Meeting Arfa Khanum Sherwani

 

When some of my friends told me that they were organizing a lecture at a college in Kerala and Arfa Khanum Sherwani from The Wire had agreed to come, I was keen to make it but was not sure.

Though she has been a veteran TV reporter, I stumbled upon her videos only after she joined The Wire. I hardly followed Hindi TV channels pre-2014 and began exploring them after the doyens of English TV channels started singing Raag Darbari in praise of the new regime. It was then I discovered Ravish Kumar, Sakshi Joshi, and Punya Prasoon Bajpai, and tried to make amends by watching their old videos.

The way Arfa presented pressing issues in ‘Hum Bhi Bharat’ got me hooked on. Her shows were a mix of panel discussions and ground reports. They were a refreshing break from shouting matches that most mainstream TV channels had adapted to survive in the TRP-driven rat race.

The way she used to say the opening lines of her show ‘kahani us bharat ki jo karodon ke dilon me basta hai’ with the old Parliament house in the background, to me it appeared as an ode to the vanishing pluralistic India.

Soon I became a regular and began seeing her shows as and when I got notifications on my Facebook feed. Later she began figuring on top of my YouTube list of videos.

Arfa soon grew in stature and began getting invites from prestigious universities abroad and also picked up a few awards at home. The speeches she gave during those occasions drew large-scale views on YouTube.

Unlike most Hindi journalists, Arfa is conversant in English. So for BBC and Al Jazeera she became one of the go-to persons for discussions on India-specific issues.

After a few postponements the date of her lecture was finally fixed on January 18 and luckily I managed to be in Kerala.

She arrived late at night at Kozhikode on January 17 by flight from Delhi and my friends ushered her into a hotel. Meanwhile, the organisers were deliberating about who will accompany her to the college, located nearly 30 km from the hotel. 

For me to be able to converse with a person whom I regularly see on online videos looked like something too good (and somewhat giddy) to be true. But I kept a low profile thinking that many would have already put their hats in the ring. However, I was surprised to know that there were not many takers. 

I then decided to stick my neck out. And they readily agreed that myself and another guy would be accompanying her in the car to the college.

At the appointed time we reached the Taj hotel where she was staying. We gave her a call and waited in the lobby. 

The wait was getting longer and the other organisers were making calls to enquire whether we had started. The route to the college had some stretches of slow-moving traffic due to the construction of an expressway.

After a while, Arfa Khanum Sherwani turned up in the lobby wearing a black sari. She had that immaculate appearance that we see during her shows – saree neatly worn, proper make-up, and not a single strand of hair here or there. But she appeared a bit shorter than I had assumed and I noticed she was wearing tallish heels. 

When I approached and smiled at her, she realized I was the guy who had come to pick her up. “Hi I am Arfa,” she said. After I and my friend introduced ourselves, we got into the waiting Toyota Innova and left. 

She apologized for the delay as she had a video call to attend that got stretched more than expected. It was regarding some conference she had been invited for in the US in the coming month.

The driver took the beach route as there was less traffic. She recalled the state election coverage she had done a few years ago and her visit to Calicut Beach then. 

Early on, Arfa opened her laptop and began typing. I had to strike a balance between engaging her in a conversation and not interrupting her work.

I told her that I knew Hindi and watched her programmes regularly, and she gave a polite ‘thank you’ though she didn’t sound very convinced.

I then asked about how during her recent Rajasthan assembly election coverage, she managed to get a saffron hardliner to agree to be interviewed by her. This broke the ice, and she realized that my claim of watching her programmes was not hollow. 

She explained how one of the staff members of the BJP leader gave her details about his whereabouts and she managed to track him down. He was an Adivasi and somewhat disgruntled with his leader.

When his followers realized he might find it difficult to answer her questions, they began shouting Jai Shri Ram slogans and disrupted the interview. 

I then observed with concern how during her interview with college girls in Jaipur, one of them told her that ‘she did not want the country to be run by a bar dancer (referring to Sonia Gandhi)’. Arfa too said it was quite sad. The girl appeared to be a bright student, claiming to be an atheist and feminist, holding such views.

Meanwhile, our Innova was passing through the verdant countryside and Arfa was looking out with wonderment. We crossed a few bridges from where the sea looked visible. 

Her attention was drawn to a huge water body and I explained to her that it was a temple pond, which older Kerala temples have.

I then remembered her visit to Dadri village a few years after the first lynching over beef happened during the Modi regime and the hostile reaction she encountered from the villagers. 

She pointed out that she was going to speak about that in her speech. “It was four years after the incident and I had thought the situation must have cooled down and people may have let bygones be bygones. But I was wrong,” she said.

The discussion then drifted towards the forthcoming elections. She said that North is completely under BJP’s grip and many people see Narendra Modi as a Vishnu avatar. 

We entered the stretch where the expressway was being built. There are long stretches of cavernous pits with traffic being diverted to two narrow stretches on both sides. 

Traffic moved at a slow pace with restless drivers resorting to high-decibel honkings, and the whole area had turned into a dust bowl. I was wishing this stretch got covered without any major traffic hold-ups.

Once we got out of that stretch, it was a fairly smooth drive. We soon covered the rest of the distance at a good pace and arrived at the college some 20 minutes behind schedule. 

I was entering a college campus in Kerala after nearly three decades and nothing much seems to have changed. The presence of flags and banners of various student unions on the walls gave the impression that the rough and tumble of campus politics continues to exist.

After she got out of the van, her attention was drawn to a notice board with Joseph Stalin’s picture. She took a photo of it and asked a random college student who happened to be there, “Who is this?” Pat came the answer, “It is comrade Joseph Stalin.” 

She exclaimed, “Hmm only in Kerala!” The yesteryear Soviet leader, who is looked upon with fear and trepidation, and long forgotten in other places, continues to be a popular icon among Kerala’s college students. 

Shortly afterwards we were ushered into the principal’s room. I was a bit reluctant but college teachers insisted that I too should go. After some small talk and tea, we went to the auditorium where Arfa was to deliver her lecture.

The auditorium was of modest size with a capacity of around 300 people and though it was not packed, almost in every row some seats were occupied. In her lecture, Arfa spoke of the growing polarization of India and peppered it with some personal anecdotes. 

“I cannot go to a public park or a gym in Delhi,” she said. Arfa also spoke at length about the online trolling, and how her being a journalist and a Muslim puts her at a double disadvantage. 

She said she even avoids announcing her public functions on social media, but made this one an exception “because I know Kerala is a safe space”. This, of course, drew a spontaneous applause.

The lecture was followed by a question-answer session, but the mike provided to the audience was in no mood to oblige and displayed its reluctance by emitting some grating noises. It was then decided that those wanting to ask questions should come near the stage and ask. 

Once it was over, she left to have lunch. I too was offered but had some urgent errand at my home in Calicut, so left by bus. 

By evening I was free and decided to join them. I called up my friends to check their whereabouts, and they told me they were at Paragon – the iconic restaurant every celeb visitor to Calicut stops by.

When I reached there they had already ordered food. When the food came she began taking pictures of each dish after asking what it was. There was a dark brownish dish on a plate and when she was told it was beef fry, she desisted from taking its picture!

The plan for the next day was to visit Wayanad. I got picked up on the way and as we raced to the outskirts of Kozhikode, she began marveling at the greenery and wondered what the AQI may be in the area. All through the trip Delhi’s toxic AQI was there at the back of her mind and every now and then she would thank herself to be out of it for a few days. 

At some places, we decided to stop by so that she could get photographed. A couple of times she handed over her iPhone to me to take her pictures. I dutifully obliged, but at the back of my mind, I was psyched out by my abysmal record in this department.

She wore a T-shirt, cargos, and sneakers. She was quite a natural in front of camera, used to put forth her best smile and pose with poise and in an uninhibited manner. “The only thing common between Narendra Modi and me is the love for camera,” she remarked.

She recounted how The Wire was raided a couple of years ago. The policemen who came to the Wire office sounded apologetic. A couple of them even told Arfa that they watch her programmes regularly, while some others claimed they have never heard of this publication before.

As the car winded its way through the ghats and entered Wayanad district she was very excited because it happened to be Rahul Gandhi’s constituency. We stopped by Wilton restaurant for lunch. 

She was again bowled over by the food and wondered how the bill was ‘a fraction’ of what it would be in Delhi. The only explanation we could put forth was lower rents, beyond which we could not come up with anything plausible.

We then moved to the famed Pookot Lake. I had gone there in 1988 as a student and back then it had not made to Kerala’s tourism map. The lake had a pristine and wild look untouched by any governmental or even human intervention. 

There was a white painter living in a small cottage nearby.  He told us he hails from Scotland and showed us his paintings, mostly landscape ones with the lake acting as his muse.

But now it has acquired a touristy look with boats of various sizes out on the lake, a walking track. At the entrance, we had a bevy of shacks selling sundry snacks to exotic ‘forest produce’, which range from honey to herbal remedies. 

The journey down the ghats was smooth and the sumptuous Wilton food made me fall asleep. By the time I woke up we had crossed the ghats. After about 45 minutes I was near my home. I took leave while my friend went to drop her at the hotel. 

As I got out of the car and walked home, I still found it hard to believe that I had interacted with a celeb anchor whom I never thought I would ever meet. 

Hot Off the Press

Deccan Herald editor Sitharaman Shankar recently penned down a longish full-page piece on the workings of a newspaper after shadowing his own daily right from the printing press to the reader’s doorstep.

It evoked mixed reactions with some marveling at the coordinated efforts and hard work that go behind the production of a newspaper, while a select few dismissed it as an ego trip or marketing gimmick.

For those who have worked in the newspaper offices, this will strike a special chord. For someone like me who spent a good part of my working life at the newspaper desk, reading this piece was a mix of nostalgia and spotting some discerning changes that have crept in over the years.

One of the things that Shankar missed out on was the physical parting of the printing press from the newspaper office.

When I started out, many newspapers had presses located on the same premises, and the relationship between the two departments used to be frictional. 

The press superintendent will often drop in for a chat with the news editor and politely recount how the previous day’s edition could not reach certain places because the desk released the paper late. We used to look at his entry into the newsroom with a degree of hostility.

When there was some inordinate delay in the release of pages he would either walk in or call the shift in charge on the phone to enquire.

Many times an alert sub-editor may spot a mistake in a page that got released earlier in the day. A frantic call to the press will be made as a last-ditch effort to rectify the error. If lucky, the error gets fixed, or they will say the 'plates' have been made and nothing can be done. So the error gets a safe passage to the next day’s edition in cold print. 

The dressing down that follows the next day remains etched for many weeks to come, and sometimes becomes the recurring motif of nightmares.

Our interaction with the press staff used to be minimal as they get active after the newspaper is 'put to bed', and for us it is time to leave for home. It was mainly confined to a nod or a smile while bumping into them in the canteen. 

There was also a class barrier – while the editorial and marketing staff were mostly university-educated, the press staff came from more humble backgrounds with ITI certifications and diplomas. They were, however, more active in workers’ unions and in organizing strikes. 

Sometime after 2000, due to real estate constraints and the advancement of technology, most newspapers began relocating their presses to the city outskirts. 

This also brought to an end the era of open confrontation between the two departments. 

Nowadays, I guess, the press superintendent might be using phone or video-conferencing to raise his concerns.

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Those were pre-internet days and newsrooms used to be overrun by papers, with every table having some pile or the other and lots of paper strewn on the floor. 

The ever-rattling teleprinter machines dish out paper despatches from various news wires throughout the day. It was the job of the attenders to neatly cut each dispatch and leave the pile at the desk in-charge’s table.

Once the desk in-charge arrives, he/she goes through the pile and sorts news according to their importance and what pages they are meant to be carried – Page 1, city, state, nation, world, business and sports. Around 90 per cent gets dumped in a bin.

Even though boxy first-generation computers with black and white display monitors had made their entry into the newsrooms, the shift in charge used to be more comfortable in handing out ‘hard copies’ to sub-editors. The subs had to spot the story on the computer based on the time or serial number in the wire feed.

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Those were pre-social media days and once the shift gets over, one could choose to remain cut off from the news cycle till the next evening.

There was no internet or mobile phone to intrude into your day-to-day activities.

With smartphones being our constant companions, no such luxury exists.

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Revolutionary Road

After the dastardly killing of journalist Gauri Lankesh on September 5, 2017, her first birth anniversary was observed in a big way at Bengaluru Town Hall on January 29, 2018. Popular youth speakers Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Shehla Rashid Shora, Jignesh Mevani, who were close to Gauri Lankesh, spoke to a capacity crowd. Veteran freedom fighter H.S. Doreswamy was the well-known local face, while Carnatic musician T.M. Krishna, who is very vocal about his egalitarian views,  played a few of his famous protest numbers. 

The mood was very anti-establishment with every speaker berating BJP and its policies ranging from demonetization of high-value currency notes to crackdown on various universities. Doreswamy’s open call to vote out BJP drew thunderous applause.

When the function got over, I hung around the Town Hall veranda waiting for a friend as the crowd spilled over to the streets. The main speakers had a tough time negotiating among fans and selfie-seekers. When Kanhaiya, Umar, Shehla and Jignesh reached the veranda, I overheard someone saying, “They need to be careful. After all they are the real opposition.”

These youngsters were far more vocal in questioning the government and its controversial policies than the dispirited opposition parties. Kanhaiya, Umar, and Shehla had earned their spurs after the JNU agitation in 2016, while Jignesh became the face of the protest movement following the flogging of four Dalit youths in Una, Gujarat. 

Kanhaiya belonged to All India Students Federation, the student wing of CPI, and later unsuccessfully contested Lok Sabha election from Begusarai in Bihar. Umar too came from a hardcore Communist background and is a professed atheist. Shehla belonged to All India Students Association, affiliated to CPI (ML). Jignesh was a lawyer and Dalit activist based out of Gujarat. He himself hails from the Dalit community. 

On the other hand the Opposition parties were seen as being inhibited in taking to the streets. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was still battling with the pappu image and even those who were opposed to BJP were not taking him seriously. The regional party leaders were seen as too weak with limited appeal and fixated to caste-specific and region-specific agendas. 

Under the Modi regime, the mainstream media had undergone an acute dumbing down with self-censorship taking precedence over speaking truth to power in most media houses. Outspoken Journalists and TV anchors were weeded out and only the pliable ones remained. They were so fully engrossed in singing praises of the government that they gave hardly any space to opposition parties, and lost no opportunity to belittle them.  

Different Trajectories

Now over six years after the Bengaluru Town Hall meet, the career trajectories of these youth leaders have moved in different directions. Kanhaiya moved to the Congress party after being associated with CPI for a few years. Jignesh too gravitated to the Congress party after being elected as an independent MLA from Vadgam in Gujarat. 

Umar continued to soldier on with atheism and ties with left-leaning organisations. He got arrested during the Delhi riots in 2020 as an alleged conspirator and was booked under the draconian UAPA. He has now spent over 1000 days in prison without a trial. The way his case is progressing, with numerous adjournments, is a classic case of ‘process as punishment’ – something that will make Franz Kafka blush.

His case hearing was adjourned on January 23 despite the court making it clear during the previous hearing that no further adjournments would be given. Earlier he was also denied parole during the deadly Covid-19 pandemic as he was a UAPA detainee. Khalid also contracted the virus in jail but survived.

However, all through his struggles, the deafening silence of his erstwhile comrade-in-arm Kanhaiya Kumar appeared very glaring. It is not clear whether there was any personal rift or pressure from the Congress party bigwigs. 

However, Kanhaiya has now become the face of the Congress party, holding press conferences along with senior leaders like Jairam Ramesh, and often regales journalists with his rhetorical flourish.

On the other hand, the Congress party has done little to tap Jignesh’s talents and he remains a nondescript MLA in Gujarat. The party could have projected him as its Dalit face and used his services during elections in various states.

Abject Capitulation

However, the most mystifying trajectory among this lot is that of Shehla Rashid’s. During the above-mentioned Gauri Lankesh birth anniversary function, civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad, who was the MC during the function, had praised Shehla effusively. Teesta said Shehla is a Kashmiri, a JNU student, a Muslim, and a woman – in short, she ticks all the boxes that put her in the crosshairs of BJP’s troll army.

Shehla made an impassioned speech about how she was close to Gauri and what a blow her untimely demise was. She attacked the BJP government for throttling dissent and urged the audience to vote out the BJP in the assembly election that was to take place a few months later.

On social media, she was a stormy petrel. She was very vocal on Twitter with frequent jousts with the right-wingers over issues ranging from stifling of dissent to misogyny. 

When the union government abrogated Article 370 that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir in 2019 and downgraded the state into two Union Territories, she was among a group of 23 petitioners who had filed a case in the Supreme Court in 2022 challenging the government ruling.

However, a year later Shehla sought to withdraw her name from the list of petitioners and it was granted by the apex court.

After that capitulation, she kept a low profile for a while and was conspicuous by her absence on social media platforms. Twitterati was abuzz speculating about her sudden disappearance.

Then she began appearing on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms with posts laudatory of the Narendra Modi government. The icing on the cake was an interview she gave to Smita Prakash of ANI where she hailed Narendra Modi and Amit Shah as being ‘selfless leaders’. She also spoke about her ‘flirtation’ with revolutionary politics and being in an ‘echo chamber’, during her days as a JNU student and how she has outgrown it. 

What caused this turnaround is a million-dollar mystery and hundreds of theories abound. She is not the first person to distance herself from a left-leaning outfit, many have done so in the past owing to various reasons. But the way she is dissing her erstwhile ideology has angered many of her former comrades.

She is now singing praises of the Narendra Modi government with the fervent zeal of a born-again religious convert.

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Second Reads: New Insights

In his essay ‘Of Studies’, Francis Bacon remarked, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” He was suggesting how a reader should approach books based on the quality and depth of their content. Those ‘tasted’ were worthy of a quick read, while those ‘to be swallowed’ contained important knowledge, like scientific facts, and those with philosophical ideas need to be ‘chewed and digested’.

However, during my reading experience, I have come across books that appear hardly promising while being ‘tasted’, but during a second read, they tell a different story – almost the opposite of what I had earlier thought. I then realised why critics have labelled them as classics.

I first encountered this while reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness during my college days, as it was a part of my course syllabus. I had never read a Conrad novel before, though books like Lord Jim and Secret Agent used to be prominently displayed at bookshops and libraries.

Heart of Darkness appeared much slimmer (150-200 pages) in comparison, but its structure and the main character Marlow’s narration tied me up in knots. I could barely figure out what the novel was about and gave it up midway.

Once the exams were over, and I had nothing better to do during the vacation, I picked up the novel again. Probably because I was in a much more relaxed frame of mind, Marlow’s narration appeared much more comprehensible and the horrors brought about by Western colonialism in Africa became palpable. I immediately realized that I was holding a masterpiece in my hands.

The novel was later adopted by filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola to make Apocalypse Now. Coppola changed the setting to Vietnam to narrate the horrors caused by the US military misadventures.

Interestingly, in both the novel and the film the villain's name is Kurtz. He subjugates and rules over the local population. The main protagonists (Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now) are given orders to eliminate him.

Another such book is James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. I had tried to read this novel during my college days but gave up halfway as it appeared too dense and convoluted. The stream-of-consciousness narrative for which Joyce was famous for appeared a hard nut to crack.

This writing style rests on the premise that we never think chronologically. Hence the writers try to capture the randomness of the thought patterns of their characters, and the readers are allowed to “listen in” to the characters’ thoughts.

I found this narrative style a big turn-off and became wary of its practitioners – Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, and others. However, I also used to get baffled by the accolades the critics used to shower upon them. Joyce’s Ulysses is often rated as one of the best books of the previous century.

After a long hiatus, my interest in Joyce got rekindled while reading a piece on Ernest Hemingway’s advice to an aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson. The Nobel laureate had provided him with a list of books he needed to read before deciding to become a writer, and James Joyce’s Dubliners figured in it.

Since Dubliners happened to be a collection of short stories, I decided to revisit Joyce. The brevity of short stories made them less daunting. While trawling through second-hand books I came across Dubliners and the price was low as the book appeared somewhat soiled.

I bought home the book and took the plunge. What struck me was the incisive characterization. Joyce takes us into the minds of the protagonists and brings out their eccentricities and quirkiness. However, the endings often were somewhat vague, a far cry from the dramatic O’Henry twist. Some stories even make the reader wonder whether the story is really complete.

I didn’t read all the stories in Dubliners, but after reading a few I began to see Joyce’s writing as less intimidating.

A few months later I did see a copy of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man at a second-hand bookstore, but baulked at buying, as previous experience weighed heavily in my mind. However, while going back home I thought maybe it was a mistake. I made amends during my next bookstore visit.

As I waded through the first chapter that recounted the childhood of Stephen Dedalus, the timid and precocious alter-ego of Joyce, I began to see the book in a new light. In fact, it came across as a very vivid picturisation of the insecurities and anxieties while growing up, and makes you wonder: Isn’t this similar to what we all underwent during our school and college days.

The dinner table discussion after the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, a polarizing Irish freedom fighter, with the elders of the Joyce household getting divided into two camps, reminded me of similar discussions my father and his friends used to have during the Emergency. While most saw Jayaprakash Narayan as a great white hope, some were wary of his intentions.

Though Joyce spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Dublin remains the muse for all his works. In Portrait too he recreates the sights and smells of the city and eccentricities of its people. Those were the days of gas lights, as electric street lights had not made their appearance.

It was also before the advent of telephones. I often wonder how Joyce, a master stylist who experimented with the language and coined new words, would have approached the present-day SMS lingo used by mobile phone users. YKWIM.

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