I just read an article from an eminent journalist and marvel at this journalist’s narrative setting skills.
I am busy with earning a living and do not have the luxury of time to write such narrative setting articles. I suppose you could call me – as our beloved journalists will – (that dreaded word) a common man, an aam aadmi, who cannot speak fluent English. I concede that my knowledge has suffered due to lack of good grasp of English vocabulary. So I am not best qualified to see life through the prism of any elite profession, leave alone that of a journalist. Yet, after reading the article, a question has been gnawing at me, nibbling away, bit by bit, at my conscience and sense of comfort: what if I were a journalist?
What would I feel to discover that though my voice is loud and clear, it now falls on deaf ears in the country’s political discourse because I no longer have credibility? Or, that in the most populous state of India, not a single party that I campaigned for could win meaningful number of seats? Would I be able to celebrate after seeing the photograph of a journalist son of a Goud Saraswat Brahamin middle order batsman, who used the mainstream media as a weapon get into a scuffle with ordinary people on Madison Square?
If I were journalist, how much helpless rage might I feel about news traders who soil the name of my profession and then leave me to carry the cross of condemning them, like I am somehow responsible for their monstrous acts?
What would I say to the family of the workers at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai who were killed in the terrorist attack, because of, at best careless, and at worst sinister live reporting by one of my fellow journalists? Or the soldier who died because a journalist gave the enemy his exact location?
How would I deal with the self-appointed custodians of my country’s values who get entangled in Radia tapes controversy- only to embarrass me and strengthen the common man who attacks my profession?
If I were a journalist, what might I feel to learn that the Prime Minister no longer takes me free of cost on his foreign trips?
If I were journalist, I would look back in dismay at the good old times when I could set the narrative and the social media was not there to catch my lies.
