Five of India’s most iconic one-day players of the last decade will never be seen again. That is how sunset comes: without a “farewell series”, without emotional speeches and orchestrated jamborees. Sunset comes via a televised news report. A list of...
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Five of India’s most iconic one-day players of the last decade will never be seen again. That is how sunset comes: without a “farewell series”, without emotional speeches and orchestrated jamborees.

Sunset comes via a televised news report. A list of names that you scan, your heart dropping by degrees as you go down the list and fail to find your name in the list of 30.

To add a layer of irony, Virender Sehwag got the news that he is no longer wanted in the Indian set up on the day, five years ago, when he was one audacious stroke short of becoming the first batsman in history to score three triples.

It is, they tell me, a “thoughtful, far-reaching selection”.

I know it is likely a fair call. But mind and heart are in no mood for reason – they miss – I miss – Viru too much.

Tomorrow makes 30 years since the day 40 tons of poisonous gas leaked out of a factory, killing over 20,000 and injuring or otherwise harming over 500,000 in arguably the worst industrial disaster of our age. Why have we moved on? Why is there...
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Tomorrow makes 30 years since the day 40 tons of poisonous gas leaked out of a factory, killing over 20,000 and injuring or otherwise harming over 500,000 in arguably the worst industrial disaster of our age.

Why have we moved on? Why is there collective amnesia, not merely in the rest of the country but in Bhopal itself?

Why, asks the talented Priyanka Dubey, fresh from winning a Thompson Foundation award for journalism, do so many residents seem so indifferent to what happened in their own city?

 

How Bhopal and I Betrayed Our Own

NB: Lead image is by the artist Pete Dunne who, at the time, was living less than 100 km from Bhopal

“ He bounces a wounded cry down into the canyons of the Tigris River: a blade of rusty water that saws its way through the bedrock of time. Ali’s song is a hymn to true love, which is to say, to love unrequited. It is the tale of a beautiful woman...
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He bounces a wounded cry down into the canyons of the Tigris River: a blade of rusty water that saws its way through the bedrock of time. Ali’s song is a hymn to true love, which is to say, to love unrequited. It is the tale of a beautiful woman who remains blind to the longings of the singer. It is a lyric of loneliness. Of waiting. Of resignation—a form of acceptance. It is the perfect ballad for this antique river and this doomed, haunted town. …

It happens every time. I read a Paul Salopek update on his Out of Eden Walk and I marvel. And gasp with wonder at the observation, the insight, and the way he brings it together with his words. And then I am led to think. And to read. And to learn.

Here is his latest. And it is on par with every previous post:

Mother Rivers

I have spent the better part of my life – or maybe it just seems that way; you know how it is when you are frustrated, a day seems like a year – “reporting in to” people who have never spent a day in a newsroom. I’ve spent the better part of my life...
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I have spent the better part of my life – or maybe it just seems that way; you know how it is when you are frustrated, a day seems like a year – “reporting in to” people who have never spent a day in a newsroom.

I’ve spent the better part of my life – or so it seems to me; see above – shocked at how little effort there is, institutionally, to stay on top of emerging tools and technologies, to have constant conversations about how these new tools, these technologies, can be harnessed to the goal of making storytelling structures better. (Hey, while on this – if you have anything at all to do with storytelling, do follow Journalism Tools. You can thank me later – I have plenty of reason to thank that account.)

The net result has been, you talk story, idea, project. What you get is, ok, can you do a powerpoint/waterfall chart/excel on the “gives and gets”. You do that, and you get a conversation that goes on these lines:

“So, I saw your powerpoint, and I notice you haven’t addressed the question of RoI”

Eh? Sorry, what? It is a powerpoint about a great storytelling project…

“Yes but have you quantified the RoI?”

What do you need?

“Projections. How many updates a day? How many items of text articles, how many words each? How many images? Standalone or slideshow?  How about video? Clip durations? What is the traffic estimate for each of these elements – page views, time spend, unique users by geography?… You know, we need details…”

And that is when another idea goes off to die peacefully, in the media graveyard where so many good story ideas go to die unwept, unhonored, unsung.

I’ve often wondered why. Would you, for instance, take a journalist and make him CEO of a company? Or its CFO? Or head of its product department? No?

Why then this presumption that someone with “management expertise” is best fitted to make decisions about media, about storytelling?

I wondered, but never really nailed an answer that satisfied me, until I stumbled on this Rafat Ali (Who he? Here, check) “rant” that is so bang on target it would win gold at an Olympic shooting contest. Here it is, Storify-ed:

Words to the wise – from the wiser…

In passing: This is not a reference to any particular media house including the one I am currently part of. (God, the times we live in – you’ve got to put a caveat to anything, even a good morning, for fear what you say could get misrepresented.)

N Srinivasan is such a dude! That he went to court, claiming the Mudgal Commission had vindicated him and demanding that he be reinstated as board president and further, be allowed to contest elections, was no surprise. The real kicker lay in a...
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N Srinivasan is such a dude! 

That he went to court, claiming the Mudgal Commission had vindicated him and demanding that he be reinstated as board president and further, be allowed to contest elections, was no surprise. 

The real kicker lay in a little codicil that went unnoticed (emphasis mine): 

Srinivasan also asked the court to re-instate the officials from India Cements who were part of various sub-committees at the BCCI. 

Read that again. Then ask yourself this: Why were officials from India Cements, a private company, embedded in “various sub-committees” in the BCCI, which is not, appearances to the contrary, a sister concern of the cement firm? 

Check out his actual words: 

“Now, that the Report (Mudgal) has been filed and no adverse findings have been made as against this Respondent (India Cements) or its employees, it is just and proper that the employees of this Respondent be permitted to discharge their duties if any assigned to them by the BCCI." 

N Srinivasan’s serial conflicts of interest have been discussed in every conceivable forum, including the highest court of the land.

So what does he do? He goes to the Supreme Court and, in as many words, demands that his employees – people who work for him and for the company he owns – be reinstated in the BCCI. 

Like I said – such a dude. 

Does anyone remember the name Prasanna Kannan? Of course you don’t – in this era of instant sensation, who can be bothered with even the recent past? 

As aide memoire, I’m quoting (with mild edits) from my own post, dated January 20, 2011:

A story that merits attention slipped under the collective radar. Remember when a Parliamentary Committee decided to question the BCCI honchos about foreign exchange violations and other skulduggery? Questions were asked about the source of funding of some IPL teams, and also about various foreign exchange transactions relating to the IPL edition held in South Africa.

The BCCI’s defense was the classic SODDIT (Some Other Dude Did It). And the sod they said did it was  Lalit Modi. (This move prompted Revenue Secretary Sunil Mitra to inform the Yashwant Sinha-led committee that for all legal and tax purposes, the IPL was a subset of the BCCI and that therefore the BCCI was responsible for any and all decisions taken by the IPL).

Turns out, even such distinctions are unnecessary. While we were distracted with the national team selection and the SA ODI, CNN-IBN broke a story that received surprisingly little attention in the media. This one.

Never mind that the source of our very own mini-wikileaks is fairly obvious, what the released documents (Here’s the cache) indicate is fairly obvious: N Srinivasan’s (Earlier post: The Cat in the Hats) fingerprints are all over the thing.

#BCCI President Shashank Manohar was formally authorized to take, on behalf of the BCCI, the final decision on the venue.

#The payment process for the SA edition of the IPL was detailed by N Srinivasan, who signed the agreement with CSA.

#N Srinivasan approved, and signed off on, all payments, transfers of funds, etc.

An under-reported story is the extent to which N Srinivasan’s insidious control over the Board extends. (For example: An India Cements employee is chairman of the national selectors — in fact, the first chairman after a rule change that ensured that the selection committee would not be changed after each board election — and also brand ambassador of the franchise that is owned by India Cements. A sports management agency owned by the CSK skipper represents, among others, India Cements. And so on. Tug on any thread you see before you, and it unravels endlessly.)

In continuation of that theme, consider this clip:

Every case for approval was made by Prasanna Kanan who was the CFO of IPL and otherwise an India Cements employee seconded to BCCI. He reported all expenses to N Srinivasan who approved them. No money was paid except after go ahead by N Srinivasan who controlled the entire expenses.

That is to say, the Chief Financial Officer in “Modi’s IPL” was an India Cements employee “seconded to” the BCCI.

Srinivasan wants the Supreme Court to reinstate Prasanna Kannan. In other words, Srinivasan isn’t satisfied with the control he already has over the board – he wants to go back in time, to the halcyon days when his employee was controlling the board’s finances.

And it is not just one employee. As per Srinivasan himself – he wants the court to reinstate India Cements officials, plural, in sub-committees, plural. 

Such. A. Dude!

(Image courtesy livemint.com)

I’m guessing the hardest thing to do when you stumble is to recover your balance and gracefully move on? Which, among other things, includes refraining from cover-your-ass statements so disingenuous, it only draws additional attention to the initial...
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I’m guessing the hardest thing to do when you stumble is to recover your balance and gracefully move on? Which, among other things, includes refraining from cover-your-ass statements so disingenuous, it only draws additional attention to the initial stumble?

Should a man against whom charges of rape (or other serious crimes, for that matter) be invited onto public forums? I think there is an emotional answer – fuck, no! – that stems from an individual’s instinctive revulsion at some acts.  There is also a cold-blooded, pragmatic answer – why not? – that is predicated on the bedrock presumption of ‘innocent until proven otherwise’.

Whichever way you swing, the Times LitFest – and Bachi Karkaria – could hardly have mismanaged this worse if they had spent months planning a monumental screw-up.

First up, whose “clever” idea was it to dust off Tejpal and trot him out on a panel just now? Is it because you think there is such a dearth of capable speakers in the literary world that you had to interrupt the poor fellow’s “penance that lacerates”? Is it that someone thought Tejpal’s name in lights would add to the drawing power of the event? Or is it just someone’s idea of being oh-so-clever – look, we got Tejpal, who is facing charges of misusing his position to molest a junior colleague, on a panel to speak of “Tyranny of Power”, tee-hee, ain’t I witty?

Seriously – what was the thought behind the original idea to extend the invite?

Having invited Tejpal and publicized his presence, the organizers really had only one option: to stick to their guns, not spike it themselves. The official stance could have been (and briefly was): We are not entitled to sit in judgment over Tejpal’s guilt or innocence; law mandates that every person not actually convicted of crime be treated as if he were innocent; our invitation was not a reflection of our stance on the rape accusation… you know the drill.

I believe the technical term is 'courage of your conviction’.

Or you could figure that the negative response was hurting an event you believed in and wanted to make successful – in which case, you could simply say: We respect the public sentiment and have decided to rescind the invitation to Mr Tejpal, the “horny protagonist” of a recent rape investigation and charge-sheet.

But to actually say 'Oh, we don’t care if Tejpal misused his position and raped a female colleague, we don’t care what you jokers out there think of us inviting him, we just don’t need you nattering on and on about it when you should be nattering on and on about what a wonderful event we are putting together…’

Really, Bachi? 

Talk of gaffing your mouth with both feet. At once.

In passing, for me this is another #memo-to-self: On the internet, as never before, it is impossible to walk back your words. So: makes far more sense to pause before hitting the “post” button; even better to fine-tune that filter between mind and mouth.

On June 13, 1948, a young girl walked into a shop to steal a five-cent notebook. She didn’t need the notebook; she didn’t need to steal – she only wanted to belong, and this was a rite of entry for the group she longed to be part of. So Sally stole,...
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On June 13, 1948, a young girl walked into a shop to steal a five-cent notebook. She didn’t need the notebook; she didn’t need to steal – she only wanted to belong, and this was a rite of entry for the group she longed to be part of.

So Sally stole, for the first time in her life. She was caught. Then her real nightmare began.

It’s a gripping, chilling story – but that is not all Sally Horner is. Read:

The Real Lolita

“ SEVERAL YEARS AGO I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory,...
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SEVERAL YEARS AGO I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.

Read: The Secret Life of Passwords

“ The Girl At The Window ” I’d seen this image earlier, when Arati Kumar-Rao first shot it. A while ago, while browsing Instagram, I came across it again – via a post on the official IG blog. The blog’s intent is to find and spotlight...
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The Girl At The Window

I’d seen this image earlier, when Arati Kumar-Rao first shot it. A while ago, while browsing Instagram, I came across it again – via a post on the official IG blog.

The blog’s intent is to find and spotlight photo-journalists producing world class work. That Arati featured this week doesn’t surprise me – she is a good friend, but she is also one of the best with a camera I’ve ever come across.

What made me do a double take is the stats off to one side of the post: 366,000 likes in 23 hours at the time of writing this.

Her open-ended project on rivers – River Diaries, focussed now on the Brahmaputra and surroundings – is a visually stunning, always insightful, often wrenching narrative. She tells Instagram:

“Sometimes, the river is not what devastates areas,” she explains, “It is what we do to a river that does.”

Here is a ‘director’s cut’ of her email exchange with Instagram, reproduced with her permission:

I’ve grown up in Bombay (Mumbai) and wandered a bunch since. I spent a decade in Arizona, getting my second and third masters degrees - in instruction design and international business, and then worked in Intel Corp. doing strategic marketing and market research.

After working in Arizona for eight years, I moved back to India. Still with Intel, I researched consumer technology buying behavior in the Asia-Pacific region, which allowed me to learn quite a bit about how technology adoption varied in different cultures and sub-cultures.  It was a most interesting time to be working in Asia. 

On what came first, writing or photography:

I cannot separate the two in my mind. For me storytelling has always been about both writing and photography. They compliment each other and, in the work I do, I find it necessary to use words as situations and issues are complex. 

On why she calls herself an “environmental biographer” on her Instagram profile: 

I find myself writing and shooting longform about environmental issues – mainly people within landscapes, negotiating changes that come to them from without. My work is biographical in nature, as most of these are explored over seasons and, sometimes, years.   

On her River Diaries project: 

I have had an idea in my head since I graduated college: to traverse river systems, documenting life from source to sea. Rivers. They sustain hundreds of millions of people around the world and are home to a hundred thousand creatures. What we do to a river, however, changes this. We dam it, divert it, squeeze it, pollute it, restrain it, mine its bed, gouge out its banks, pluck trees, dyke it, siphon it, dredge it, and sometimes suck these veins of a land dry.  

This has direct social and ecological effects. River Diaries is a long-term series that follows one river: the Brahmaputra, documenting the significant changes coming to it. Sometimes, the river is not what devastates areas; it is what we do to a river that does.   

On why she uses composite images, which is unusual in documentary/journalistic practice:

This was born in Instagram! I was intrigued by the #doubleexposure posts I was seeing and wanted to see how I could use such composites to illustrate issues, have people mull over them. I began to composite images taken within a certain radius to see if they could tell the story in another way. The responses have been very encouraging.  

Of course, I label these very specifically. 

On her Instagram feed:

I see Instagram as an excellent medium for storytelling. A large part of my photography in River Diaries happens on the iPhone and often I tell stories from location, which allows me to take people along. I find that engagement invaluable in getting people involved in the issues and stories that I think are grossly underreported. 

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