"Journalism in India was never glamorous.
It was manual labour. No internet, no cell phones, usually no landline.
We took the bus. The government even gave reporters discounted bus passes." --
- writes a Govt servant-turned-journo, Binu Alex.
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| Binu Alex : Ahmedabad to Keralam |
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| When senior scribes Khushwant, Kuldip Nayar protested in 1987 |
Binu was in Ahmedabad and now moved to his native state, Keralam.
The lines quoted above could have been "my lines" easily and just exactly.
I traveled a lot on the Nagaland State Transport (NST) buses and had made use of 'discounted' bus passes. My daughter perhaps does not believe that was an era and my wife presumes, I am simply glamourising my role in this life.
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| Me and NST bus : My 'old Metro' |
I got the 'discounted' pass after I got the application countersigned by three people - Late Lelie Legisie, president Nagaland Journalists' Association (NJA), V Sekhose, GM, NST and one Mr Chakraborty, joint GM, NST.
Nevertheless, Binu continues:
"Try asking a news anchor to take a public bus today. They’d probably live-stream it as a survival challenge."
"Glamour (in Indian media) arrived with television. Everyone wanted to be the next big anchor. The coverage shifted. Nobody cared about the seventy percent of India living in villages. The cameras turned to film stars and cricketers and politicians.
(And when it turned to army top guns - some anchors reported - "India will attack Tiger Hill tomorrow". Had I reported, I could have been shot down. That was an act of treason - sharing war plans.
The anchor was a female; and the 'men' in uniform had "a cup of tea".
*****
Binu's story goes --
"We parked reporters outside actors’ gates twenty-four hours a day, waiting for a sneeze, while farmers were swallowing poison somewhere else entirely".
Binu is again categorical -- "But I’m not here to lecture on the death of media".
So am I !!
But here is the best comparison - I could imagine,
"Marey hue ko kya Marogey" -- (No need criticising someone, who is almost dead)," Ms Mayawati had spoken about Mulayam Singh Yadav. For working journalists of the tribe of Binu Alex and Nirendra Dev - the phrase of Mayawati works very well.
Binu in his blog piece actually talks about one Umesh Narayan.
"I’m telling it again, because it says everything I want to say," recounts Binu.
"Umesh joined the 'Indian Express' in 1968. Retired in the eighties as Chief Sub-Editor. If you don’t know what that means, a sub-editor takes a reporter’s unreadable draft and turns it into the story you read with your morning tea.
Reporters have a nose for news. They usually write like they’re texting with their elbows. The desk is the invisible backbone of the whole enterprise.
In 2014 .... we needed to check on Umesh. He lived in Shahpur, a locality mostly known for riots (in Ahmedabad). I used to live nearby.
I had watched those streets burn once, never thinking I’d one day be checking on someone who survived them quietly, in a small rented room.
"He paid fifty rupees a month for that room. The landlord kept him out of pity, and warned us the room itself was unfit for visitors. Umesh made us sit on a bench outside. Isolation and old-newsman pride, in equal measure.
The 1986 movie 'New Delhi Times' showed how a journalist could be 'misused' by the political system.
***
That year the Gujarat Media Club decided to honour him. Basant Rawat (a journo from Uttarakhand but based in Ahmedabad for about four decades) tracked him down and sent an auto-rickshaw to fetch him. Imagine a hall with five hundred people.
Umesh walked in wearing his best clothes, which hadn’t seen soap in months. He looked terrified.
By eight-thirty he was begging to leave, worried he wouldn’t find a ride home.
Dinner opened at ten. Every young journalist in the room was busy networking with VIPs. Meanwhile the old man was struggling to get himself a plate at the buffet. I (Binu Alex) helped him with his food. Then I looked around for someone to drop him home.
Nobody wanted an old, unwashed man in their car.
***
This is what happens when you’re a journalist and not a celebrity. You simply become invisible.
I (Binu) was stuck at the venue till the end, being the organiser. But I’d invited a businessman friend, Anil Koshti, who owns Tailors Point in Ahmedabad. I pointed Umesh out and asked if he could drop him. I fully expected a polite no. Anil agreed without blinking.
That night, Umesh Narayan left the Golden Glory Hall of the Karnavati Club in a Mercedes Benz. It felt like a small victory. Hollow, but a victory.
Binu further says: "Months later we visited him again, hoping to help financially. Like most desk men of his generation, he had never saved a rupee. His fixed deposit gave him twenty-five hundred a month. A relative sent another two thousand. He refused to see doctors. If he fell ill, the landlord would only find out a week later.
"The details, when we sat with him, were hard to take in.
"Two different slippers. Trousers so stiff with dried sweat they looked like armour. Safety pins where buttons used to be. A hearing aid he couldn’t afford batteries for. We wrote notes on paper to talk to him. I went through an entire notepad in an hour.
It was clear he needed more than money. He needed care, and a clean place to live. I suggested a destitute home. Mother Teresa’s. He refused. He had lived life on his own terms and wasn’t about to stop. We couldn’t force him. If he gave up that fifty-rupee room, he’d have nowhere to go back to.
We left that day completely helpless. Umesh died in 2016, quietly, still stubborn to the end.
He wasn’t just a man. He was a whole generation of journalists, the ones who built the news and were then simply left off the page. Some people spend their whole lives making other people sound good, and never once ask to be remembered for it.
Binu Alex's piece has another part of the story.
"Today’s journalists don’t report the news. They are the news. Look at them now. Millionaires with real estate portfolios, discussing the working class from air-conditioned studios. There was a time this tribe worked for two meals a day.
They had this odd notion of actually serving people. My father was one of them. A man who borrowed money to pay our school fees.
(Blogger adds: Binu's father Senior Alex worked for United News of India in 2002 when I was deputed by the rival news agency Press Trust of India for the post-Godhra mayhem. I survived in the raders' paradise - then a riot-hit place - there with the "curse" of PTI management and some love of friends such as Binu Alex, his dad uncle Senior Alex, Thomas Kutty (then with Reuters), Anosh Malekar of (The Week) and Sanjay Pandey (Times of India) and a few others.)
Thomas even kept me in his apartment for a few days when PTI behaved as if it was me who was responsible for burning of the Sabarmati Express.
Binu says - "I was freelancing back then. My monthly cheque was bigger than his (father's) salary. When my brother needed fees for IIT, a friend’s uncle had to step in. Chit funds and loans were standard issue. Add alcohol to that, and you have the full picture.
Press clubs across India basically ran on this tragedy. Nobody sipped a drink. They swallowed the bottle.
Maybe Binu Alex is wrong this time. It's the half-a-glass that 'swallowed' the journalist every night.
He is reborn next morning. He would rush to his office next day and get lost in work, file copies and again meet friends at the Press Club - and ask : "Mera story para kia".
Anosh had a classic way of summing up our tales : "Mera wife bhi nahi padti".
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| Feb 27, 2002 : One Journey that changed India |
Anosh Malekar of 'The Week' summed up the profession’s particular grief more precisely : “I wrote a cover story on who led the flames in Godhra Train. Even my wife did not read it.” Yes, this was 2002.
Note the coincidence of timing. Around 2002 — the year Malekar’s wife did not read the cover story — Narendra Modi began his ascent in Gujarat. Television channels believed, with the confidence of the casually powerful, that they could decide who should be the chief minister of Gujarat.
They were utterly wrong. Not because their coverage was neutral, or because the electorate was not watching.
A different world had set in. A different media was already being built — one we journalists had not yet understood.
Namo used social media. He was among the first Indian political leaders to sense its structural advantage: direct communication, no editorial filter, no need of so-called journalistic skills.
Under him, no pampering, no foreign junkets. He did not need to court the press.
The Congress leaders like Jairam Ramesh laughed at this. By May 16, 2014 — when the mandate came — people knew that the bird had left the nest.
ends
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