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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Enter Return to Office, Exit WFH

 

Remote work that kept companies afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic has now fallen out of favour of corporate czars. HR managers of various big corporations have issued return-to-office mandates and are exerting pressure on employees to be present in offices. In the post-pandemic world, companies are eager to return to the pre-2020 working norms as they brace for an economic downturn.  

The latest to do so is e-commerce giant Amazon which has mandated managers to sack employees if they don’t attend office three times a week. Earlier, banking majors JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs had issued directives to do away with hybrid mode and want employees to attend office on all five working days of a week. 

Closer home, Tata Consultancy Services in June scrapped work from home and wants its employees to be present in the office five days a week.

Infosys CEO Narayana Murthy also has a dim view of letting employees work from home and feels it leads to the waning of institutional culture. Regarding the Indian context, Murthy said the WFH system does not work as people live in ‘multi-generational households’, ‘have poor Internet bandwidth’, and ‘do not have a separate room to convert into a home office’.

However, Infosys has not totally scrapped work from home option, though it claims that the number of employees attending office was steadily increasing. It claimed as many as 70% of its employees are on campus at any given point in the week. 

Boost to Collaboration

The reasons being cited by various companies for bringing people back to the office include productivity, collaboration, training, and networking. Managers feel that face-to-face interactions improve camaraderie among employees and boost collaborative efforts. On the other hand, remote work runs the risk of employees working in silos.

The other reasons include lack of supervision and training, especially for younger employees. This could seriously affect their learning curve.

Lastly, there is the overhead expenses like real estate. Many of these companies have continued paying rents and leases for the office space even during lockdowns.

Interestingly, Tesla and X chairman Elon Musk has even added a dimension of morality to this issue. He observed that working from home was possible only for a certain set of white-collar employees, while others had no choice but to attend office. Hence he felt that remote work was ‘morally wrong’.

WFH as a Saviour

When the dreaded Covid-19 pandemic made us hunker down in our homes to duck the invisible virus, and the governments imposed lockdowns to contain its spread; employers and managers saw remote work as the go-to option to keep their businesses running.

While industries like software have used this option on a limited scale in the past, for others such as banking, insurance, and publishing it was a headlong plunge into unchartered waters with too many imponderables. 

This unplanned experiment, thrust upon them by the virus, forced them to shift work from office premises to the 1 and 2 BHKs of employees, with dining or study tables doubling up as a home office. Webinars, Zoom meetings, and Slack messenger provided the tenuous link in the socially distanced world to keep the offices ticking.

Once the teething troubles such as lack of enough laptops, ensuring data safety and patchy internet connections at the homes of employees were sorted, the companies found the going smooth with not much dent in productivity. While the pandemic was raging, TCS even announced its 25 by 25 vision - under which only 25% of the workforce would work out of office by the year 2025. However, this year the plan was given a quiet burial.

This eagerness to call back employees triggered an exodus among the women staff at TCS. For the first time, women employees leaving the company outnumbered their male counterparts. The company, however, decided to stick to its return-to-office policy. 

Survey Narratives

Before the pandemic, remote work was looked down upon by most managers. They saw it as the first refuge of slackers and used to sanction it with much reluctance, and most companies had a monthly cap on WFH.

However, the pandemic ensured that WFH was the only way out and skeptics were forced to list out its virtues. Many research organizations came out with surveys stating that remote work had not affected productivity and the work-life balance of the employees had improved. Though some of them claimed that employees were complaining of longer working hours. 

Once the virus was gone for good, the surveys began to sing a different tune. They began to list out the ills, including low productivity, longer turnaround time, employee tendency to procrastinate, and lack of supervision and mentoring of new employees.

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Israel, Palestine and Indian Social Media

Image: X (formerly Twitter)

The 75-year-old Israel-Palestine dispute is once again on the boil, but this time the war hysteria is being felt almost across the globe, thanks to social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.

In India, in the 1970’s this conflict used to be confined to the ‘World’ pages of the English newspapers and was non-existent in most vernacular dailies. Later with the advent of satellite television in 1990s, we got to see footage of buildings getting reduced to rubbles on BBC World News, accompanied by a fast-paced narration by Lyse Doucet - each word going off like a bullet from a machine gun.

Those days the Indian government used to throw its weight behind the Palestinians in tune with its policy of non-alignment, while Israel was considered a pariah state. Gradually around 1980s, a section of intelligentsia and political class began to feel that it was high time we explored ties with the Jewish nation, as they argued we shared many common interests. India then formally established diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992, but after ensuring that ties with the Palestine Liberation Organisation were not upset. 

For the general public, discussing politics in drawing rooms, tea shops, and paan shops – the brick-and-mortar predecessors of social media platforms, the Israel-Palestine conflict only evoked yawns and the initiator of the topic used to be dubbed as a ‘big showoff’. Many had no idea where this region was on the world map and used to dismiss this ignorance with a ‘kya-farak-padta-hai’ shrug.

Even when social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook became household names in the first decade of this millennium, the Israel-Palestine wars didn’t evoke much traction among Indian users. 

However, Israel was fondly remembered by a section of the Indian commentariat whenever Delhi, Mumbai, or Kashmir used to get rocked by terror attacks. Israel's success in freeing passengers and crew from a hijacked Air France aircraft at Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976 had won them legendary status. These analysts looked upon the Jewish nation as a role model and wanted India to show the same ruthlessness while dealing with Pakistan-trained terrorists. The worldwide rise in Islamophobia after the 9/11 terror attacks in the US also added heft to this school of thought.

On the other hand, in New India secularism has become a dirty word and the Indian Muslim is increasingly being seen as the other. Frequent lynching, hate speeches, and other hate crimes against Muslims for nearly a decade have helped bolster this narrative. Using this corollary, anyone attacking Muslims across the globe gets instant support from Hindutva zealots. Hence, the current Israel-Palestinian war is evoking a very strident reaction, and the world is getting a taste of the toxic polarization India is currently afflicted with.

On October 7, the moment the Palestinian extremist group Hamas breached the heavily guarded Israeli border to carry out attacks on residences and military installations, and rained missiles on some Israeli towns, #IStandWithIsrael began trending on Indian Twitter. Soon there was a rash of similar-sounding hashtags and in some cases, even Israel was misspelled as ‘Isreal’. 

A number of resident welfare uncles, who bombard us with ‘good morning’ messages, turned into ‘military experts’ overnight. They expressed their choicest outrage against Hamas but were salivating over the prospects of massive air raids Israelis were planning to carry out on Gaza in retaliation. Borrowing a cricket analogy, a Twitter user said Hamas had done with its batting and now see what Israel does. Memes showing Hamas in poor light were widely circulated.

As the frenzy spread, we had random guys from Rajkot to Rae Bareli offering themselves to fight for Israel. This reached such a feverish pitch that the Israeli ambassador in India, Naor Gilon, had to issue a statement, “Israel never asked anyone to come and fight for us. We fight our own fights.”

All the prominent influencers of the right-wing social media ecosystem in India began rooting for Israel and wanted the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to wipe out Hamas by flattening Gaza. All this vociferous posturing was emanating from the bedrock of rabid hatred towards fellow Muslims.

There is an old adage (though who actually said it is disputed), “The first casualty of war is the truth.” This war too helped rumour mills work overtime with social media proving to be a force multiplier. 

One of them was that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies in a hospital after entering Israel. The report was based on hearsay and travelled across the globe. It gained so much credence that US President Joe Biden issued a statement condemning the act. Later it turned out that the report had no basis, and the White House had to ‘walk back’ on its earlier statement.

The trouble is that by the time these lies and half-baked reports get exposed, they have already travelled too far. It gets shared by thousands of social media users, and many don’t even get to know about the clarification that comes much later. 

Hamas has been attacking Israeli positions in the past but never attained a success of this scale. For the dominant Western media, Hamas action became the casus belli, as if this was the first stone cast in this dispute, while they conveniently overlooked Israel’s atrocities on Palestinians that date back many decades. Every anchor in prominent TV channels across the Western world wanted the panelists to first condemn the October 7 Hamas attack and then get on with Israeli atrocities.

No Western leader issues a statement on this issue without including the line, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Hence, the oppressor gets a blank cheque, while the oppressed need to be the epitome of poise and grace or be dubbed as a terrorist.

Coming to Indian mainstream media, a major chunk of which has been reduced to government mouthpieces over the last decade, the Hamas attack provided a golden opportunity to divert attention from a civil war-like situation prevailing in Manipur state. 

For Indian TV news channels, many of whom fit Arundhati Roy’s description of ‘Fox News on steroids’, this war provided fresh ammunition for its daily edition of notoriously toxic debates. Talking heads with very extreme views were invited and they all still continue to call for the annihilation of Gaza to teach Hamas a lesson. 

Interestingly, some of these channels have flown in their top correspondents to Tel Aviv, and they are reporting from the relatively safe confines of Israeli towns with none venturing into Gaza. They are also unable to see the widespread protests on Israeli streets calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ouster. Amid all this turmoil, ANI even managed to find an Indian woman residing in Israel, who was willing to sing paeans of Narendra Modi!

It may be recalled that none of these channels ever bothered to send even a single reporter to Manipur where the ethnic conflict rages on even to this day.

While most of the Israeli media is pulling no punches and asking the Netanyahu government tough questions regarding Israeli security failure on October 7, for Indian reporters and Twitter users he continues to be a hero. The same template is expected to continue as Israeli forces get ready for ground assaults on Gaza.

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Gigabyte Skeletons

Lucky is the man who does not have skeletons in his closet, so goes the saying. But in this digital era, the closet or cupboard has been replaced by our smartphones and laptops. These gadgets now hold so many vital and crucial records of our lives that if they land in the wrong hands, our future could be in jeopardy.

In the last decade or two, mobile phone usage has become so pervasive that it has scaled all class, gender, and age barriers. Our lives have become so dependent on our phones that they have now become an extension of ourselves. 

With each upgrade and new features, these devices have progressively entwined themselves with our private and official lives.

In the early 2000s, we had the feature phones that could carry our contact lists, call logs, text messages, and maybe a few games. They could not access the internet, or download apps, photos, or videos. As for images, it could only provide a few limited emoticons that could be used along with text messages. 

Those were the early days and mobile phones were a prized possession with even incoming calls and messages getting charged. People saw this as a new mode of communication that helped them stay in touch while on the move but used it very sparingly and followed some cheat codes to beat high prices. 

The traditional landline phones continued to hold sway as they offered cheaper calls and the only threat mobile phones posed then was to wristwatches and timepieces as they displayed time with greater accuracy and offered a more versatile alarm facility.

Once the charges for incoming calls and messages were abolished, mobile phone sales and usage grew by leaps and bounds. Many one-handset households turned into multi-handset ones and soon families began pondering whether a landline was needed at all. 

Along came camera phones. Many wondered why a camera was needed on a phone, which is meant to communicate. But all naysayers were proved wrong, and what these camera phones spawned was something no one had foreseen – selfie culture.

Now no age group, social strata, or ethnicity is free from this narcissistic affliction; and hardly any occasion or place is considered not kosher for a selfie. Whether this narcissism was inherent among the people or fanned by camera phones and social media is open to debate. Now we have reached such a stage where prominent handset brands are offering ‘selfie-camera’ as their unique selling proposition!

The advent of smartphones was a game changer. They made people unlearn the usage of keypads and master the art of tapping, sliding, and typing words on flat screens. Smartphones offered a seamless link to the internet and the facility to download apps completely changed our personal and work lives.

The features they offered were a direct hit on personal computers and laptops and boosted the use of mobile internet. It has changed the way we socialize, handle finances, shop, travel, and access news and entertainment. Smartphones are the first thing we look at after waking up and the last thing before crashing at night.

Hence they have now become a rich repository of your personal photos and videos, data concerning your health parameters, banking and digital payments apps, and authenticator gateways to access your office’s protected networks. 

Losing a smartphone is nothing short of a calamity, irrespective of the passcodes and other safety nets you may have activated to safeguard your personal and official data. Even moving data from an old smartphone to a new one is as challenging as moving houses!

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