It all helped us pull on

My grandfather was an avid follower of the game. So were my father's peers. Since ours was one of the rare households with a television set, they would gather to watch matches. Those were the initiation ceremonies.

Shashtri's Audi is one of the earliest memories I have. Maybe the famous victory lap shown for several years to come is what actually I saw because in '85 I must have been too young to seriously appreciate such celebrations and rewards for individual cricketing brilliance. 

In 1992, I was aware that Pakistan had won the world cup, but the first tournament I actually watched was Hero Cup in 1993. The last over going from Kapil to Sachin was a brave decision but also symbolised what lay ahead for all of us.

By the 1996 world cup, I was mad about the game, playing for hours, worshipping Sachin like millions others. I skipped my intermediate exam, failed in the next attempt but couldn't shake the madness off. The arrival of Rahul, Saurav and VVS and later Sehwag provided more glue.

People talk of cricket and they talk of joy. Some say when Sachin scored, India slept well. Some found it a source of national integration when India won.

But for those torn between warring parents, suffering family feuds, fighting unemployment, the good results, though very few then, helped them pull on. Cricket also gave me a career.

I never covered cricket as a journalist, barring for a brief period in Ahmedabad. It helped me earn a living in a different way. I listened to AIR's running commentary that came alternatively in Hindi and English. Trying to make sense of the English bit was, perhaps, the toughest thing I then did. But I had to know the scores at all costs.

Later, developed a liking for Radio Pakistan, ABC and more classically produced BBC commentary. For better pictures and graphics, I slowly switched from Cricket Samrat to Sport Star. With some heartbreak, I dumped my favourite writer Charanpal Singh Sobti for the likes of Peter Roebuck. 

But all this needed a helping hand. Sahni Shabdkosh [from English to Hindi] made room for [English to English] Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.

I was surrounded by people who didn't know English. Even I passed class 10 exams without English --- it didn't feature as a subject, thanks to Lalu Yadav's magnanimity. Since I picked it up to some extent, I stood out when HT was looking for a reporter for our area in 2001. But that's a different story. 

We had our mini battles in the neighbourhood. Initially, fights happened to prove Sachin was better than Kambli. When this became ridiculously irrelevant, we kept fighting for years to prove there's no connect between Sachin's centuries and India's defeats.

I began having to ignore cricket as I got busy with work, which I got to do because of cricket, and kept changing cities, my interest going up and down. But, Sachin Kitnya Banaya -- remained  a constant query. And praises for Rahul's solidity, VVS' selfless service and Saurav's captaincy were never hard to come by.

Slowly, they started leaving the scene one by one. The void being felt is not only because Sachin is retiring, it's because all the greats we grew up watching are not around. It's more because the game that meant so much is suddenly not that important to me.

I can't be in Kolkata or Mumbai. But I want to be in Lahli. It won't be possible, I guess. I can't claim I won't watch cricket now, I will follow Kolkata and Mumbai. 

But for me and many of my generation who saw the blitz and the poise from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s,  the fun is surely gone.

My heart doesn't bleed...

                                                                                   (This is the lecture I delivered at Miranda House)

Hello everyone!

It’s a great opportunity to be here. 

But before I speak, first a disclaimer: I’m no expert. I’m a journalist. So, I’m a jack of all trades. I will basically deal with media’s role in environment protection. I will also try and offer some tips on how to collaborate with media for the green cause. And, yes, I will spare you the environmental jargons.  

Media has a great role to play in generating awareness on environmental issues. I’m sure reporters across publications are doing their job well. But I think we can do much more and less. What worries me particularly is the fact that the line between being a journalist and being an activist often gets blurred. That should not happen. Knowledge of the subject you’re dealing with always helps. But an environment reporter does not necessarily have to be an environmentalist.

In my career, I never did the environment beat. In my last assignment, I in fact covered the opposite – infrastructure development. But that didn't keep me from taking to environment reporting a year ago, when I came to Delhi.

I will share some of my recent experiences not to brag but to let you have a sense of how things work. I exposed luxury hotels, mighty clubs and hospitals for wastage of resources and causing massive pollution. 

My articles helped in saving a number of trees from being axed in the execution of poorly planned infrastructure projects. I also took the forest department and pollution control authorities to task whenever they indulged in blatant wrongdoing.

Mention my name and you will find officials of the Public Works Department particularly cursing me. That’s because so many of their idiotic projects have got stuck, contractors are losing crores, thanks to my articles. Taking note of my writing, courts have also scolded them time and again. I assure you none of it is personal for me.

Having said all of that, I firmly believe there’s only so much you can do as a reporter. Many here may not agree, but I believe it’s not my fight; I’m not party to it. And now a line which I often repeat and which will not make me any popular here --- my heart doesn't bleed when I see a tree being felled. But I know what to do about it.

I am dispassionate, because I don’t want to lose my sense of objectivity. Being dispassionate doesn't mean having no passion for you work. It simply means you do your job without bias. It means you don’t pre-judge people.

I am not on a mission to change the world, make it a better place to live in. My job is to make people aware of what is happening around them and, in the process, if I happen to help mitigate some of the problems, I feel good about it and move on.

But that’s for us, the reporters. You could be as passionate as you want. You have your convictions to drive you. Make interventions whenever required. There’s a tree helpline. Make use of that. Take to RTI; that’s a great tool when information is hard to come by otherwise.

What does awareness do? It creates interests. It sets people thinking. And without being full-time activist, they can do a lot. Our job is to report and let people take informed decisions. Our job is also to suggest alternatives to people and policy makers. And you have to take our suggestions up for debate and discussions.

With so much infrastructure development happening around and people taking to modern lifestyle, there's always a danger of natural resources being compromised. This is where you can come in.

But climate change is a very catchy term. We need to figure this, breaking it down to more relatable, more doable and more tangible activities. You can start with saving water at home, asking your neighbour not to hack that tree and use public transport.

There are 75 lakhs vehicles in Delhi. The daily addition is 1400. Every year, Delhi gets 6 lakh news cars. This means we need an additional 310 football fields every year to park these cars. 11% of Delhi has gone into parking. Only as much of this city is forest area. These vehicles also mean massive pollution.

You need to promote public transport. You need to ensure car usage goes down. But even public transport eats into greenery. For every phase of Metro expansion, 10 to 15,000 trees are sacrificed. You need to keep a watch on compensatory plantation.

Despite crores spent and various court orders, Yamuna remains choked with all kinds of pollutants. The river is dead, almost.  A total of 22 Delhi drains empty themselves into the river. 5.5 tonnes of arsenic is dumped into it by Rajghat power plant alone every year. DDA and DMRC have alone dumped 25000 truckloads of debris along the river.

Three of the four landfills are long overdue for closure and there are no fresh landfills available to take in the current daily discards of 9,000 tonnes. By 2020, the Capital needs an additional area of 28 sqkm, more than the entire spread of Lutyen's Bungalow Zone, to dump 15,000 tonnes of garbage per day.

Winter will soon be here. Delhi will soon face the smog problem. You need to check if Delhi has learnt its lessons. How are you going to do all this and more? That’s the question.  

I’m not citing these examples to scare you. This is just to let you have a sense of the task ahead. Environment is no more a fashionable word. It’s a daily reality, reminding us of the fact that survival will only get more and more difficult.

Build good rapport with reporters. But that takes some doing. We are so intelligent; we don’t mingle with rookies easily. You need to challenge us intellectually!

Kidding, but only partly. You actually need to convince us that not only you care for environment but you can also be a good source for the kind of reports we are looking for. After all, everything doesn’t get published. But that shouldn’t keep you from doing what is needed.

Every reporter has his own timings for newsgathering. If the subject you want him to pursue is not on his agenda, chances are he will avoid you forever.

Don’t lose heart. Don’t try and contact a reporter for not-so-important stuff, post-sundown. Because that’s when most of the stories are written.

What we expect is tough to tell. You will get to know as you go along. Often even we’re not sure what we want!

One piece of advice --- read, research and do real work. Never go for your moment of glory. Quotes and interviews appear only when you have done enough and your words carry weight. So, don’t try and reverse the process. 

The objective shouldn’t be lost sight of.

Together, we can make a difference.

Most of all, enjoy what you do

Thank you very much.

Looking back

Sometimes a glimpse from the past makes you pause and assess the present. A decade-old NDTV video, put out on the web more recently, in which senior journalist Tavleen Singh interviews me for doing a story on homosexuality was one such opportunity. The video reminds me of the kind of stories I, and my contemporaries, then managed to do. I was in my early 20s. I had neither been to a media school nor worked outside my small hometown. The way those stories would be written made them stand out. The anecdotes now linger in memories. They set the right tone.

We once discovered a village from where most families “contributed” at least one member to the business of stealing. The introduction featured a newly-married couple. The young man enthusiastically brought a cake of Pears, among other things, but his wife didn’t look impressed. She said her family used “this soap” for washing clothes. The man later discovered that her family members - who belonged to that village of thieves - had stolen cartons of Pears in the past but couldn’t sell all of those, and had to use the cakes for purposes other than bathing. Then the story, featuring interviews of policemen and locals, followed.

Sanjay Singh, who has been a mentor to me, did many such stories. He was not alone. There were many who were masters in telling such tales — away from the urban gaze.

Another story was about a village, which was not on the Railways map, but most families had members serving India’s biggest transporter. The story began with a quirky, tiny tale from the British period. A bunch of people from the village were travelling on a train, ticketless. Upon seeing TTEs, they changed their coaches and landed in one crammed with those selected to work for the Railways. A goof-up started a long tradition.

Only such tales were stories. The rest was news. We were groomed the same way. Photographs for these stories were shot by those who also shot photographs at wedding ceremonies. It’s a sheer misfortune that these stories didn’t go online then.

Not for a moment am I trying to ignore “anti-establishment” and “investigative” journalism. I’m only focusing on “tales”, which are rare now. Tales that people then told in most challenging circumstances.

We then didn’t have cell phones or computers. We wrote in the light of a lantern, and faxed them to journalism demigods in Patna. Overhead stone slabs resting on termite-infested wooden beams seemed to act like deadlines as I worked on a really old typewriter. Walls had plenty of seepages. Bed sheets and ragged saris — used as curtains — hanged limp. My reaction to the musty smell in the room — doubling up as my office — depended on the amount of time I took to type out the right introduction.

On days when your stories were not carried, you would tend to stare at flaking speckles of whitewash that often peeled off and, mixed with dust, lined the damaged floors.

There were threats. I received a mild threat for highlighting — with Tavleen — how homosexual relationships in India did not come out of Western influence; how many elite men in my town traditionally had male partners despite being married traditionally. 

I was also kidnapped and thrashed. I don’t know for which story. Around the same time I had done a story on how the backwardness in telecommunication was taking its toll on the law and order situation. Buxar was then one of the only two districts in Bihar where cell phones did not work.

A number of criminals who extorted money from behind the bars had been shifted to the Buxar jail, making the place and the prison sensitive with cavalcades of gangsters with sophisticated firearms frequently coming to meet their jailed bosses, opening a whole new vista of extortion and gang war.

In her subsequent writing, Tavleen describes my hometown, Dumraon - filthy, decrepit and felt the road every moment of the journey because “we rattled and shook rather than drove”. She wrote: “I have driven down some seriously bad roads in my time but have to say that the road from Buxur to Dumraon is in its own [of] special category. There is not the tiniest stretch that is a flat surface anymore.” In her article, she described me “a clever, ambitious young man who seemed oblivious to the decay that lay all around”.

What she meant was that when she pointed out roadside tea shops and vegetable sellers selling their wares on the edge of open drains clogged with solidified slime and plastic bags, I seemed to notice that for the first time.

With due respect to the point she made, civic problems were not the biggest stories for us. We had grown amidst those problems, but never complained because nothing was going to change. Can you make every Dumraon a Delhi? We had not seen the outside world. People sometimes don’t fathom the contrast, a reality of small towns and rural India.

My first story, for the paper I worked till six months ago, appeared in March, 2001. “Looted police rifle recovered.” A few days later, I got my first byline: “A cut in the fine will be fine for the cops.” It was about the police chief in the district asking for a share from the money realised as fine from examinees caught cheating.

For the first couple of years, I didn’t get any money. Later, things changed but the monthly pay was still in three digits. A clip on “one killed, two hurt in road mishap” fetched one Rs 10. So did a Page 1 lead. You got Rs 10 per appearance.

But passion drove us. Filing a report and waiting for the paper to arrive gave me goosebumps. In the morning, I straightaway looked for hawkers. I kept walking, covering long stretches on foot, hoping to bump into a hawker.

People always tried to avoid me in such times. If trains were late, the journey became longer. Finding out about the arrival of trains was also an important task. On several occasions, I reached the railway station only to find trains several hours late. If the report appeared, it felt great. The effort was worth it. I spread the word. I often bought two copies. One was for keeps. I kept the paper handy. I looked at the article. Several times.

http://www.dailyo.in/politics/bihar-homosexuality-gay-marriage-indian-railways-journalism-tavleen-singh/story/1/7318.html

Let me do it my way..!

The state of the house spoke volumes. The inside roof across the rooms looked threatening with stone slabs resting on termite-infested wooden beams. With plenty of seepages in the walls, everything smelled musty. Once could inhale the dampness all the time.

Flaking speckles of whitewash often peeled off and, mixed with dust, lined the damaged floors. Disused furniture rotted. A couple of rooms had curtains, actually old bedsheets or ragged sarees, hanging limp and moth-eaten. The outside roof was green with moss and threatened to cave in at many places.

The structures didn’t have a feel of a house because rooms were not separate. There were too many entrances and exists. It was, effectively, one huge hall with haphazardly erected walls creating living spaces and makeshift windows and doors, some never opened and others never closed, hardly serving any purpose.

At one point, the house didn’t look that bad. The courtyard had plenty of trees and plants. The old structures had their old charm. Furniture were beautifully designed. Doors looked majestic. But things began to change when she, about a decade into her marriage, began taking control and tried to turn the bulky, ancestral house into her esthetically pleasing dream house, where birds would chirp, plants would blossom, separate entrances and exists for men, women and outsiders would mean complete privacy.

The deadly combination of dwindling resources, financial constraints and her never-dieing zeal to “turn the house around” meant construction would often have to halt midway. The next time it began the basic plans were completely changed. Her imagination had taken a fresh set of wings, undoing what had been done till then and making room for further mess.

The kitchen was shifted more than a dozen times. It was almost a routine to see some windows being closed with a layer of bricks shutting the outside view out. At other times, workers would break into a wall to create a new window, letting the much-awaited sunlight filter in. Nobody was really surprised to see a bedroom being turned into the bathroom.

I could never solve the mystery of handpumps. The numbers kept swelling. Maybe, it was because of her love for water. Or her madness for cleanliness. The handpumps, strategically located, outnumbered the occupants of the house
And, sometimes, the visitors too.

(We don't extend such wishes. We never have.
But since she perhaps cannot read it, let me say: "Happy mother's day!")

याद लखनऊ

एक य़े भी मकान है, एक वो भी मकान था.

वो घर से भी प्यारा था कई मायनों में... (वो शहर भी तो कुछ ख़ास था)

य़े मकान तो कितना बड़ा है, वो तो बस एक कमरा भर था.

उसी में वो आतंक मचाते थे, दिन भर, नींद ख़राब होती थी

मगर मुझे जागते देख उनका सहमा हुआ चेहरा...

कई बार सोते रहने का नाटक किया... (उनकी शैतानियाँ भी तो कुछ ख़ास थी)

वो पैर घसीट के आना, वो कांपती प्लेटें,

छलकती चाय, सब्जियों से भीगते पराठे.

यहाँ कोई करता नहीं शोर-गुल. नींद फिर भी जोरो से आती नहीं

रेंट तो तब भी दिया था, बस किरायेदार अब ही बना हूँ.

More than just a walkway

Who says a leisurely walk in a bustling city is too much to ask for? Hazratganj has given you just that and much more and, in the process, gone back in time.

I never was a beat ka pakka reporter but spent time walking down that famous street.

Mostly alone.

Amid chaos.

All my kaam ki cheejein were there: the offices of NE and NR, DM's and Commissioner's offices, plus some more. I discovered (and now miss) several exotic food joints.

When I came to the city first, I was put up at the Halwasia guesthouse. I stayed there for months. The caretaker, who would wake me (and the office thought I was on the beat!) in the afternoon after bringing kulchhe from downstairs, still gives me buzz. He himself was once a small-time reporter and almost bored me to death with his stories. (This is true with all journalists. Why blame him?)

I never saw the old Hazratganj (how could I?) but it’s nice to know it’s changed for the better; that even cities such as Noida are thinking on those lines of makeover. (don’t miss reports on the sector 18 market plans here!)

When the makeover had barely begun I was in Lucknow. The commissioner’s office was one of my beats. He, along with many other officers, and the media played a crucial role in restoring Hazratganj to its pristine glory. From ensuring uniform facades of all multi-storey buildings to removal of hoardings and encroachments — beautification of the historically famous lane remained a top priority for many.

For months.

We even brought out a special edition dedicated to Hazratganj. The commissioner was never press friendly. (all commissioner office reporters also covered the DM’s office and, thus, manage information) I was suddenly told to interview him. Surprisingly, he agreed to speak and spoke at length.

We saw hoardings being removed (these were Anupam’s dear copies), power and data cables shifted underground, benches set up. Facades were resorted and painted uniformly. Traders agreed on a uniform colour code and size of signages.

I was particularly attached to the three-storey building housing the Northern Railway DRM (Lucknow) headquarters. Also being a railway correspondent, I often ventured into this one of the several architectural masterpieces in Hazratganj. Incorporating the best of British and Mughal styles, it harmonises with the architecture unique to structures of the Nawabi era.

I was surprised by the enthusiasm shown by DRM JS Sondhi. He helped immensely in putting together an article on the building for the special issue. He lamented the majestic structure, like several others in the famous lane, lost parts of the glory and grandeur to mindless commercialisation over the years.

He can rest easy now.