S B Easwaran posted his comments to my post “Learn to wring a chicken’s neck…”  wondering about the wisdom of an Hindustan Times article romanticising Kobad Ghandy, the alleged Maoist leader arrested in Delhi. I’m throwing up Easwaran’s comments as a separate post to carry forward the PublicScrutiny of that debatable article.

— B V Rao, administrator

By S B EASWARAN
Is a Maoist the more interesting for having gone to Doon School, for coming from an affluent and urbane Parsi family of Bombay? Is he the more interesting for his naive psychology of minor or ritual brutality in preparation for human violence and death of hundred-fold magnitude? Is he the more interesting for the polished affluence of his fruit-icecream fortunes? Or is he just a more interesting story for all that?
 
In the weighing of a man and his story against each other which one comes out the more heavier with the power to evoke empathy? Is a writer’s quaintly silly adoration of a man and his condonation of mindless violence worthy of circulation and revulsed consumption through print and cyberspace? Is all this bollywoodised news-script at its very best, with the power to hold you, the reader, in mild syrupiness you don’t want to regret being held in? Do you, Everyreader, object to the wiles of story-telling rhetoric, its swirling, snaking, greased ropes holding you in weak, suspended awe?

There is something called ethical intelligence, a mere wisp of a faculty in most of us, but a complete weather system in those who have cultivated and amplified it over the years through years of attentive use. Coverage of stories like Kobad Ghandy’s–in which the telling of the story casts fierce black linations, like an interfering line cartoon on the film we are watching on our mindscreen–is a test of that faculty. It is a test Everyreader shies away from, lazily ducking it like the sudoku or crossword or bridge puzzle that catches attention but one is too lazy for. It is a test and a bracing mindgame. It is a foundation drill in navigation through a cross-section of that complex weather system.
It is an exercise in watching our minds read. It is a riddle to test our ability to discern the building from the magical but interfering shadow of the scaffolding suspended about it, a perceptual grid and, at the same time, a perceptual cage.