Will you find a Kuru nowadays? No, is the likely answer. Editors, sad to say, tend to be almost uniformly useless. It is left to the greater community of journalists to provide the context, the space, the encouragement, and the means. The encouragement, context and professional support has perforce now to come from within. This working alternative has not only become desirable, it has become imperative for for the non-sarkari journalists.
The problem is a systemic one today; there should have been manuals passed on, but system administrators have deleted them. Where binaries perish, we must turn to mnemonics. There was a time when some of us in The Sunday Observer successfully ran a tactical media counter-insurgency within the framework.
An immediate provocation at the time was a faux editorial regime presided over by an imposter named Pritish Nandy. Every Friday (dak edition) and every Saturday (city edition) we would have to redefine and re-take our territory and remind the insurgents that they had no place in it. It was hard work — outright threats and go-slows, files full of protest notes and minutes of meetings, and the halting evolution of a code that cut across the barriers that traditionally define a functioning news organism. I think it worked well at the time — the guerrillas who did this are still here.
Our questions were basic — why can sanitation not be "sold"? Why can education not be? Labour not be? Health not be? The elderly not be? That this not only assumes but reflects the dreadful significance of "sold" indicates why we still need guerrillas in the newsroom. These guerrillas, if they still exist and can still be drafted, will come up against some formidable mantras. "All things are more or less of equal import: all are only daily" is one. If you ask one of the system administrators she will reply: "All data are equal, but some are more equal than others."
That is why, we are reminded by those who give the system administrators their wages, the media have produced their own heroines and myths, which can compete with the traditional ones and moreover happily embroider over them. I was once advised that "journalism asks us to invest in the stock-market of momentary sensation". After such sexualist reduction, what forgiveness?
The difficulty lies in the accepted impermanence of our art, our skill, and the relentless transformation of today's news feature into tomorrow's newsprint into the day after tomorrow's wrapping paper for pakodas. The media that we construct (from the point of view of the consumer, and the brokers who interpose themselves between writer and audience) offers titillating speculations on danger, scandal, death, nightmare, opportunity.
Like a television talk-show host tripping loquaciously on industrial-strength amphetamines, it rattles noisily on, uncaring of the quiet interjections about sanitation, infant mortality, unreported police atrocities, tribal communities flooded out of their homes. And that is so both in an India that has reclaimed 'aparanta' without caring to know the topography of Goa, as it is in the desolate urban scapes that seek to define the middle classes who — reliable sources say — are the new India that seeks to spend.
The rules of the game have changed and we do need a new set of guerrillas. Newsroom disobedience is not what it used to be (is it at all what it was?). Who is willing to explore the new paradigm? It is so easy to stay in the bunker of assurances. No conclusions, no certainty; only performance analyses, management matrices, and practical wagers. We really do need a bunch of newsroom narkasurs here.
Can one seek for and hope for such a dimension in Goa? Will 'aparanta' provide it? Not readily. Early in my apprenticeship as a correspondent in Goa I ran into the local brand of sarkari thought. It was one of those endless afternoons in the old press room, the one in the corner of the Idalcao. A minion from one of the chambers above clattered in through the swing doors and muttered something. He was half asleep and so were the occupants of the press room, those who were not wrestling with the typewriters.
We all streamed out, following the minion. Through the wooden security gate we filed, the one that is supposed to detect the presence of suspicious metal objects on one's person, and up the stairs we climbed. Across a landing whose timbers had been scuffed shiny by the passage of tired footwear, then down a verandah over which hung tattered pieces of plastic in an ugly and half-hearted attempt to keep out the rain. And finally into some functionary's room.