When the media mediates In the name of neutrality…

Before I venture into writing about the death of the Pricol HR manager at the hands of workers of the same firm, let me qualify that I am against any kind of violence- unorganised or organised; orchestrated by the state or by individuals. I condemn violence. However, when I read the reports of the incident in the various newspapers, I got the feeling that the ‘lumpen proletariat’ killed an innocent person without any provocation. More than the company, the newspapers painstakingly explained the gory incident and that it happened without any provocation; the slain Roy George was too good; understood the workers and interacted with them individually about their problems. Even if he was not, the murder was not justified.

This is the second incident in India, in recent times. The first one happened in an Italy based MNC located in Noida almost a year back.

Well. If you dig a little bit further, the other side of the story will also appear. It seems that the company Pricol was not very worker-friendly. Apart from transferring many workers to Uttarakhand, it has also laid off many workers; some of them had worked for more than 20 years in the company; and at least half that number of years left before they retired. They were agitating for the last 2 years against the company hiring contract labour.

Thanks to the liberalisation and globalisation, many workers have either lost their job or are having to work as contract labourers; the principle of hire and fire at will has been made easy.

While my sympathies are with the bereaved family, my thoughts are with the workers who were arbitrarily laid off. To find another job immediately is a grim probability as the job market is messy. What will happen to their families? Will they be able to meet with their basic needs? What will happen to the education of their children, perhaps the first generation learners in those families?

I know the case of a worker whose case is being fought by Krishna in the labour court. He was thrown out of his job in 1989; 20 years ago and still fighting against the management and his case is being shunted from one court to another all these years. All these to get his job or legitimate compensation. The case is still on; from the labour court to the Madras High Court and now back to the labour court. God only knows as to how long it will take for him to get his money. Hopefully, he may get it in his own life time. I felt the trauma of the worker.

Let us look in to the other side of the story too. A negotiation, on equal footing with the workers, not victimisation, is the solution. How much I wish the media is neutral than taking the side of the rich. Memories of how the media focussed so much on the Taj Hotel and the Oberoi Towers and so little or even nothing was said about those who perished at the Mumbai Central station are fresh in my mind even now.

An interview with poet Salma --a Malayalam version of this was published in Janashakthi (And thanks Cheri for the quick translation; it saved my time)

You have said that your childhood experiences inspired you to write poetry. What were those?
I was born into an orthodox Muslim family in Thuvarankurichi in Trichy district, facing the restrictions imposed on a girl with such an upbringing. I could study only till the ninth standard. The circumstances under which I had to leave school hurt me a lot; I had to pay a heavy price for a small incident at an age when I was unaware of the discrimination between boys and girls. As a child, I was crazy about movies. Three of my girl friends and I once bunked classes and went to a small theatre near my house, without knowing which film was being screened. We found ourselves the only girls in the theatre which was playing the Malayalam movie "avalude ravukal(Her nights)". My brother too was there amongst the audience. Despite ourselves, my friends and I managed to remain in the theatre till the end of the movie. But by this time, the news had travelled home and I was beaten when I returned. More than the physical pain, it was a blow to my heart. No one even scolded my brother. When I protested, I was told: YOU ARE A GIRL, HE IS A BOY.
With that, my studies were discontinued.
When did you begin writing poems?
After my studies ended, I was in a kind of house arrest for some ten years. I was not allowed to talk to boys and rarely ventured outside. Reading was the only means I had to escape this loneliness. I would read whatever I could. I grovelled before my brother for him to bring me books from the village library. I used to be a regular at that library in the days before I left school. It was in these lonely years that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky entered my life. Reading broadened my intellectual horizons and my imagination. That is how, at the age of 16, I began writing poems. My poems, under my own name-Rajathi, were published in magazines like Kalachuvadu.
What were the repercussions of you being published?
In the little hamlet that I lived in, the poems kicked up a storm. How a Muslim girl could dare to write such things, people asked. My marriage had been fixed at a very young age, but with these problems, my engagement was almost broken off. After much debate and discussions, the elders decided: she is not to write after her marriage. With my marriage, the restrictions on me increased manifold, do not write, do not read, it went to that extent. No one understood me in that house. This was how Salma was born. I wrote surreptitiously, using the name Salma. No one in my house or my village knew of it. I would not even put my address when I sent my poems for publication.
Who encouraged you to write?
Senior writers like Sundara Ramaswami, who received my poems for journals like Kalachuvadu, encouraged me.
When did the world next hear of Salma?
The panchayat elections in Thuvarankurichi paved the way for that. The president's post was reserved for women. My family decided to put me up as a candidate as a proxy for my husband. Selfishly, they thought they would control the post through me. But when I won the election, I began taking an active interest in panchayat affairs. I had to travel a lot for work, and had to meet officials like the collector. This made me shed my insecurities and my fear of the outside world. Thus the world began to know of Rajati, of Salma. In the beginning, my husband had problems with me. But since I was in the habit of discussing panchayat affairs with my husband, we solved our issues.
Why do you continue to write, even at times you are engaged otherwise?
As I said, it was the pain and loneliness of my teenage years that got me writing. When I freely write what is on my mind, it is as if I am sharing my sorrows and pain with someone. That was what made me a writer. My emotional state must have been too intense to share with someone else. So writing is the only potion
What do you think is the strength of your writing?
It is for readers to decide on the strength of my writing and where it lies. For me, it is in the restrictions imposed on me as a girl, more so on a girl from an orthodox Muslim family. I have a feminist perspective. My pain and my problems are not unique; they are universally experience by most women.
How do you view Malayalam literature?
Malayalam has a lot of good writers, many of whom I have read in Tamil translations. My favourite Malayalam writer is Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. It may be that I relate to his works more than others', being a Muslim woman. I enjoy Kamala Das' poems very much; her poems reflect a woman's strength. I also like Zachariah.
How do you carry along your busy public life along with your writing?
I have been neglecting my writing for some time now, it is true, but I enjoy my work as the chairperson of the social welfare board. I can help many suffering people, especially women and children, and I am confident this experience with enrich my writing.

The 99999 Campaign

IT was Exnora’s campaign -99999 (09-09-09-9PM-9 minutes) for switching off lights at 9PM; for 9 minutes. To show that we do care for the environment and we would like to contribute to prevent global warning. Indeed it was a good idea in times of the threat of global warming hanging over our heads; like the proverbial Damocles sword. The media had publicized this campaign quite a bit. And we participated in that campaign religiously. Sharp nine, we switched off all the lights; including the wet grinder which was running. From the terrace we looked towards the city to see the magic. How many environmentally conscious middle class and upper middle class people were there doing the same? To our dismay, we found lights on everywhere in our neighbourhood. The homes everywhere were brightly lit up with light peeping out through the windows of those airconditioned rooms! Of course, there were few people who switched off their lights; and the flat complex where the faculty and staff of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences reside were dark during that nine minutes. Thank God! There are still some people who care for the environment. And the day after, we were out at 5 AM; we were driving to the central station to pick up Appa and Amma and the Satyamurti Bhawan, the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee’s headquarters off Mount Road was illuminated with hundreds of bulbs. The occasion was that of the visit by the charming prince Rahul Gandhi to some parts of Tamil Nadu; mind you not in Chennai). So they had decided to light up the whole building. Besides this, hundreds of flexi boards were on display- the young Gandhi, sister Gandhi and mother Gandhi and the at the bottom, the photo of the chotta local leader at the feet of THE family. I am not totally disheartened – What do you expect of the politicians and political parties otherwise. I still prefer to believe that we and others who switched off the lights for nine minutes made a small difference. And I shall continue to do it where it matters. We don’t have to wait for a catastrophe to happen to amend ourselves. Do we?

Newspapers carried the photo of the Ripon building which is housing the Chennai corporation without lights and I appreciate their move.

YS RAJASEKHARA REDDY and others

Our politicians are benevolent kings. History will definitely write about them. Like we learnt by rote that how emperor Ashoka built roads and planted trees etc, or how Akbar built Fatheh pur Sikri and so on in our school days, the generations to come will end up reading by rote (thanks to our education system) how 21st century kings built flyovers, smart cities, SEZs and their children followed suit. When YS Rajasekhara Reddy, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh and the major money spinner of the Congress died in a helicopter crash (while he was on his way to visit his subjects in a village), no wonder, it made headlines for a few days and newspapers taking the role of investigation agencies (a new trend in journalism) and looking into the crash from all ‘angles’. They did give expert opinion on the weather conditions, condition of the chopper; compared it with the other choppers and more importantly giving a chronology of deaths in air crashes. Well. My television is not connected to any cable now and hence lost out on the theatrics.

We, Indians are the most courteous people in the planet so we do not talk about the dark sides of a person after his death. So there were condolence messages about what the nation lost with his death- a vibrant, pro poor politician, etc, etc, they conspicuously buried his detrimental relationship with mining mafia in the state and many such things. One of those days, the news papers also carried a four line report that 6 more farmers committed suicide in the Vidarbha region. They added to the statistics of 136 suicides in the last one year due to the debt trap. Of course it does not have a news value; hence it would not make news. After all they do not belong to the ruling class; they are the subjects. And the fact that the peasants happen to be the people who feed and clothe the nation would not make any difference. Nor are they celebrities.

WOW! NATO did it again!

NATO admitted that its air strike in the northern province of Kunduz killed and injured many civilians. It was ‘just’ a mistake as they thought there were no civilians in that area. The strike was reportedly ordered by a German commander after Taliban militant hijacked two fuel trucks on a NATO supply route from Tajikistan. Of course, German chancellor Angela Merkel ‘deeply regretted’ the loss of civilians in the attack. I am sure God may take pity on Angela’s deep regret and give back lives to those innocent victims. This International Security Assistant Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan think that they are doing a great service to the nation as well for the humanity as they are saving the planet from Islamic terrorism. They had had their share of cleaning up in Iraq and in the process we have also come to know what some of the soldiers were doing. You act as a world police man and enter anybody’s b ack yard and fcuk up sovereign nations in the name of democracy. Life is precious everywhere – whether the lives of the people who got killed on 11 September or the lives of the people doomed in the Hiroshima & Nagasaki or the people perished in Vietnam or Palestine or the civil war victims in Sri lanka or the innocent civilians killed in the indiscriminate bombing in Afghanistan. Explosives burn you skin irrespective of its colour. That gives the worst memories to the one who has to live with the injuries and agonies about the beloved ones who died. The famous bible quote “for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword". This is relevant to the good terrorists and bad terrorists.