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Patrakar types

Swaminarayan Temple authorities always treat women this way

Yogi auditorium next to Dadar’s Swaminarayan Temple always asks women to sit a few rows behind men. A personal account.
by Vrushali Lad | editor@themetrognome.in

I learnt with dismay, but not with surprise, of a woman journalist being asked to vacate her front row seat at the auditorium adjoining the Swaminarayan Temple at Dadar. She was there as an invited mediaperson to cover a religious function to honour Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis in the wake of the beef ban in the State.

I know the journalist for years now, and first learnt of the incident on her Twitter feed. She was understandably furious over being asked to sit ‘three rows behind’ – women are not allowed to sit in these rows and must take a seat in the rows behind. After arguing with the authorities and even speaking about it to a senior BJP leader, she finally left the auditorium.

The same thing happened a couple of years ago.

An awards function to honour Gujarati achievers

It was at the same venue a couple of years ago that I first learnt of this practice. My husband, a Gujarati by birth, was to be awarded for his services to journalism. He was part of a group of other Gujarati awardees from various fields – entertainment, education, law, civil rights. I had accompanied my husband and some of our family members to the event, and I remember looking through the invite which had pictures of the other awardees. Only one of them was a woman – a young pilot with a commercial airline, possibly the first from the community.

When we got there, the function had already started but the auditorium was not full. When we made our way to the front seats, I was promptly stopped by two young men, who told me to sit anywhere provided it was 10 rows away from the stage. Perplexed, I assumed that the front rows were reserved for families of the organisers, which normally happens. We sat behind and awaited the prize distribution.

At one point, all the awardees were asked to take their seats on the stage, and my husband joined the others. But there was no sign of the woman pilot. I wondered if she was going to show up at all, then decided she must be at work and somebody else would take her award for her.

Then the chief guests for the awards function, two sadhu brahmachari types, were brought on the stage and a lot of feet-touching and speech-making followed. Finally, the awardees’ names began to be called out. When the pilot’s name was announced, there was a flurry of activity at the far end of one of the middle rows of the auditorium – everyone kept craning their necks and looking at a smiling woman who had just stood up. With horror, I saw that it was the woman pilot.

A little questioning finally helped me understand – the woman had not been allowed to take her place on the stage with the other male awardees, had not been allowed to sit in any seat in the first 10 rows, and what was worse, she was given her award at her seat in the audience by two other men from the organising committee, not by the sadhu chief guests. All of this because ‘women cannot be in physical proximity of a brahmachari‘.

On the stage, I saw my husband looking mutinous. When his name was called, he took his award and left without acknowledging the chief guests. Later he kicked himself for accepting the award in the first place.

I just looked across at the woman pilot – the young achiever for whom the sky was literally not the limit, was completely okay with being treated this way by a bunch of religious nobodies who, in this day and age, hold on to some archaic views on women in the guise of religious sanctity. What would compel an independent, successful woman to accept an award at a venue that routinely makes women sit in the back rows because ‘that is the rule here’? Didn’t she feel the slightest humiliation at being the only one to not be seated on stage with her contemporaries, on account of her gender?

I still wonder at her. And I’m never going back to that auditorium again.

What do you think of yesterday’s incident with the woman journalist at the CM’s function? Tell us in the comments section below.

(Pictures courtesy www.mapsofindia.com. Image is a file picture)

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Patrakar types

“You paid media dogs!”

It is the age of the instant response – and the age of the crudest name-calling against mediapersons and celebrities. We are so quick to take offence at the media commenting on things that affect us, that we resort to shooting the messenger instead of debating the message.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Two days ago, we ran a story on how traders in Thane and Pune had all but called off their agitation against the LBT after Sharad Pawar’s intervention, and how traders in Mumbai were about to follow suit. See the story here.

We’d got quotes from Viren Shah, President of the FRTWA, who was part of the delegation that met Sharad Pawar on Sunday at the latter’s residence. We had excerpts from the press note that the FRTWA later issued, outlining the points discussed. Viren Shah even went on record to say that, “The FRTWA is against the LBT but our retailers will not down shutters. Business will go on as usual while the protest is on.” The story went live on Sunday evening, and Monday’s newspapers carried the same news with varying degrees of detail.

But on Twitter, at least five tweeters called us several names, the substance of their remarks being that we, like other media outlets in the country, were “paid media dogs” who were bribed by the Congress to spread rumours. “Pls do not spread rumours. Do u have a signed letter to confirm this?” asked one, the mildest of the lot, while another tweeted, “chal jhota, congress ne paisa diya hai kya rumours felane ka? #PAIDMEDIA #LBT” with an entertaining cartoon showing the Congress scamming everyone in sight. A little digging by our social media team found that this latter guy had been on a name-calling spree all afternoon, tweeting at every mediaperson on Twitter and calling them all #PAIDMEDIA. Some of these luminaries included journalists Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt.

I wonder if people really understand what this ‘paid media’ thing really is, though all and sundry use this phrase as freely as they use public streets as their personal dustbin. I always imagine this paid media business to be a situation where somebody comes to a media office with bags of money, plonks them on the editor’s desk and says, “There, I paid you. Now write nice things about me.”

I’m not saying things don’t necessarily pan out like that, either.

In recent times, we’ve been seeing a growing tendency in the country to take offence at everything. And, not content to merely take offence, we’re outraging all day about things that, in hindsight, were meant as a joke, albeit a not so funny one. Some of us are so outraged, we form packs of similarly-outraged persons and attack the offender all day.

Recently, a sarcastic tweet from stand-up comic Rohan Joshi, who was responding to a self-proclaimed feminist who’d accused him of being a male chauvinist, took up the Twitterati’s time for an entire day. And he wasn’t even being a chauvinist. A Firstpost.com article about how a new initiative to provide leftover food from one’s lunchbox to starving slum and street children was most likely a sham, prompted all and sundry to address the article’s writer with every possible swear word known to mankind, even as they jeered at his cynicism and asked how much money he’d been paid to write that piece.

And there’s no point responding, if you’re the writer of a particularly controversial piece, to such name-calling and trying to explain your point of view. Any such attempt only results in a bigger barrage of insults.

We didn’t know this a few years ago, safely insulated as we were in our print media offices and our TV channel stations, how much hatred there was out there. Then the media’s working changed, to the extent that every bit of news and information put out there is compatible on all forums, most significantly, the web. And the Internet doesn’t do a very good job protecting us from instant, biting feedback the way other media can. Sure, there are such things as comment moderation tools, but what does one do when an article also has Facebook-enabled comments? Who’s going to disable Facebook?

Does this hate stem from the genuine fury consumers feel at seemingly important issues not being covered by the news media? The LBT strike, for instance, is over 25 days old, but apart from snippets on how closed shops are inconveniencing the public, has there been an in-depth piece on the issue by the electronic media? Even on Sunday, as trader organisations decided to suspend hostilities for a few days, news channels continued screaming headlines about one more player arrested in the IPL spot-fixing scam. Not a single LBT-related story surfaced at all that evening.

Or could a part of this hate be attributed to the clout the big media players enjoy, of being able to function well despite its consumers not liking most of the content they put out there daily? In another business, for example, if people don’t like your product, you’re going to either take their feedback on board or shut shop. This doesn’t happen with say, The Times of India, which gets roundly criticised every single day for having more ads than news, or for biased reporting, or for peddling advertorials as news items. The TOI continues to function, and function well. Is that enough to make people so resentful that they start calling the TOI names and tell it to go to jump off a cliff?

Or is it as simple as a lack of manners, of good breeding? Sensible people, when debating a point, argue with the person’s point of view. They don’t tell the person to his face that he is a jackass, or worse. In my eyes, you have to be totally moronic to say a person is a prostitute who sleeps around with Congress politicians and writes against the BJP, when what you really wanted to say was that the writer’s views had hurt their own and they begged to differ. Say what you wanted to say, don’t get into needless side issues about a person’s parentage or background or tendency to take bribes. Apart from being moronic, it is an unnecessary exercise in wasting time when, instead of debating the message, we shoot the messenger over and over again. Tell people they are wrong, certainly, but remember that you don’t really have the right to do so. A point of view is never right or wrong; it may be contrary or controversial.

And besides, how brave would you be if you had to say half those things to the mediaperson’s face, and not from behind your computer or phone’s screen?

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so. 

(Pictures courtesy blogs.reuters.com, mag.bewakoof.com, pastorchrisowens.wordpress.com, www.sodahead.com)

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Security? Who’s that?

Fresh out of a serial bomb blast strike in Hyderabad, you’d think the police everywhere would wise up, right? Wrong.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the police are a bunch of dodos. What else could explain what I’m about to describe next? And, trust me, this has happened before as well.

A few days ago, I was looking for a Borivli-bound train at Churchgate station. If you’ve been to Churchgate station, you’ll know it is characterised by three things: its subway, its Wimpy restaurant right opposite the public restrooms, and the benches on which bored policemen and policewomen sit and chat with each other, occasionally taking down details and checking bags of random commuters.

It was to two of these policemen that a scared-looking young man, probably on his way home from work as well, ran up to, breathless with excitement. “Sahab, wahan ek bag pada hai! (Sir, there’s a bag lying there!),” he said, pointing in the direction of Platform 4. His face was flushed, and I noticed a tremble in his hands. “Please come with me,” he implored the two cops.

To his chagrin, the two cops merely glanced at each other sleepily. “Tu jayega ki main jaoon?” one asked the other. (I swear I am not kidding). As if by some tacit consent – one of them probably owed the other some small debt – the sleepier of the two rumbled to his feet. “Chalo,” he said to the young man.

I followed the two to see what would happen next. If there was an unidentified bag with a potential bomb in it, I wanted to witness the action.

The cop followed the young man, unhurried and supremely bored. The young man, meanwhile, raced ahead looking for the spot that he had seen the bag in. When he found it, his face lit up with the glow of achievement – he was, after all, rendering a great public service by pointing out unidentified baggage, which is what public service announcements exhort us commoners to do all the time.

The bag was finally found, and I confess my heart sank when I saw it. A black rucksack, placed next to a pillar, adjacent to Platform 4. It was bulky and could have held practically any kind of explosive. The young man pointed at it and backed away, eyes wide.

The cop, whose name should ideally figure in next year’s Gallantry Awards list, nonchalantly approached the bag, and I swear I am still not kidding – poked it with a finger, then pulled open a zipper and started rummaging through its contents.

The young man backed away, horror written all over his face. With a last look at the cop happily emptying the bag of its contents  (a few books, some loose papers, an ID card, stray stationery), he walked away and soon melted into the crowds. I wanted to stop him and tell him to not be horrified. Because I have seen cops do exactly the same thing every time a citizen points out suspicious baggage on railway platforms or on the streets or inside trains – they start by tapping the baggage with their lathis, then poke and prod with their fingers, then empty out its contents before pronouncing, “Kuchh nahin hai ismein.”

At the risk of sounding extremely uncharitable, if there ever is a time for a bomb to go off, that time is when a lazy, foolish policeman approaches suspicious baggage and starts poking it. Too bad we citizens are not empowered to call the bomb squad ourselves.

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so.

(Picture courtesy stockpicturesforeveryone.com. Image used for representational purpose only)

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Who have you ignored today?

The media that complains of a Government ignoring its citizens can’t really talk, since it deliberately, subtly ignores certain ‘others’.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Oh yes, the Government’s a bi**h. It doesn’t care about you, it doesn’t want to hear your views, it steadfastly ignores your protests and it sweeps every matter, however monumental, under the rug. It doesn’t care if you’re dead or alive, as long as you rally around and vote it back to power in 2014.

There has been a round of protestations against the severe (mis)handling of things by the Government with regards to the Delhi gang rape issue. The country’s newspapers and channels have gone all out in their criticism of the Government’s workings, and several media houses have launched campaigns for justice, organised self defence camps for women, dug out old compilations of rape statistics all over the country, and stepped up their coverage of every crime happening against women.

In the midst of this noisy reportage of the state of affairs in this supposedly rape-happy nation, the media continues to turn its back on those it has always turned its back on.

Since the New Year, there has been a huge bunch of people protesting at Azad Maidan, Mumbai. This group comprises displaced slum dwellers and those affected by the decisions of the State Government, a group that is on a relay fast till its demands are met and its leaders given adequate time for a meeting with the higher-ups. The group marched to Azad Maidan in huge numbers, prevented from advancing at several stages by cops, denied a meeting with the CM more than twice, but it still camped out at Azad Maidan, and is still there. Headed by fiery activist Medha Patkar, this group is gathering strength with each passing day, and at least 30 of its members, at any point of time, are on a fast.

Did the papers and channels cover this momentous protest?

Slum dwellers in Mumbai are an active lot, forever demonstrating against demolition drives and demanding meetings with authorities. As the population of slum dwellers in the city swells and they get official sanction as vote banks, what logic dictates that their issues, their demands, indeed their existence, must be denied by the media?

One reason for this studied silence, and this is a reason propagated by managements and editorial staff in almost every city media house these days, is that the media must cater primarily to those who read their papers or watch their channels. “We are catering to the South Bombay crowd,” my chief reporter told me during my orientation at a city tabloid years ago. “You are on the health beat. You should get news from private hospitals, not civic or government hospitals.”

I can agree in part, but are we journalists or middlemen for business houses? If we are one but not the other, why pretend otherwise?

This same arrogance was the reason why several media were slow to pick up the pulse of the Anna Hazare-led agitation for the Jan Lokpal Bill last year. It was an agitation led by a little villager, so what? But when the numbers began to align with the same man, the media pounced. Even yesterday, at the ongoing Azad Maidan agitation, the media deigned to cover the proceedings only when Anna Hazare landed at the spot to offer his support. And even then, the questions remained largely restricted to his views of the Delhi rape case. As journalist Javed Iqbal, who is covering the agitation tweeted yesterday, “Anna holds press conference. More media today than all the media I have seen @ demolition drives in past 3 yrs…And during press con, not a single question abt Rajiv Gandhi Awas Yojana, SRA scams, only questions about Delhi rape, irrigation scam & Anna’s anti-corruption campaign.”

In its bid to cater to the ‘upper’ classes of society, the media willingly ignores the poor and the marginalised, in fact those same people who are genuinely in need of the media’s help. It assumes that the poor are not reading the papers that the rich are buying. In demarcating readership thus, the media creates a clear ‘Us v/s Them’ divide, it sees development only in the building of glass pyramids and gorgeous townships for the elite, not in the housing of the city’s poor and the generation of employment for them. This divide further points at the poor being the enemies of development, and hence, the elite. This explains why you will see lengthy stories of new slums being recognised, of water connections being granted to certain slum pockets, but not much about deliberate irregularities committed by the builder lobby (or the advertising lobby). Several editors are known to address issues such as an entire area receiving muddy water only when the taps in their own homes spew smelly water and the domestic help (who stays in the neighbouring slum) tells them that she has clean water in her shanty.

In its flawed reasoning of what constitutes development, the media inadvertently and, sometimes subtly, blames the poor for whatever backward spirals our cities occasionally fall into. For rising crime. For increasing poverty. And to complete this pretty picture, it goes and ignores the poor some more, choosing instead to outrage for days on end over rubbish statements made by the country’s politicians and spiritual gurus. It’s almost like an entire class of people just does not exist in our collective conscience. The only times ‘they’ are receiving any coverage these days is if ‘they’ annoy ‘us’ in some way. And then all of us yell ourselves hoarse for being ignored.

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so. 

(Picture courtesy youthrelationships.org)

 

 

 

 

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Editors from hell

Could sub-editors please be more careful while editing articles? And giving away e-mail IDs and phone numbers is not cool.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Okay, first off, Mid Day. What were you thinking with this story of a boy arrested because he sent a photo cake to a girl he liked? Your story is eminently readable, but what was your sub-editor and page editor doing when they overlooked one important detail while checking the story: your paper printed the email ID the boy used to send the girl’s picture to the cakewallahs.

What’s worse, NDTV‘s website picked up your story, and printed it as is. No, not really as is, because NDTV changed the story’s headline to the puzzling: ‘In trouble for sending photo of cake to a girl’. A question to the NDTV sub-editor who changed the headline: Why did you change Mid Day‘s headline to read ‘photo of cake’ when you clearly meant ‘photo cake’? (An aside here is that the story would be doubly interesting if the boy had actually sent just a photo of the cake and not the cake itself. If somebody did that to me, I sure as hell would go to the cops.)

A few days ago, a Mumbai daily carried the headline, ‘Man shoots dead builder’. At first glance, it seemed like a case of extreme cruelty – I mean, why shoot a dead man? Another news item last month, about a man making prank calls to a woman at work, gave away the telephone number the calls were made from.

All of this makes the police’s precaution of hiding an accused’s face from public pretty redundant.

And it’s not just newspapers, it’s also television. A few days ago, IBN Lokmat did a charming special on Dev Anand’s birth anniversary, and showed the late actor’s songs and a few interviews of people who had worked with him. Each song was accompanied with the lyrics of that song being flashed across the screen. But when the song ‘Ek but banaoonga…’ from Asli Naqli started, IBN Lokmat’s lyrics read, ‘Ek putar banaoonga…’

A rather funny and insensitive editing error occurred recently with The Times of India placing an ad for Good Day right in the centre of a grim news story of a man killing his own kids (see pic on left). Other regular offences that editors commit are publishing pictures of minors, whether accused of a crime or the victims of one, without blurring their faces or changing their names, and often choosing to blur the faces of women and not men.

And it’s not just obvious elements like headlines and what goes in the main story that comprises editing goof-ups. Several times, reporters write an article with an obvious slant – for instance, political and crime stories, in which the writer’s biases clearly reflect in the article he/she has written – but editors checking those copies let the slant remain. The result is stories such as the Bidushi Dash Barde case, in which most reports blamed the dead woman’s husband without actually saying so, with phrases like, ‘He called her only once in the morning despite knowing that she was ill’, and ‘He was calm and answered all questions without breaking down.’

When I still worked with newspapers full time, I had an almost daily run-in with the paper’s editors. Once I waged a war against a particular sub-editor, who had not only mangled my story, but changed the headline I had given to the story with the sensitivity of a speeding truck. Imagine my chagrin when I read the papers the next morning and saw that the sub-editor had altered my headline ‘Youth win award for propagating gender equality’ to ‘Youth win award for fighting molestation’.

I used to think sub-editors and editors above them are people with eyes like hawks, and the brain capacity of an encyclopedia. At least, that’s how they used to be. Earlier ‘deskies’ were people who used to be reporters, and journalists who read constantly on a variety of subjects. This sharpened their intellect – an editor had to know more on a subject than a reporter – and gave their language an edge. And you couldn’t become a deskie just by applying for an editor’s job; you had to slog your way through the reporting ranks before being elevated to a desk position.

For the last five years or more, however, newspapers and channels are increasingly hiring desk personnel for their knowledge of English alone. Proofing of articles has now been reduced only to grammar and spell checks, which even the reporter himself can do on MS Word. And then there are new concepts such as Rewrite Desks that are operational in major newspapers – this Desk’s job is to go batshit crazy on articles that have not been written well. In other places, we are told, there are three levels of editing to pass through before the article is considered final.

And despite all these precautions, we still end up with gems like ‘Photo of cake’.

May be we should have a Corrective Measures Desk above the sub-editing desk…?

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so.

 (Feature image courtesy ipjtraining.com. Picture used for representational purpose only)

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Patrakar types

Palghar for President!

We’re glad Palghar is on the map, and for putting us all in our places through an innocent Facebook post.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

I am a little baffled. Since when did political parties log on to Facebook? And if they have been logging on, are their FBs different from ours? I ask because if I see a post I dislike or disagree with, I ignore it or say what I didn’t like about it. Just last week somebody posted a picture of Lady Gaga that I did not need to see. But my FB did not whisper to me to go the police against my friend for hurting my sentiments (and my eyes). May be that’s why I don’t understand politics – my FB wall is very lame.

What baffles me even more, and this is very patronising of me, is that it took Palghar, Thane district, Maharashtra, to put the issue of Internet checks and balances on the map. Little old smug city girl me has always believed that the country’s biggest movements would always originate from Mumbai or the other metros. Not that I’m complaining, of course – Palghar’s young ones haven’t exactly been treated well by the police and the political parties, what with two of them already arrested for posting content against the Shiv Sena, and a third in trouble for dissing Raj Thackeray on Facebook.

If I was a Palghar kid with access to Facebook, I would open several accounts and slang out every political party I know, just to see what happens. No, I am not about to do it, because I am not a Palghar kid (see what I did there?) I think I know what would happen – if you think intolerance towards criticism of their party or its chiefs is strictly a Shiv Sena or MNS thing, you’ve got another think coming.

I am very proud of Palghar. Palghar and its youngsters have shown us the way. In this day and age, it is not a mean achievement to have a Twitter hashtag created after your name, or to have people outrage over your arrest as they sip their coffee in their air-conditioned offices. The day the two girls were arrested, somebody created a fake Shaheen Dhada account as well.

Sure, some ignorant ones are still asking, “Hey, where IS Palghar?”, but they’re also ‘liking’ others’ call for support, aren’t they? And whether we remain unsure of Palghar’s geographical location or not, aren’t we all secretly thrilled that we can now write and post things with some impunity about the Party That Must Not Be Named, because we can cite those two girls every time somebody threatens us with arrest? Of course, we can’t keep shouting, “Shaheen Dhada! Rinu Srinivasan!” while a mob ransacks our office or clinic, but at least we now have something to shout out in our defence.

My vote of thanks goes to Palghar. For giving us a worthy event to include in this year’s list of exciting events. For shaking us out of our slumber, induced by some weird idea that nobody outside Mumbai has access to social media. For proving that the Shiv Sena, wherever it may be, is a delightfully predictable political party. And for its two young girls, for innocently saying the things that we were thinking but did not have the courage to think out loud for so long.

P.S.: Where is Palghar?

Vrushali Lad is a freelance journalist who has spent several years pitching story ideas to reluctant editors. Once, she even got hired while doing so.

(Picture courtesy jaimaharashtranews.com)

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