Eye Browse

Five of India's most iconic one-day players of the last decade will never be seen again. That is how sunset comes: without a "farewell series", without emotional speeches and orchestrated jamborees.

Sunset comes via a televised news report. A list of names that you scan, your heart dropping by degrees as you go down the list and fail to find your name in the list of 30.

To add a layer of irony, Virender Sehwag got the news that he is no longer wanted in the Indian set up on the day, five years ago, when he was one audacious stroke short of becoming the first batsman in history to score three triples.

It is, they tell me, a "thoughtful, far-reaching selection".

Tomorrow makes 30 years since the day 40 tons of poisonous gas leaked out of a factory, killing over 20,000 and injuring or otherwise harming over 500,000 in arguably the worst industrial disaster of our age.

Why have we moved on? Why is there collective amnesia, not merely in the rest of the country but in Bhopal itself?

Why, asks the talented Priyanka Dubey, fresh from winning a Thompson Foundation award for journalism, do so many residents seem so indifferent to what happened in their own city?

  How Bhopal and I Betrayed Our Own

He bounces a wounded cry down into the canyons of the Tigris River: a blade of rusty water that saws its way through the bedrock of time. Ali’s song is a hymn to true love, which is to say, to love unrequited. It is the tale of a beautiful woman who remains blind to the longings of the singer. It is a lyric of loneliness. Of waiting. Of resignation—a form of acceptance. It is the perfect ballad for this antique river and this doomed, haunted town. ...

It happens every time. I read a Paul Salopek update on his Out of Eden Walk and I marvel. And gasp with wonder at the observation, the insight, and the way he brings it together with his words. And then I am led to think. And to read. And to learn.

Here is his latest. And it is on par with every previous post:

I have spent the better part of my life -- or maybe it just seems that way; you know how it is when you are frustrated, a day seems like a year -- "reporting in to" people who have never spent a day in a newsroom.

I've spent the better part of my life -- or so it seems to me; see above -- shocked at how little effort there is, institutionally, to stay on top of emerging tools and technologies, to have constant conversations about how these new tools, these technologies, can be harnessed to the goal of making storytelling structures better. (Hey, while on this -- if you have anything at all to do with storytelling, do follow Journalism Tools. You can thank me later -- I have plenty of reason to thank that account.)

The net result has been, you talk story, idea, project. What you get is, ok, can you do a powerpoint/waterfall chart/excel on the "gives and gets". You do that, and you get a conversation that goes on these lines:

"So, I saw your powerpoint, and I notice you haven't addressed the question of RoI"

Eh? Sorry, what? It is a powerpoint about a great storytelling project...

"Yes but have you quantified the RoI?"

What do you need?

"Projections. How many updates a day? How many items of text articles, how many words each? How many images? Standalone or slideshow?  How about video? Clip durations? What is the traffic estimate for each of these elements -- page views, time spend, unique users by geography?... You know, we need details..."

And that is when another idea goes off to die peacefully, in the media graveyard where so many good story ideas go to die unwept, unhonored, unsung.

I've often wondered why. Would you, for instance, take a journalist and make him CEO of a company? Or its CFO? Or head of its product department? No?

Why then this presumption that someone with "management expertise" is best fitted to make decisions about media, about storytelling?

I wondered, but never really nailed an answer that satisfied me, until I stumbled on this Rafat Ali (Who he? Here, check) "rant" that is so bang on target it would win gold at an Olympic shooting contest. Here it is, Storify-ed:

Words to the wise -- from the wiser...

N Srinivasan is such a dude! 

That he went to court, claiming the Mudgal Commission had vindicated him and demanding that he be reinstated as board president and further, be allowed to contest elections, was no surprise. 

The real kicker lay in a little codicil that went unnoticed (emphasis mine): 

Srinivasan also asked the court to re-instate the officials from India Cements who were part of various sub-committees at the BCCI. 

Read that again. Then ask yourself this: Why were officials from India Cements, a private company, embedded in “various sub-committees” in the BCCI, which is not, appearances to the contrary, a sister concern of the cement firm? 

Check out his actual words: 

"Now, that the Report (Mudgal) has been filed and no adverse findings have been made as against this Respondent (India Cements) or its employees, it is just and proper that the employees of this Respondent be permitted to discharge their duties if any assigned to them by the BCCI." 

N Srinivasan’s serial conflicts of interest have been discussed in every conceivable forum, including the highest court of the land.

So what does he do? He goes to the Supreme Court and, in as many words, demands that his employees – people who work for him and for the company he owns – be reinstated in the BCCI. 

Like I said – such a dude. 

Does anyone remember the name Prasanna Kannan? Of course you don’t – in this era of instant sensation, who can be bothered with even the recent past? 

As aide memoire, I’m quoting (with mild edits) from my own post, dated January 20, 2011:

  A story that merits attention slipped under the collective radar. Remember when a Parliamentary Committee decided to question the BCCI honchos about foreign exchange violations and other skulduggery? Questions were asked about the source of funding of some IPL teams, and also about various foreign exchange transactions relating to the IPL edition held in South Africa.

The BCCI’s defense was the classic SODDIT (Some Other Dude Did It). And the sod they said did it was  Lalit Modi. (This move prompted Revenue Secretary Sunil Mitra to inform the Yashwant Sinha-led committee that for all legal and tax purposes, the IPL was a subset of the BCCI and that therefore the BCCI was responsible for any and all decisions taken by the IPL).

  Turns out, even such distinctions are unnecessary. While we were distracted with the national team selection and the SA ODI, CNN-IBN broke a story that received surprisingly little attention in the media. This one.

  Never mind that the source of our very own mini-wikileaks is fairly obvious, what the released documents (Here’s the cache) indicate is fairly obvious: N Srinivasan’s (Earlier post: The Cat in the Hats) fingerprints are all over the thing.

#BCCI President Shashank Manohar was formally authorized to take, on behalf of the BCCI, the final decision on the venue.

#The payment process for the SA edition of the IPL was detailed by N Srinivasan, who signed the agreement with CSA.

#N Srinivasan approved, and signed off on, all payments, transfers of funds, etc.

An under-reported story is the extent to which N Srinivasan’s insidious control over the Board extends. (For example: An India Cements employee is chairman of the national selectors — in fact, the first chairman after a rule change that ensured that the selection committee would not be changed after each board election — and also brand ambassador of the franchise that is owned by India Cements. A sports management agency owned by the CSK skipper represents, among others, India Cements. And so on. Tug on any thread you see before you, and it unravels endlessly.)

In continuation of that theme, consider this clip:

Every case for approval was made by Prasanna Kanan who was the CFO of IPL and otherwise an India Cements employee seconded to BCCI. He reported all expenses to N Srinivasan who approved them. No money was paid except after go ahead by N Srinivasan who controlled the entire expenses.

That is to say, the Chief Financial Officer in “Modi’s IPL” was an India Cements employee “seconded to” the BCCI.

Srinivasan wants the Supreme Court to reinstate Prasanna Kannan. In other words, Srinivasan isn't satisfied with the control he already has over the board -- he wants to go back in time, to the halcyon days when his employee was controlling the board's finances.

And it is not just one employee. As per Srinivasan himself – he wants the court to reinstate India Cements officials, plural, in sub-committees, plural. 

Such. A. Dude!

I'm guessing the hardest thing to do when you stumble is to recover your balance and gracefully move on? Which, among other things, includes refraining from cover-your-ass statements so disingenuous, it only draws additional attention to the initial stumble?

Should a man against whom charges of rape (or other serious crimes, for that matter) be invited onto public forums? I think there is an emotional answer -- fuck, no! -- that stems from an individual's instinctive revulsion at some acts.  There is also a cold-blooded, pragmatic answer -- why not? -- that is predicated on the bedrock presumption of 'innocent until proven otherwise'.

Whichever way you swing, the Times LitFest -- and Bachi Karkaria -- could hardly have mismanaged this worse if they had spent months planning a monumental screw-up.

First up, whose "clever" idea was it to dust off Tejpal and trot him out on a panel just now? Is it because you think there is such a dearth of capable speakers in the literary world that you had to interrupt the poor fellow's "penance that lacerates"? Is it that someone thought Tejpal's name in lights would add to the drawing power of the event? Or is it just someone's idea of being oh-so-clever -- look, we got Tejpal, who is facing charges of misusing his position to molest a junior colleague, on a panel to speak of "Tyranny of Power", tee-hee, ain't I witty?

Seriously -- what was the thought behind the original idea to extend the invite?

Having invited Tejpal and publicized his presence, the organizers really had only one option: to stick to their guns, not spike it themselves. The official stance could have been (and briefly was): We are not entitled to sit in judgment over Tejpal's guilt or innocence; law mandates that every person not actually convicted of crime be treated as if he were innocent; our invitation was not a reflection of our stance on the rape accusation... you know the drill.

I believe the technical term is 'courage of your conviction'.

Or you could figure that the negative response was hurting an event you believed in and wanted to make successful -- in which case, you could simply say: We respect the public sentiment and have decided to rescind the invitation to Mr Tejpal, the "horny protagonist" of a recent rape investigation and charge-sheet.

But to actually say 'Oh, we don't care if Tejpal misused his position and raped a female colleague, we don't care what you jokers out there think of us inviting him, we just don't need you nattering on and on about it when you should be nattering on and on about what a wonderful event we are putting together...'

Really, Bachi? 

Talk of gaffing your mouth with both feet. At once.

On June 13, 1948, a young girl walked into a shop to steal a five-cent notebook. She didn't need the notebook; she didn't need to steal -- she only wanted to belong, and this was a rite of entry for the group she longed to be part of.

So Sally stole, for the first time in her life. She was caught. Then her real nightmare began.

It's a gripping, chilling story -- but that is not all Sally Horner is. Read:

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.

I just read this Chris Jones story for the second time. And I know I'll likely read it again. Concept, execution of the narrative -- just brilliant.

Away by Chris Jones

The Girl At The Window

I'd seen this image earlier, when Arati Kumar-Rao first shot it. A while ago, while browsing Instagram, I came across it again -- via a post on the official IG blog.

The blog's intent is to find and spotlight photo-journalists producing world class work. That Arati featured this week doesn't surprise me -- she is a good friend, but she is also one of the best with a camera I've ever come across.

What made me do a double take is the stats off to one side of the post: 366,000 likes in 23 hours at the time of writing this.

Her open-ended project on rivers -- River Diaries, focussed now on the Brahmaputra and surroundings -- is a visually stunning, always insightful, often wrenching narrative. She tells Instagram:

“Sometimes, the river is not what devastates areas,” she explains, “It is what we do to a river that does.”

Here is a 'director's cut' of her email exchange with Instagram, reproduced with her permission:

I've grown up in Bombay (Mumbai) and wandered a bunch since. I spent a decade in Arizona, getting my second and third masters degrees - in instruction design and international business, and then worked in Intel Corp. doing strategic marketing and market research.

After working in Arizona for eight years, I moved back to India. Still with Intel, I researched consumer technology buying behavior in the Asia-Pacific region, which allowed me to learn quite a bit about how technology adoption varied in different cultures and sub-cultures.  It was a most interesting time to be working in Asia. 

On what came first, writing or photography:

I cannot separate the two in my mind. For me storytelling has always been about both writing and photography. They compliment each other and, in the work I do, I find it necessary to use words as situations and issues are complex. 

On why she calls herself an “environmental biographer” on her Instagram profile: 

I find myself writing and shooting longform about environmental issues -- mainly people within landscapes, negotiating changes that come to them from without. My work is biographical in nature, as most of these are explored over seasons and, sometimes, years.   

On her River Diaries project: 

I have had an idea in my head since I graduated college: to traverse river systems, documenting life from source to sea. Rivers. They sustain hundreds of millions of people around the world and are home to a hundred thousand creatures. What we do to a river, however, changes this. We dam it, divert it, squeeze it, pollute it, restrain it, mine its bed, gouge out its banks, pluck trees, dyke it, siphon it, dredge it, and sometimes suck these veins of a land dry.  

This has direct social and ecological effects. River Diaries is a long-term series that follows one river: the Brahmaputra, documenting the significant changes coming to it. Sometimes, the river is not what devastates areas; it is what we do to a river that does.   

On why she uses composite images, which is unusual in documentary/journalistic practice:

This was born in Instagram! I was intrigued by the #doubleexposure posts I was seeing and wanted to see how I could use such composites to illustrate issues, have people mull over them. I began to composite images taken within a certain radius to see if they could tell the story in another way. The responses have been very encouraging.  

Of course, I label these very specifically. 

On her Instagram feed:

“Can you give me a confirmation and a quote?”

Thru the second half of yesterday, when the news spread that I was coming to the end of my tenure with Yahoo India, I kept getting that question, with mild variants, from journalists.

WTF is up with that? Since when did you guys get reduced to quote hangers? And, corollary – don’t they teach you any better in the J-school you hopefully passed out of, and in the newsroom you are part of?

This is not an attempt at being holier than thou – honestly, it’s not. It’s just that of late, I’ve been thinking about content a lot. I also got lucky in some long conversations with bright young journalists who pinged to discuss story possibilities and project ideas. 

So what the actual f… what’s up with this “confirmation and quote” stuff?

There were exceptions – like the journalist who asked me a lot of questions that I answered in depth and detail. And then I saw the finished output, and – put it this way, yesterday was a big day for going what the eff.

Not much I can do about that, but I would like to keep the record clean and straight. So I decided to interview myself. Here’s the transcript (Most of the questions are what I was actually asked -- and answers I actually gave, in more or less the same words and to the same depth. I’ve avoided the more bizarre queries):

Can you confirm that you’ve quit Yahoo India?

I can confirm that my last working day will be December 12, 2014.

You are quoted as saying that you want to get back to a content focus and away from management. Does that mean there is no content focus where you are now?

No, it merely means that I want to spend more time on content – by that I mean writing what I want to. Equally, on editing – which means working with storytellers from the idea stage up, through the field work and then at the writing/editing table, on forms and shapes and structures and the actual words themselves.

It means that if there are 12 working hours in a day, I want to spend 11 hours 30 minutes working with ideas and words. The other half hour is for smoking and email.

My saying I want to move away from management is not pejorative in intent. Someone has to manage things so the rest of us can function in the areas we like. I merely mean that the minutiae of management functions do not excite me. I’ve learnt how to do that stuff with a fair degree of competence,  but there is a difference between being able to do something and wanting to do it for the rest of your life.

What has your stint in Yahoo been like?

Great fun, and incredibly educative in a way I did not even expect.

Could you elaborate, particularly on the ‘educative’ part?

I’d never worked in a global organization before. Being here taught me – among many other things – that there is a world beyond the tip of my little nose.

For instance, the things we do mean the world to us – we invest in them, we think and rethink them, we overdose on euphoria when they work and think Armageddon is around the corner when they fail, as ideas will fail sometimes.

But when you step back and look at the larger world you are part of, you realize there are other ways of looking at things; that what you are doing is part of a much larger whole – and that therefore, ‘success’ at something you do is not absolute but relative to that larger whole. That in turn teaches you to think of how to expand the definition and scope of what you call success; it teaches you to ask questions like, how do you do things at scale.

Or looked at another way – immediately before joining Yahoo I worked at Rediff, a media organization I was part of from inception. The CEO, the head of product, the head of sales, the head of edit, they all sat, literally, within 50 yards of my desk. And since we all grew together from zero, there was an interpersonal relationship that impacted how we worked together. For instance, if I had a thought, I could stroll up to my editor, Mr Nikhil Lakshman, and go hey, need to talk. I could do the same with my CEO, Mr Ajit Balakrishnan. And I could walk away from those conversations with decisions.

In a large corporate, you don’t just waltz into your boss’s cabin for a coffee and a chat. If you have an idea, you make presentations. You cost it. You think of ROI – return on investment. You make traffic projections. You estimate possible revenue based on those projections. And then you walk someone through it and if that someone green-lights it you then talk to someone else and…

There is a greater rigor to the process – it’s not just ‘got idea, will execute’. You could say it slows things down; you could equally say it challenges your assumptions more, forces you to think not merely ideas but also implications.

I could go on but seriously, each ecosystem you are part of teaches you much – for instance, smaller ones teach you to be nimble; giant ones teach you to be diligent.

Where will you go next?

I’ve honestly not considered the question in any depth. And it is not “where” anyway – it is “what”. Content. Wherever I go next, and whatever I do, it will be in the field of pure content.

Will you stick with conventional media?

What is “conventional media”? I’ve been in journalism 25 years and counting. When I started, “conventional media” was newspapers; when cable television came in it was considered “new media”. Then the Internet came in – and suddenly TV was conventional media, newspapers were almost relegated to borderline “old media”. Now, 19 years after the internet was first opened up for commercial use, it is “conventional media” and all sorts of things are “new, innovative media” – from Twitter and Facebook to Instagram and Vine and oh I don’t know, whatever the latest toy on the horizon is, until we get bored and throw it out of the pram and grab the next one. For me, media is just that – a means of telling stories. “Conventional”, “traditional” etc are labels we stick on them, often for our own purposes and prejudices.

Have you considered starting something on your own? 

Yes, for quite a while. There are many indicators out there that the audience is not as invested in who – which media house – is telling the story as it is in the story itself.

For instance, my friend Sonia Faleiro was a founding member of Deca Stories – a group of top of the line journalists/writers who formed a collective so they could tell the stories they wanted to tell, in the way they wanted to tell them, with no dependence on “conventional media houses” and “ROI”.

They went on Kickstarter, announced their intent and asked for $15000 so they could tell stories at the rate of about 10 a year, each the size of a novella, each researched in depth, and written and edited with care and passion. Well within the one-month time frame, potential readers donated over $30k. Who knew?

That should tell you there is an audience out there for good stories well told. It may not number in millions, but numbers are not the only – or even always the best – measure of what we can do.

So there is an audience. And there are writers, journalists, who care enough to tell stories the way they should be told. And people are increasingly noticing, and investing, in this “alternate media model” that is emerging. Take two examples that speak to the same thing: Medium, and Creativist.

Both are content management systems – back-end platforms that let you tell stories the way you want to, with the elements that suit the story (text, video, images, data, audio, timelines, you name it). And they are not the only ones – more such systems are being built, and launched, every other month.

Why would someone invest in creating such platforms? For the casual blogger, there is Wordpress and Tumblr and a host of other readymade platforms, each with users numbering in the millions of millions – so who is this for, and what is the idea behind this? Simply, that blogs as we know it have limitations when it comes to immersive, in-depth story-telling; that providing such platforms, at affordable rates (I spend more on cigarettes in a month than I do on my Creativist subscription) opens up a whole new opportunity to those who want to go beyond the here-and-now immediacy of blogging to larger, more rounded storytelling. And equally, the realization that the storyteller doesn't have to be employed by a media house to tell the story, just as the reader does not need the imprimatur of a media house to judge whether to read the story.

Extend that thought one degree more: If I am no longer dependent on a media organization to give me a CMS and engineering/development back-up and all the rest of it, just how hard is it to do your own thing – assuming you know what it is, you are sure of the idea, and you are confident you can pull it off?

So will you start something like Deca?

Why start something like something else? Deca exists, and there are other such initiatives. It’s much more fun to think of what else is possible than what you can clone.

What do you see in the future for yourself?

So -- can you spot the elephant's legs?

Sexist injustice, he says, continues to this day. “I don’t think there’s a woman in the readership of the Guardian, not one, who hasn’t been objectified or trivialized because of her gender at one time or another. And that’s really what our movie is about.”

So is it a feminist movie? A pause. He chooses his words carefully. “It would not be unfair to call it that but I’m not looking for labels.” It seems he will elaborate but doesn’t. A prolonged silence ensues.

No, Jones does not look for labels. And if he thinks he detects one lobbed in the guise of a question about his personal convictions, those black eyes petrify it mid-flight with a basilisk glower.

Rampant sex abuse. Over 100 coaches banned for life.

How on earth do such things happen? How do so many remain blind to so much for so long?

Cinderella in rags, toiling hard in the kitchen of the wicked stepmother...

Wait -- why was she living the life of a drudge?

To escape possible incest at the hands of her father.

Rapunzel, at the height of beauty and of youth, immured in the castle keep and, oh how sweet, using her long hair as ladder for the man of her dreams to climb up to her.

And when the prince did negotiate the climb and reached her prison, then what? Sweet nothings, nothing -- they were screwing like rabbits.

Mental Floss once came up with a story on the surprising origins of familiar fairy-tales. Sampler:

The King's wife dies and he swears he will never marry again unless he finds a woman who fits perfectly into his dead Queen's clothes. Guess what? His daughter does! So he insists on marrying her. Ew. Understandably, she has a problem with this and tries to figure out how to avoid wedding dear old dad. She says she won't marry him until she gets a trunk that locks from outside and inside and can travel over land and sea. He gets it, but she says she has to make sure the chest works. To prove it, he locks her inside and floats her in the sea. Her plan works: she just keeps floating until she reaches another shore. So she escapes marrying her dad, but ends up working as a scullery maid in another land"¦ from here you can follow the Cinderella story. She meets a prince, leaves her shoe behind, he goes around trying to see who it belongs to. The End.

More on the theme, this time from Flavorwire:

Sleeping Beauty

In one of the very earliest versions of this classic story, published in 1634 by Giambattista Basile asSun, Moon, and Talia, the princess does not prick her finger on a spindle, but rather gets a sliver of flax stuck under her fingernail. She falls down, apparently dead, but her father cannot face the idea of losing her, so he lays her body on a bed in one of his estates. Later, a king out hunting in the woods finds her, and since he can’t wake her up, rapes her while she’s unconscious, then heads home to his own country. Some time after that, still unconscious, she gives birth to two children, and one of them accidentally sucks the splinter out of her finger, so she wakes up. The king who raped her is already married, but he burns his wife alive so he and Talia can be together. Don’t worry, the wife tries to kill and eat the babies first, so it’s all morally sound.

Much was lost in translation from the original and much more was sanitized -- and that was before Disney stepped in with its airbrush.

Enter Jack Zipes:

Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, says he often wondered why the first edition of the tales had never been translated into English, and decided, eventually, to do it himself. “Though the Grimms kept about 100 of the tales from the first edition, they changed them a good deal. So, the versions with which most English-speaking (and German-speaking) readers are familiar are quite different from the tales in the first edition,” he told the Guardian.

The Guardian, on the first real translation of the original stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

In May 334 BCE, the Persian army was deployed on the East Bank of the River Granicus (now the Biga River in modern Turkey). The Greeks, led by a 21-year-old with very little battle experience, arrived on the West Bank.

The battle that followed turned on one action. Alexander the Great swam his horse across the river and planted his personal flag in the middle of the Persian lines. His forces including the famous Companions followed in order to protect him. Alexander took several wounds but his army won the ensuing melee.

And what does Alexander have to do with Anand holding Carlsen to a draw in game four of the world chess title fight at Sochi?

Here, read.

Then why do writers of some of the best books in the country not find publishers elsewhere in the world, even as far more mediocre works – there, I've said it! – written in English are not only published abroad but also command handsome advances for their authors? (Although that last aspect might also be a matter of multiplying the advance by 60 or 100, as they case may be, when converting to rupees.) The answer is simple: English fiction from India enjoys a disproportionate share of voice in western publishing markets, where editorial perspectives on South Asia are dominated by the post-Salman Rushdie, post-Arundhati Roy story. For one thing, almost everyone (fortunately, not quite everyone) is looking for the "Indian" novel – exotica meets confusion meets mumbo-jumbo meets Slumdog Millionaire, or the-dark-underbelly-of-India’s-economic-success.

This is a demand that India’s globally clued-in English language novelist is inherently capable of exploiting. Not surprisingly, the fiction of the other Indias, which is actually much closer to the real Indias – as we know, there are many – is ignored.

Arunava Sinha says it: The best writing coming out of India is not in English. So why does no one sit up and take notice? And arising from that, is it time for a Library of India, that will bring together the best of our 'vernacular' writing and shine a light on it?