report helped to restore to him his police job, from which he had been summarily sacked. Such small stories make a difference to uncelebrated lives. Given a chance again, such stories of woe are what I would like to pursue. Kalidasa qualifies Valmiki as രുദിതാനുസാരി, a poet following, so to say, the life of the insulted and the humiliated. Newsmen may well do so too. But such stories are not what the way to victory is paved with. Victory, followed by due decoration, belongs to those who have a seat in Parliament’s press gallery, who hobnob with politicians, locking horns with them or currying their favour, or both. Any newsman becomes one of consequence when he starts grazing in the shadow of power, as an exalted political correspondent. I could not have but known some power players in my time. One of them, who ordered an inquiry into a complaint that I was sabotaging news bulletins, later rose to the top post. Another one, who looked like reaching there once, had transferred me as a punishment many years before. Later he sort of liked me. When I dashed off a piece about him, with a computer caricature likening him to a master of indecision, he told me: “Govindanji, that computer conversion was fun.” Advaniji was my minister when I jumped out of a crashing plane whose prime passenger was Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Wing Commander De Lima, its pilot, died virtually in my hands. I got a commendation from my minister, which was possibly the next best thing to happen to one after surviving an air crash. People said nice things about one’s survival, and sometimes a good word about one’s promptness and work while facing death in the corner. Predictably, I gloated over it. On second, or third, thoughts, I ask myself how silly it is to revel in one’s survival, and the attendant benedictions. So many face, and succumb to, death every day without getting so much as a line of newspaper reference. Almost every soldier signs his own warrant of death when he joins his calling. Others, like the boy who hangs from the skyscraper, fixing a brick or plastering it, are face to face with death every moment. And, when they die, or live, it makes no news. I was lucky not only to win a fresh lease of life but some ex gratia publicity for not going under in just one swoop. News is the first rough draft of history. That is a saying wrongly attributed to Phil Graham, once a part-owner-editor of Washington Post. An original saying of his I remember is that a good newsman will take care not to get too close to the powers-that-be. To get too close to them is a primeval temptation. You yield to it and hamstring yourself, trading away your credibility. You become a pamphleteer. No matter how true he is, a pamphleteer is a pamphleteer is a pamphleteer. So many illustrious newsmen before me have fallen for it. I fell its victim, now and then, latching on to one power monger or another, or, if you like, one messiah or another, and exploring reasons to back them in a constricting spell of self-righteousness. There were occasions when I made, with a campaigner’s zeal, stories about Marxism, and for it, and then about and for its renegades. My editor, S K Anantharaman, would ask, in his subtle fashion--avoiding my eyes, under a whisper--if all that was absolutely necessary. He was not enamoured of any thing or person. He saw, as Vailoppilli said, the small pox virus in the spring air. I suspected he was being jealous of my proximity to the forces of change and justice. That is one deceptive thing about proximity. It is not revealed to one who is caught in it. Phil Graham’s injunction against getting tied up with power traders dawned on me, like many things, much later. News is often a statement, less often an action. A newsman’s tragedy is that he has to turn an action into a statement or equate a statement with an action. So we read in papers what “he said” or “they said” or “you said” or “we said” somewhere or nowhere. It is an endless experiment with the word “SAID” in all its variety and plenitude. Have you tried hearing a news bulletin in a language you don’t know? I have. Time was when I used to entertain myself by tuning in for news in Kannada. The reader would wind up every other sentence with self-same words: പാട്ടിൽ അവരു ഹേളിദരു. പാട്ടിൽ അവരു ഹേളിദരു. That self-sameness, that inexorable repetition, was fun or disgust, depending on how you viewed it. Life seemed ending up as an eternal statement sans action. A good newsman will survive the ‘he-said’ syndrome. He will look for, and sometimes get, what his peers don’t--scoops. Scoop masters are the fourth estate’s super stars. I have longed to be one. One scoop I had was of Taiwan’s prime minister visiting Gangtok in disguise. My peers looked miserable when they had no clue to what had happened, how. They were even more so when their efforts to get my report denied produced only a dreary spell of official silence. It could not have been denied; it came from sources which were supposed to hold such information, and use it discreetly. For once they thought I was a useful instrument to spread the closely held word. So is perhaps the case of most exclusive reports. A scoop is generally rare information someone somewhere wants revealed. A newsman should be lucky or pliable or trusted to become its vehicle. Now and then some crap I wrote struck the imagination of a reader or two. My colleague Vasu was quick to catch it. He flaunted in my face a letter to the editor in a rival paper--from a woman with a sweet name, Vanaja. Vanaja’s thesis was sound, composition familiar. I said so and handed back the paper to Vasu. He was looking at me pitifully: I hadn’t got it. He produced our own paper of a week ago. There it was, Vanaja’s literature, printed earlier in it as an editorial--which was my concoction. I was being imitated and flattered. Who wouldn’t enjoy flattery! It has been too long. When I stop this, I realize how arrogant I was when I picked up the pen, how modest I feel when I lay it down. ഞാനഹങ്കാരത്തോടെ കയ്യിലേന്തിയതാണീ പേന. വെക്കട്ടെ താഴെ, കുനിഞ്ഞും വിറ പൂണ്ടും. …