Thursday, October 15, 2015

Media bashing

When GK was asked by a TNIE reporter what he thought of The Ink Attack, he said (into the phone, perhaps), “What do you expect from the Sena? They are idiots.”
Why did he say so?
It was probably because he was at the end of his tether with something or someone and he wanted to just forget about it for a moment.
However, we know this is a fact. There are times when idiocy seems to be prevailing despite all good sense you are trying to exert in with the very core of your being.
Idiocy can be of two sorts: Benign and malignant.
We have been focussed on malignant so closely that we lost sight of the benign.
Not having a point of view has been rewarded for way too long. The Sena, for example, falls in the malignant category and so one is on the guard for it. GK has been trying to say something and go about his day when somebody from a newspaper calls him and asks him his point of view yet again.
Dear media, I am you, I place my faith in you.
So tell me,
You are not benign,
Are you malignant then? What are you trying to find out?
Sorry,
I keep coming to the end of my tether sometimes.
It is important to have an educational background to everything. Let us just say it is important for the discipline.
Every once in a while one must go back to the basics. As a part of the media in India, I must keep doing that for the sake of (pithiness/pettiness-- how's that even correct?) being.
Medium.
  • Media must not take sides. To achieve that level of impartial, scientific approach towards anything one must undergo years of training. Media studies as far as I am concerned only begins at the graduation level and extends for about two years. The manpower that we have in the media today rests on this laurel. How can one expect total impartiality from this? So let us say media must take the side of the truth. Questioning the truth is always advised, but denying it is idiocy.
  • Report all sides of the story. This adage at best allows for all the verbosity you can muster up to get spilled on to the pages or the TV screens. Catch a story. Puke on it. Shit all over it, because everyhing must come out.
I will have to write later when I am in a better mood.














Friday, October 09, 2015

It starts with the dark. You open your eyes first. And you are here,
Your eyes can adjust to the dark,
You do not have to know that
For your eyes to do that.

But your eyes they do that,
sometimes too slow
and you miss some of the sights
sometimes too fast
and catch some of the supernatural

Just before they learn to adjust,
they learn to see too much or too little

Do not shut them yet in despair,

sometimes you have to see too little
sometimes too much

For them to learn to adjust.

Supernatural is the hour of twilight,
Do not be afraid. 

Thursday, October 08, 2015

Don't beat yourself about it

In the previous post, I took the liberty of abusing something that was given to me.
Because abuse is my second nature.
The first, of course,
is use.
Misuse, by the way, is abuse.

About my new workplace

Hold it till you have something to say.

With me, writing has been an assertion of the self in an emphatic way. And because it was emphasis that we seek, but emphasis not being my strength, I never wrote much. In a way being on the desk provides me the ability to get a variety of stories, read all of them if possible, rewrite them a bit, put it on the page, slap a headline on -- or place it on with flourish, if you will, look at the page and release it.
Obsession with any one part of the job is not a healthy sign. And so you move about, get a feel of things -- understand what all you may be able to pull off.
The key to the whole conundrum is -- the constant knowledge that we cannot afford to be flippant. Now more than ever, as this is pretty much it.
Taking stock: And why does it matter?
Because we are still at the workplace, don't you remember?
Now we all like to keep things sorted out into compartments, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
But the purpose of life in your life,
is not to CONFUSE you
or to throw things at you that you must reconcile or keep separate.
Well if you are control freak, lose control already, because we need you to take control of more serious matters than yourself.
So shall we come back to the work.
When you are dealing with news it should not have to be that tough to see u are in the middle of something bigger than yourself. sorry but you need to remember this to live longer so i say it in different ways, 
And if you die or plead insanity (mind you!) earlier than you should,
I will hold a grudge against you and that's not good.
I refuse to clean up after you.(And I'd like some company with the cleaning.)
If the previous line sounds like something your father/mother should have told you, it is not because I am your father/mother. It is just that maybe they didn't say it often enough
for you to remember it already.

So much for placing blame on the other. I wish you would go back to placing those headlines instead.

And that is why i said at the beginning, seena,
hold it, till you have something to say. 
unless you have it in you to hear it all.





Friday, October 02, 2015

for the practitioners of politics

The inability to move from the past into the present proved one's downfall,
And the reluctance to move from the present to the future will prove the other's.

Talking politics

Though I have a problem with what is going on in our country now, I feel I have almost always had problems with what was going on in our country. Considering that is the human condition, that we find something to put the blame on, and if one is a non-believer (or believes strongly that god can do no wrong) then the government is a good second rung in the ladder.
However, being acutely aware that the government is that of the majority – a large number of people-- and always battling with the question, if we aren't all in the end made of the same matter, I found it difficult to put the blame on the government, without taking some of the blame on myself.
And that being an unpleasant thing to have to do, I chose (involuntarily, I think), to become a journalist. Because as the media, you are not saying what you want to, you are saying what the stories want to. And so, if the stories put the blame on the government then, so be it.
And so let us say that through our stories putting the blame on the government is a done thing, then in a democracy, the government must have no problem with being shown a mirror.

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Years of complacence in a being can take away its sheen. Complacency can lead to death, so we can count ourselves lucky, that we got away with a prolonged term of festivities instead.


But it is easier to at least to say you are against wars, than to even say you are against festivities.
So wake up. Because you need to practise how to say it, in a way that doesn't lead to death. 

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