#Me Too Maelstrom Mauls Many

Five years ago, when Tarun Tejpal, the editor of Tehelka magazine, was caught pants down for his testosterone fuelled antics with a young colleague and later faced the full glare of social media, I had thought that lucky were those editors and journalists who had carried out similar acts in the pre-internet and typewriter days.

Names of M.J. Akbar and some others (still not outed yet), who were part of press club folklore, came to my mind. During my student days in the late 80s and early 90s Akbar was a big name in journalism and his column ‘Byline' was something we all looked forward to in the now defunct Sunday magazine of Anand Bazar Patrika stable. I also happened to read his book Riot After Riot and a biography on Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru: The Making of India). All this gave me an impression of him being a man of great erudition.

But later in a baffling fashion he chose politics and my respect for him went down a few notches, as I thought it was a great loss for journalism. However during my rookie sub-editor days in Mumbai I got to know that the prodigal was returning to journalism and starting a new paper Asian Age.

When the recruitment happened, the grapevine had it that only 'fast' girls were getting recruited and all key position were occupied by women with very little experience. My respect for him dived many more notches. However, still the general perception was that although he was a 'ladies’ man' he was 'good at his job'.

That was also the time India embraced economic liberalisation and newsrooms also witnessed drastic changes. The editor's age profile became much younger and there were more women joining the profession. The look and feel of newspapers also changed, thanks to better printing technology and headlines became catchier than matter of fact.

The presence of higher number of women and younger workforce was a mixed bag. On one hand it brought about greater gender sensitization (use of misogynist Hindi expletives came down) and the blooming of office romances. But some of the superiors, deeply entrenched in patriarchy, took advantage of the power they enjoyed to treat their junior women colleagues as a fair game. They used this by dangling carrots like dinner invites, junkets and out of turn promotions. Those days sexual harassment redress mechanisms were not even thought of.

Newspaper offices then were closed places and nothing spilled over to the public domain. A Tejpal type incident those days would have been swept under the carpet or settled with mere apology or a transfer.

Managements used to close ranks and observe an incestuous 'code of silence' so that the publications name is not sullied. Even rival newspapers too adhered to this code, keeping in mind the glass houses they all were in. In those pre-cellphone/internet days even gossips never used to travel beyond the confines of office canteens or press clubs.

Internet and social media changed the rules of the game as it now 'follows' us everywhere and now it has also proved that in addition to making contemporary events go 'viral', it can even exhume issues that happened two decades ago to haunt the perpetrators by 'calling out'.

In India #me too fire got noticed nearly an year after US. It has simmered for long and took its own sweet time to become vigorous enough to singe people's reputations. But once actor Tanushree Dutta lit the fire, it has been relentless like the French guillotine and many reputations fell by the wayside.

While some were quite obvious as they wore their playboy selves on their sleeves, but names like Vinod Dua, Jatin Das and others evoked shock and disbelief, as they were considered quite progressive and respectable.

It first started with the film industry and later spread to the English journalism, thanks to a journalist named Sandhya Menon. The first to get caught in its cross hairs was K.R. Sreenivas, the resident editor of a prominent daily, to be followed by some Kolkata and Delhi based journalists.

While their ex-colleagues were coming out with unsavoury details about their peccadilloes, I again wondered whether this #me too will address the elephant in the room or be rest content with having a tilt at bit players.

Finally, the much anticipated happened. Akbar got outed and as expected it opened a Pandora's box. And I must admit that despite being aware of his Casanova ways, the Tweets left me shell shocked. They were far more toxic than the above-mentioned press club gossip, which at the most made him appear as a flamboyant editor with a glad eye for women. 

As per the disclosures, he was a sexual predator on the loose, with no one to question or curb him and he got away with all this for decades. Journalist Saba Naqvi recalling her stint in the Telegraph and without naming Akbar summed him up very well, “He behaved like a village Thakur who set off to claim any young thing that caught his fancy."

Amid all this hoopla there are allegations of witch hunt and not adhering to the due process. While the former cannot be ruled out as a few innocent men may get pilloried for no fault of theirs, the latter point does not hold much water. 

In many disclosures the victims had stated that they had approached sexual harassment redress committees, but no action was taken. At the most the erring employees were transferred, which is just a change of scene for them. The infamous ordeal of Rina Mukherjee a journalist with The Statesman is a case in point. She was terminated for filing a sexual harassment complaint against her news coordinator and had to fight a long drawn legal battle spanning more than a decade.

It is a well known fact that at many media establishments sexual harassment redress committees are mere sinecures of little consequence. So far no media company has taken any drastic action like say Infosys took against Phaneesh Murthy in 2002, when he got embroiled in a sexual harassment case. 

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Closing of Indian Mind

Though Mary Kom the Bollywood biopic on the boxing sensation from Manipur may be raking the moolah at box office, with one Facebook meme even claiming that Priyanka Chopra, who plays Mary Kom, earned more money in this film than Mary Kom in her lifetime, it has no way made even a minor jab on the well entrenched prejudice 'mainland' Indians harbour towards their Northeast cousins.

A Facebook post by one Sreemoyee Piu Kundu about a scene in a Delhi multiplex screening the movie and later at a nearby restaurant was quite an eye-opener and succinctly sums up our fetish for symbolic gestures and quite literally 'skin deep' sense of national integration and inclusiveness.

At the end of the movie the national anthem is played and one couple refuses to stand up and all hell breaks loose. They are grabbed by the collar to stand up and reminded how Mary Kom has done India proud and how dare they sit and 'watch the fun', with choices Hindi expletives (ranging from Kuttey to MC, BC kind) thrown in. The fight snowballs to a mini riot with bottles flying and the security had to be called in to help people get out of the movie hall.

At the restaurant she describes how a group of Manipuri women, whom she had seen at the movie hall, get a taste of well entrenched prejudices and misogyny among a group of purebred Delhi youths of Punjabi kind. They sing cheesiest songs and even harass the waiter serving the Manipuri women. When one of the women stands up, they whistle and one of them remarks, 'oye yeh toh saali Mary wali aankhen dikha rahin hain...'

One among the waiters, all hailing from Northeast, pleads with  them to be quiet but gets pushed by one of the youths, who remarks, 'yeh dekh Mary ka ek aur aashiq!' The girls quietly pay and leave whatever they had ordered untouched. The guys then sing 'Hindi chini bhai bhai...'

Symbolic gestures like standing up for national anthem comes easy to us, but inculcating a far more complex sentiment like seeing a person from other community or state as equal is something we could not accomplish even 60 plus years after independence.

Though one of the cornerstones of our freedom struggle was national unity, quite ironically brought about by English education, and our stalwarts of freedom struggle had tried their level best to break down linguistic, communal and caste barriers of our vast and diverse land, but they were not fully successful, resulting in division of the country. After 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders had made conscious efforts to promote national integration, but somewhere down the line their successors lost the zest and we lost the plot. Moreover the Northeast for some mysterious reason always remained in the fringes and little did we learn about those regions in our school, barring maybe Naga dance.

The country ended up being a conglomeration of various linguistic and religious enclaves.Slogan like 'unity in diversity' remained just that - slogans. For most of us the very idea of encountering people who are different is unsettling. Hence we always harbour a desire for homogeneity. The parameters for homogeneity may vary from person to person, but broadly they look for same language, religion, caste, region and food habits.

Delhi, of course, tops in such churlish behaviour as their tolerance bandwidth is very narrow - it spans from Gurgaon to Noida. Other cities may be a shade better, but are not free from it.


Image Courtesy: Facebook  
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Resurrecting Sardar Patel

Sardar Vallabhai Patel is now unwittingly 'trending' in the consciousness of mango people, thanks to the Congress-BJP  dogfight over his legacy. In our country it is a sad fact that 'honouring' any late leader has been reduced to ceremonial gestures such as erecting statues, naming roads and buildings; garlanding his or her statue or photograph on birth and death anniversaries. Our nano attention span rarely goes beyond that. Little is done to understand what they stood for and how to propagate their values.

Patel, the country's first home minister, and many freedom struggle stalwarts such as Subhash Chandra Bose, C Rajagopalachari and numerous others became fading memories, mainly relegated to their home states, after the country attained freedom and the citizens began taking that freedom for granted. Moreover since Rajaji and Patel had right wing views on economy, they did not find much favour in the era of Nehruvian socialism and licence permit raj.

After Indira Gandhi came to power the ruling political and bureaucratic class realised that hero worshipping the First Family of Indian politics - the Nehrus was the only way forward and many took to it with gusto. All governmental schemes were named after members of the Nehru family. All others got blanked out, even roads named after Mahatma Gandhi are at best known as 'MG Road', with hardly anyone aware what 'MG' stands for.

As for Patel whatever little remembrance the Indian populace had about him got further diminished in 1984, after  the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi fell to assassins bullets on his birth anniversary - October 31. Since then the Congressmen face the yearly quandary whether to celebrate Patel's birth anniversary or mourn Indira Gandhi's death. No prize for guessing what they usually choose.

Little do the people know that had it not been for Patel we would have got a 'moth eaten' (my apologies to Mohammed Ali Jinnah) India with 563 petty princely states wreaking havoc and Pakistan fishing in those troubled waters. We would have required a passport to go to cities such as Hyderabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Patiala, Agartala and Jaipur; and not to speak of Kashmir. Patel persuaded the princely states (arm twisted the recalcitrant ones with threat of military action) to fall in line.

For this he is often compared to Otto Von Bismarck, the man who unified Germany with 'blood and iron' and the original practitioner of realpolitik. But while the Prussian Chancellor had to deal with principalities that were far more homogeneous in terms of language and culture, Patel had to contend with princely states that were as diverse as they could get.

For Narendra Modi and BJP a neglected Patel was an easy picking to bolster their political future, since Hindu Mahasabha leaders like Veer Sawarkar or Shyama Prasad Mukherjee don't enjoy a pan-Indian appeal. It has been in the works even when L K Advani was leading the party, under Modi it has become shriller.

What followed was a clever propaganda campaign. He sparked off a debate by saying Patel would have made a better Prime Minister and then went on to plant a lie that Jawaharlal Nehru did not attend Patel's funeral. In this era of Google and Wikipedia such lies have a very short shelf life. The last word on this issue has still not been said.

Modi’s plan for a grand statue of Patel, spending humungous Rs 2,500 crore, sounds more like Mayawati-isation of an illustrious leader, who discarded his flourishing law practice and brown sahib ways to become a dyed in khadi Congressman.

Picture courtesy: Wikipedia

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Four Walls Do Not a Toilet Make

I had an unusual mail in my inbox a couple of days back. It was from UNICEF stating that it was organising a photo contest for observing World Toilet Day (which falls on November 19). It said, "All you need to do is take a picture of yourself or your family and friends with your toilet, upload it (in their site), and show how happy and proud you are of using your toilet."
 
The UNICEF was in fact promoting the World Toilet Organization, an initiative taken up by a Singaporean businessman Jack Sim in 2001, to highlight lack of sanitation in developing countries.
 
Quite predictably, the mail had some depressing statistics regarding the world in general and India in particular. Though we are aware of the seriousness of the problem, the actual numbers will still make us wince in disgust - 600 million of our countrymen still defecate in the open. That is close to 60% of the population.
 
Apart from the government's monumental failure, which is very apparent; it has also to do with skewed priorities of our citizens. According to census 2011, the country has more cell phones than toilets!! Clean sanitation somehow is never considered a priority. The residents will keep their houses clean, also take care of personal hygiene, but defecate in open without any hesitation. No wonder diseases such as diarrhea, dysentry are so rampant.
 
The problem may seem very in your face as you approach any major city by train, as areas near railway tracks have become the unofficial open-air restroom of the country. However, its origins lie in villages, where these practices evoke not even a shrug. Maybe because they have the luxury of sparsely populated areas and  secluded spaces.

These very villagers often migrate to cities to escape poverty and other adversities and end up in slums. They bring along their sanitation habits too. The general congestion in cities and high real estate prices leaves them with little choice.
 
The problem has been a long standing one and despite Mahatma Gandhi's valiant efforts - he had in fact declared that 'sanitation was more important than independence', the hideous practice outlived him.

There are in fact many jokes connected with this. A very popular one is set in Jawaharlal Nehru era. The then US President John F Kennedy visited India and felt  disgusted by the sight of rampant open defecation and complained to Nehru. A hurt Nehru decided to pay back in same coin. During his visit to US he went around looking for persons relieving in the open, but tough luck. Finally, much to his delight, he did manage to find one. But he turned out to be an Indian embassy staff!
 
When V S Naipaul came to India and wrote about this eyesore of a practice in An Area of Darkness and India a Wounded Civilization, it did raise the hackles of many in the country. But instead of working towards eradicating this social evil, they just banned his latter book. Sanitation was always considered a dirty word a taboo topic, a low caste activity. Due to such primitive sanitation methods the practice of carrying nightsoil is still prevalent in many parts of the country.
 
In independent India, with the sole exception of Sulabh movement, no social or political organisation tried to squarely face the issue until Jairam Ramesh came along. At least he brought the issue back to spotlight and made it a talking point, notwithstanding the controversy over his remark that the country had more temples than toilets. I hope it does not die down after the recently concluded Nirmal Bharat Yatra. Some recent incidents of newly-wed women refusing to stay in husband's house due to lack of toilet is indeed holds out some hope.


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