MY HEROS OF 2022….Arvind Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi,Ravish Kumar, Kanhaiya Kumar, all of whom are not afraid to speak up their mind and call a spade a spade!
AMIDST all the merriment of saying goodbye to the old year I have no qualms saying it was a horrid year for the people of this country. The last three years plus in continuity have been increasingly nightmarish for media people too, especially opposition media which had to grow up learning that there is another equally important other side to the coin of life – which is sought to be hidden by the utopian powers that be. Bullied down, cowed down, silenced, burnt down, killed by the imposition of economic hardships by a skinflint government with royal pretensions.
If you’re asking me, my dears, 2022 was a dismal year, a no brainer. Those who stood up for their fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Constitution of India have taken a beating, conscience has taken a beating, the right to tell the truth — not your truth, my truth, but the unvarnished truth backed by statistics, visuals, see through media real and fake, counter-fake and counterfeit…at the cost of freedom and consequently health, has been at best a compromise and at worst steadily downhill. The anxiety and stress to live with dignity grows and dies a painful death.
More and more scared people want to sit on the fence or just believe that they should be on the winning side be it good, bad or ugly and by hook or by crook! The amount of virulent hate on social media is ominous, social media is like a window, a mirror show-casing vanity, indifference, ignorance, quick petty judgements and whatever else that is demeaning and demolishing…yet the Better India stories shine up like 24-carat gold and on these crumbs many of us live and hope that the nightmare will not get worse but better sooner rather than later.
GOOD governance is everything and I am not for religious bigotry although I do understand the sins of omission and commission of the history of this sub-continent created by various colonial powers coming in waves of migration to suppress those already there before them, labelling them as kafir, godless, wild, “man-animals” to be domesticated, harnessed, exploited, converted closer to heart’s desire in the name of presumptuous religious beliefs.
I like to think most of have outgrown much of the evils of the old world with the new world’s globalisation and search and spread of positive thinking for a better future — for the world as well as the good earth upon which human beings aristocratic and plebeian have flourished and vanished with the winds of time.
OVER the Christmas-New Year weekend while I was visiting with one of my old hometowns, Bombay which is now Mumbai, I was thinking of people I will applaud and stand up for!
First on my list is journalist of the underdog media, Rajan Narayan in Goa; then Ravish Kumar, another media person; politician of a better kind Arvind Kejriwal; politician with promises to live up to Rahul Gandhi; the Trinamool Congress Member of Lok Sabha Mahua Moitra and yes, even West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata-didi for their feisty spirit in speaking up against petty and not so petty injustices; there is also the voice of sanity in Parliament Supriya Sule, daughter of the veteran politician Sharad Pawar, a three-time Member of Parliament…there are many more languishing in jail for the courage to have contrary views.
Life is not homogenous and can never be in a democracy. This is a country being torn apart anew with a toxic hate which has no justification in our times when the very state of the good earth is now at stake, depending on how sustainable we as the premier species can be? Our gross consumerism does not auger well for sustainable lifestyles which defeat us as we merrily roll down the path of perdition.
COMING to my people of honour I will stand up for the first on my list—Rajan Narayan, who pays the price to this day for coming out to Goa in the early 1980s to edit a newspaper with a Portuguese social pedigree, turning it around over 20 years of single-minded devotion into a Goa’ first investigative daily, getting beaten up severely by then Speaker Dayanand Narvekar’s supari gangsters on September 16, 1989 and no one, least of all his employer thought the criminals should be brought to book and put away in jail and Rajan Narayan compensated. In and out of hospitals, Rajan Narayan’s never say die indomitable spirit continues to survive through ups and downs.
When I met him as the editor of the OHeraldo in the 80s and 90s during visits to Goa he was living in a horrible basement flat, servant’s quarters provided by his proprietor somewhere along the line, a Dona Paula basement flat which became quite famous with politicians and all manner of sundry people calling on him for this or that favour. Yes, the late chief minister of Goa, Manohar Parrikar, respected Rajan Narayan enough to come first to his basement flat for his blessings after he was elected chief minister and the BJP came to power for the first time in Goa…so much water under the bridge and the same Manohar Parrikar was responsible for his quitting “OHeraldo” one fine day when proprietor Raul Fernandes told him he may not carry a small report on the legal notice sent out to all media offices warning them against publishing anything untoward about the chief minister’s family (making media history actually).
It was the final straw with Rajan Narayan saying goodbye to a newspaper he had nursed with passion, and of course forgotten to make money for himself, he walked out with practically nothing in his pockets but his pride intact. Sorry, nobody gave him a farewell party. There are times I wish the late Mario de Miranda had not invited Rajan Narayan to come to Goa to edit the “OHeraldo, it turned out to be more of a punishment posting and for which he continues to pay the price.
To think that for Catholic Goa the name of Rajan Narayan counted for something once upon a time and yet the tag of being a “baile” or an “outsider” follows him around after more than 40 years of good times, bad times in Goa. His own political weekly “The Goan Observer” flourished for some 15 years and made a dent in the image of growing BJP politics in Goa and then political vendetta set in and the beginning of political vindictiveness began to take its toll on a man from the old school of journalism which believed in the cardinal principle of never sleeping with the government of the day, any government of the day.
I will stand up for Aam Aadmi party convenor and Ramon Magsaysay Award-winner Arvind Kejriwal (chief minister extraordinary of capital city Delhi) for he has stood up against all odds steadfastly, committed to giving the public better infrastructure to be happy; in good health and in bad health I have seen him trying to fulfil his electoral promises, he commands respect wherever he goes at home or abroad.
I will stand for Rahul Gandhi for taking on an increasingly loot-maar sarkar high on GST revenue at the cost of bleeding its own people; his brave Bharat Jodo yatra across the Indian states has already clocked 3,000 km in a 100 days and continues up to Kashmir for the larger cause of unity in diversity and bringing out the better India amongst the people, instead of communal hatred and divisions rooted in religious bigotry in the name of a Hindutva – something even most Hindus don’t understand!
I will stand up for Ravish Kumar for he is such a straight and fine, poetic journalist who makes the Hindi language come alive with the poetry of his on the dot observations and review of our life and times and the sins of omission and commission of the ruling government of the day. How he has been hounded out of a right to live in pursuit of the cardinal principal of media – to speak the truth even if it is the bitter truth, when a political system cannot tolerate one journalist because he disagrees with a government’s point of view – dal mein kuch kaala hona hi chahiye!
I will stand up for the fiery eloquence of West Bengal’s Mahua Moitra as also West Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banarjee—both of whom have the guts to speak up exposing the politics of lies, aggrandisement and wasteful ambitious expenditure. I will stand up for the farmers, market vendors and the common working people of this country struggling to come to terms with digital technology and staying alive in small ways to survive a government high on show-off and mercenary values worthy of Shylock in William Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice.”
This government tells its people to eat bread if they cannot afford cake, keep the cake for the sarkari babulog seeking power, profit and control and living sleazy, venereal lives of decay and pulchritude! On that note it’s avjo, poiteverem, selamat datang, au revoir, arrivedecci hasta la vista and vachun yeta here for now.
—Mme Butterfly