A lovely resignation letter!

This is a belated review of a resignation letter, a tiny memoir of a journalist, who quit journalism at the 'tender' age of fifty. Fourth estate to rubber estate – Resignation letter of a journalist is a delightful read about the 28-year-old journalistic career of Joe A Scaria, who was our editing teacher at Institute of Journalism, Trivandrum Press Club (circa 2000 AD). 

For us the eager novices, Joe came across not only as the best editing teacher who taught us the nuances and finer aspects of editing (which, I remember gratefully, has helped me immensely use the editor's scalpel with utmost caution and journalistic circumspection), he also at once impressed us with his admiring persona. Impeccably dressed and soft-spoken minus the self-importance intellectual air, he is a true gentleman in all senses of the word and surprised us with his on-time arrival with clock-like precision at the class. In fact, he would arrive well before the class time, putting professional bunkers and incorrigible lotus-eaters among us in a kind of moral indignation. They tried to outwit him in the matter of on-time arrival but with little success! 

It would be unjust to delve directly into his book without this prefatory eulogy on him, which he eminently deserves. The candid narrative of his colorful career, condensed to a few pages, minus the sanctimonious smugness typical of journalists of our times, is worth mentioning. Each word in this book is emblematic of his exemplary persona: amiable, laconically funny, information-packed and a keen observer with a perceptive mind.

Here’s a journalist who made it a point to resign at the tender age of fifty to spend time with his 95-year-old father and rest under the shade of his rubber plantation in his village in Kottayam district. Tender? Well in the life of a journalist, fifty is too early an age to call it quits. It is around this time that he shows signs of supposed maturity (there are of course scribes who precociously attain the same much before the fifty-year-old threshold, though) and preens himself at primetime TV news hours pretending to be expert of this and that. Who would want to sacrifice that primetime glory? But Joe isn’t the typical journo next-door wheeler-dealer. In fact, he has no qualms in writing that never in his journalistic lifetime has he ever received an award. Not even those monthly internal awards at Economic Times, where he worked for eighteen years.

But he won the hearts of his past employers, earning him privileges of surreal kind. While working at Magnum Publishing; he was flown Bombay-Kochi back and forth by the now-defunct East West Airlines continuously for nine days of every month for two years at company expense! This was in the early 90’s when air travel was an unthinkable luxury. Economic Times’ South Editor permitted him to travel officially to any destination at any time without any prior approvals, helping him transcend the porous borders of business journalism. Times’ management granted him three months’ paternity leave, probably first time in the 157 years of company’s history. 

There are many such interesting anecdotes that will interest both journalists and laymen. 

He ends his ‘resignation letter’ with dignified humility and predictable sensitivity, true to his wont, which reminded me of his last class in press club; as he bade adieu he made it a point to shake hands with each one of us individually.    

As I finished reading the book, I found myself drunk on press club nostalgia with an inexplicable yearning to be back in the sedate pace of his early morning editing classes: a lively journalistic cooking lab where the day’s newspapers are dissected with hair-split precision with a lot of fun and journalistic wisdom thrown in for extra taste.

A letter to the Worldwide Shock Industry

The shock, outrage, protest… This Worldwide Shock Industry reacted on expected lines following the Paris attacks by Islamic State. Massive rallies, plodding platitudes of world leaders, the predictable outpouring of online indignation…

In the nasty geo-political quagmire that is middle-east now, everyone stands to benefit. From Islamic State, the world’s most financially strong terrorist organization, to the big powers who play the game of geo-political chess with consummate ease. And the losers are those countless refugees and nameless people who get perished from Beirut to Paris. 

No doubt, the attack on France is mindless, cowardly and dastardly. But, equally mindless, cowardly and dastardly are similar acts of killings elsewhere in the world. And the Worldwide Shock Industry is visibly absent when blood is spilled in other parts of the world, i.e. in the black and brown continents. No outpouring of anger and moral protest when, for instance, Boko Haram unleashes its death of dance on a Nigerian town killing 150 or Al Qaeda attacks a Kenyan university killing another 150. Mark Zuckerberg is unfazed so there’s no scope for Facebook profile filtering activism. Neither is any Twitter hashtag. No candlelight vigilante groups or front-page alacrity. No chest-thumping world leader emitting the enemy-at-the-gate cliché. When wretched souls are perished in ‘far-away’ wretched lands, they eminently deserve to be relegated to that tiny World Brief box along with other trivial tidbits like Britney Spears’ going the family way on a one-more-successful-mission. That being the accepted norm practiced by the Worldwide Shock Industry-mass media combine, the concomitant reactions from other quarters, the general public, invariably border on predictable insensitivity and apolitical apathy.  

The widely accepted norm is that spilling of blood in third world places (by state as well as well so-called stateless actors elsewhere) doesn’t deserve the crime-against-humanity tag and all the outpourings of anger and moral indignation.

And the Worldwide Shock Industry is single-handedly fuelled by public perceptions which are dictated and shaped by the Western media with its time-tested potion of racial prejudices and colonial superiority. The banality of media’s toxic amnesia is bound to continue as long as the western news agencies and mass media conduct with its rusty racial superiority and elitist colonial mindset, which invariably permeates into the veins of their third-world counterparts, thus unwittingly distorting even their own domestic news agenda and front-page and primetime priorities. 

Thus, when Maoists strike at a police convoy in the jungles of Chattisgarh, it becomes an essential fodder for frontpage and primetime debate. Not when a cache of paramilitary troops surrounds a mineral-rich village and forces the tribals to flee with their lives in order to ensure mining rights for an MNC at the behest of the wheeler-dealers sitting in New Delhi. Not when a Dalit girl is raped or murdered. Not when Obama’s pet drones conduct their humanitarian activities in parts of middle-east or northern Africa with clinic-like precision and high-level collateral-damage probability. Not when a ruthless militia in mineral-rich Congo undertakes its occasional killing and raping spree. But a suicide bomber in a tony neighborhood in a Western country makes blaring front-page headlines and prime-time debates in India, or any other country for that matter. 

In the mainstream narrative, greatly dictated by Western news agencies and mass media, some lives are more equal. A section is superior and some others inferior in the time-tested business of killing and dying. Death is the proverbial leveler, but there are different sets of rules for different sets of people.  

It is a vicious circle and hard to break. What is heartening, however, is the emergence of alternative sources of news dissemination. But will they become potent and powerful enough to change the larger narrative followed by and change the course of the Worldwide Shock Industry? 

Onion-Eaters Of Kerala

When Qutubuddin Ansari, the now-familiar face of Gujarat genocide, met Ashok Mochi, the Bajrang Dal leader who was pictured brandishing a sword during the riots, at a conciliatory event organized by the Kerala unit of CPM in Kannur, so many enthusiastic locals made a beeline to meet and greet the duo. Later, they told the media: “So many people came to see us here. But we couldn’t make out their religion.”

It was their epiphanic moment; a realization, and a far-cry from the greatly polarized and communally compartmentalized state they hail from. No doubt, they were in thrall of the distinctive characteristics of Kerala.

It is precisely this entrenched social system that helped Kerala fend off Sangh Parivar from pulling the state into the national quagmire of cow, its latest political tool, after the due expiration of the shelf value of Ram Mandir and Love Jihad. Primetime TV debates saw demagogic BJP leaders justifying the Dadri killing. But that cut no ice with the Kerala civil society. The many public beef fests conducted by Left student unions across the state saw crowds swarming and relishing the spicy beef served hot.

The BJP’s primetime-news warriors won’t be keen to admit it, but the fact is that beef is considered a secular (and succulent) meat in Kerala! And Hindus, obviously, are no exception when it comes to basking in this delectable beef journey. Undoubtedly, they will collectively show their impulsive middle fingers to anyone who will lecture them to skip their favorite parotta-beef combo. They prefer beef ecstasy to communal ecstasy and invariably scorn anyone who tries to hard sell the Sangh Parivar’s latest election tool in cow form.

Definitely vegetarians, a relative minority, do exist and they remain so not because they are intoxicated by any RSS ideology, but out of personal or religious reasons.

And, the Hindus (and other communities as well) in Kerala are mature enough to show political propriety and social sobriety to take this meat off their dining tables if eating it truly, madly and deeply hurts the religious sentiments of any Holy Texts; but they are unlikely to succumb to the poll pranks of RSS’s political face BJP.

K Surendran of BJP, one of the many ‘leaders’ whose only ticket to political glory is his almost-daily nocturnal appearances on TV primetime news, fell into a hot soup after a photo of him apparently munching parotta and beef in a restaurant went viral, making him the butt of massive trolling and online ridicule. He immediately went on defensive mode, saying that it was onion curry, not beef.

Thank God something like onion existed lest he wouldn’t have been able to make a deft use of it in order to easily extricate himself from the gastronomy-induced political predicament he found immersed in.

Parotta-beef is a staple diet of Keralites. But parotta and onion curry is as weird a combo as Mother Teresa and Hitler! And the culinary connoisseurs of Kerala have knighted Surendran for adding this exotic culinary combination into the dining tables. And fervent efforts (GPS-Google included) to locate the restaurant selling this rare onion curry met with little success!

A social media user expressed his dismay over Surendran’s discovery in an online forum this way:

“It looks like he is eating parotta, I am from Kerala and I never been to a restaurant that offers parotta and Onion curry....it is always parotta and beef curry.....so he is most likely lying....most people in Kerala eat beef....then again i think its more Buffalo meat than beef.”

History teaches us that Kerala Hindus have shunned regressive practices like untouchability et al a long time ago, much before RSS reared its ugly head, and embraced modernity and civility, thanks to a wave of social reforms and renaissance movements and the good works of Christian missionaries. And efforts to airdrop the North Indian version of the caste system and all its concomitant paraphernalia including the cow-is-the-mother dogma into the state may not fetch the desired results, though it is a fact that BJP has made inroads here. But despite everything, it continues to be a liberal bastion till this day.

So Surendran need not to worry about the food on his plate as long as he lives in Kerala. He can eat whatever he wants in a place like this, even though his party’s attempt is to take away that very personal freedom.

(First published in http://www.countercurrents.org/firos191015.htm. This article has been included in a book, The Political Economy of Beef Ban, published by Peoples Book Shop)

BJP’s Latest Antibiotic Tablet For Kerala

If there is one place which has kept the Hindu right at a safe distance for such an annoyingly long time period, it is Kerala. The RSS and its political face BJP has not yet been able to make any ripples in the placid social waters of the state, though its power-hungry leaders have been salivating at the prospect of penetrating into this constituency for the past so many years.

All attempts by the Hindu right to convert the state into a place reeking of high-level of communal toxicity have effectively been thwarted thanks to the existence of renaissance-induced social indices in the state. These fundamentals have till date acted as a strong deterrent, like a moat that protects a fortress from its destructive enemies, against the purveyors of hate politics.

But ironically now, attempts are being done to turn the tides of this renaissance. Standing at the vanguard of this regressive bid is Vellappally Nateshan, the general secretary of SNDP Yogam – a socio-cultural movement founded by the 20th century social reformer Sree Narayana Guru – which endeavored to emancipate the Ezhava community from the abyss of the oppressive Hindu caste hierarchy.

Guru tried to give some semblance of dignity and self-worth to the Ezhavas, derided by the so-called upper-caste groups as dirt; untouchables at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, they were barred from even touching their feet on public roads where dogs strolled happily with their head high.

Now, Vellappally has joined hands with the same dark forces that once oppressed and persecuted the same people, whom he claims to represent now. He appeared to have found the perfect bedfellow in Modi as they met for a SNDP-BJP political alliance in New Delhi. Both are shysters with a hopelessly high level of self-aggrandizement and dictatorial hormones to boot.

Through this incestuous intercourse with the BJP, Vellappally is mocking at the Ezhava community’s epic struggles in the past to restore their dignity; he is taking the community to a moribund and mephitic future, from where redemption will be hard to achieve. 

Part of social engineering experiment by the crafty Amit Shah, the BJP state unit is trying to woo other Hindu groups as well to gain political entry in Kerala.

In fact, the stage has been set for communal polarization in the state quite some time now with the state BJP leadership and Vellappally peddling the absurd theory of Hindu marginalization in the state: the ludicrous hypothesis that Hindus are being marginalized economically by successive government policies. Vellappally and Company, along with his newly minted bedmates in the state BJP, has been parroting this theory on primetime news hours like the mysterious incantations of a shaman.

In this frenzied bid by the BJP, ably abetted by the SNDP, to polarize communities on religious lines exists the elitist Muslim League with its motley of self-serving professional politicians and wholesale religion sellers, whose outlandishly self-centered political histrionics have been causing irritants even among the moderate-thinking, secular Hindus of the state for quite some time now. The very existence of communal parties like Muslim League, which sticks out a sore thumb in Kerala’s secular polity, gives the Hindu right a much-needed weapon to spread its poisonous if-they-can-why-not-us theory among the secular Hindus in the state.

NSS (Nair Service Society), an organization of supposedly upper-caste Nairs – who once stood above the Ezhava community in the Hindu caste pyramid – has distanced itself from this new-found ‘Hindu unity’. For NSS and its general secretary G Sukumaran Nair, Vellappally and SNDP are still untouchables. Earlier efforts to forge an SNDP-NSS alliance met with little success.

And Vellappally’s Hindu unity (Nair-Ezhava unity) dream will continue to remain a pipe dream, at least in the foreseeable future. Part of the reason for this is the fact that underneath SNDP’s lofty talks of Hindu unity lies the stark reality of the strong undercurrents of mutual, deep-seated hatred between the majority of Nairs and Ezhavas. In spite of the renaissance, old racial prejudices and caste consciousness refuse to die down and still linger on in a very subtle level even today, one of the prime reasons why the so-called Hindu unity remains an unattainable proposition for the BJP. In fact, no political pranks by the BJP so far has worked as an antibiotic potent enough to eradicate the caste scourge still lurking inside the minds of the majority of these two communities. While a majority of the Nairs still consider superior to the Ezhavas (and, of course, rest of the supposedly low cast groups) without readying to let go of the untouchability past, the latter harbor the wounds of subjugation their forefathers were subjected to at the hands of the former.

The fact is that the fundamental values that make Kerala unique are still intact and strong. The Ezhavas (majority Left supporters) are unlikely to succumb to the whims and political fancies of Vellappally. Except for a bunch of sidekicks and yes-men who swarm him, majority of Ezhavas are perceptive enough to see through his real intentions. What the state’s political pundits watch with great keenness is whether the largely secular and Left-oriented Ezhava community will fall for Vellappally’s devious political games for ephemeral gains at the altar of hate politics.

(Originally published in http://www.countercurrents.org/firos041015.htm) 

Media's refugee activism and topless girls

Voila, who is out there looking for refugees with such messianic grandiosity? It’s Slovakia. The central European country said it is ready to admit 200 Syrians provided they are Christians, because, according to the government, “we don't have mosques... we only want to choose the Christians.” Fair point; so has the diktat been communicated to the refugees fleeing for their life, probably via satellite communication? And in the unfortunate event of not finding enough Christians to fill its 200-slot, is there any government-sponsored mid-sea baptism bid to pick the willing 200 subjects? Or is there a clergy-man baptize-ready standing along the razor-thin fence along with sniffer dogs and police men who have been deployed to drive the refugees away on the borders of Hungary and Austria? Or are there enough high-sensitive religion-detection machines installed at the border checkpoints to sift the 200 souls?

Amid this nasty religionizing of a human tragedy came the picture of a dead Syrian boy lying face-down on a Turkish beach; it has jolted the world which has hitherto been beauty sleeping in its cozy comforts, refusing to even wink at the biggest catastrophe unfolding right under its nose. No doubt, the image is the defining one à la the heart-breaking image of that Vietnam girl running from a Napalm bomb that went on to encapsulate the horrors of the war.

Indeed, it is not the first such loss of life; people have been fleeing war zones and desolation from conflict-ridden countries in the middle-east and Africa and dying like flies for the past many months. It is just that this dead boy just got lucky enough to have been photographed by a western news agency, prompting TV channels the world over to spare their prime time and newspapers to front-page the image to the accompaniment of such poetic headlines as “Europe couldn’t save him.”

And for the readers of those much-vaunted Western tabloids it was a refreshing change as the boy’s body was front-paged, instead of celebrity boobs and bums. It was good to see the picture has been able to open the floodgates of sympathy from the larger world.

And we must appreciate the BBC over its journalistic circumspection, for, it says that it has chosen to publish only one photograph of Aylan, in which he is being carried by a Turkish police officer. Oh Aylan. That is the boy name, the enterprising media has found out his name. We don’t know the names of those 2,500 people who were drowned or killed on their way to Europe. They remain faceless.

Amid the cacophony of reactions of European leaders, that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands out like that of a real angel, a beacon of hope and humanity as she welcomed these seas of desperate souls into her country with open arms. So is France. Rightwing-ruled countries like Hungary closed their doors to the people with predictable insensitivity. Hungary Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, said Europe is in the grip of madness over immigration and refugees, and that he was “defending European Christianity against a Muslim influx.” But thanks to Aylan effect, countries like Hungary have been forced to change their position.

And we saw the likes of David Cameron going into pedagogic mode with didactic precision, trying to differentiate between the vexatious words like ‘immigrants’ and ‘migrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’! Now, he says the UK is ready to accept “thousands more” Syrian refugees. Thanks, again, to the Aylan effect.

Hello world, it is very easy to brand people fleeing war zones and catastrophes with such heavily loaded words like ‘migrants’ and ‘illegal emigrants’; in effect bracketing them all in the “bad people” category. And instead of applying the balm of humanity upon these wounded souls, rest of the right-wing world, instead, is poking at their wounds with the poison of religion and xenophobia.

Yes, the world is made of migrations and cross-migrations; people’s movement has always been the inevitable ingredient of human civilization; each country of the world as we know it today has been peopled by migrations of different kinds. Nobody was air-dropped to countries according to pre-fixed maps based on their skin color, nose size and passports that they possessed.

For a change those rightwing leaders in Europe may read history books. Europe has benefited from migration immensely: when the continent was ravaged by war seven decades ago, rest of the world embraced the refugees with open arms. After the Second World War, Australia, New Zealand and rest of Americas accepted huge refugee population that emanated from Europe.

Even as these human tragedies are being played out, in another part of the world called Swaziland, one of the poorest countries in the African continent, a total of 65 girls were killed in a ghastly road accident. They were traveling in an open truck to take part in the annual reeds festival, where the Swazi king traditionally picks one of the topless girls as his newest bride. Some 40,000 virgin-girls gather in a stadium and dance bare-breasted to attract the attention of this African monarch who already has 15 wives, 13 palaces, a private jet and a fleet of luxury cars. Other facts are: the country has the highest HIV and tuberculosis rate in the world and over 50% of the people are under the poverty line.

These girls, desperate to escape the tyranny of poverty and squalor in their lives, hope to lead a better life as queen. Their condition is no less wretched than those thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives, and they are in a way refugees, too. While those girls were killed on the road, most of the refugees perished in the sea. The difference primarily ends there. Both of them flee their pitiable conditions for a life of dignity.

Until and unless a western news agency photographer meets with his epiphany Aylan-moment, places like Swaziland – and the stark realities of the people’s lives there – will continue to remain off from the radar of our tabloid front-pages and TV primetimes.