— 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.

I’m not saying that. Kobad Ghandy, the top Naxalite who was recently arrested in Delhi, is saying that. And he’s saying that courtsey Jyoti Punwani, a Mumbai freelance journalist and courtsey the Hindustan Times.

Jyoti is clearly impressed with Kobad’s ideology and friendshio (he stood witness to her wedding and served his family’s ice cream at the dinner that followed). So the tone of the write up is one of admiration for the man. Which is all very well. But while discussing his early days in Mumbai the writer slips this in:

“After a whole morning of wrestling with Lenin’s “Imperialism” at some open-air camp outside Mumbai, Kobad would start making lunch, insisting that we learn to wring the necks of chickens, else how would we stand the sight of blood when the revolution actually came?”

Now, that nonchalance might suit a hardened Naxal teaching his prospective comrades but what about the writer? Is it the norm these days for journalists to draw such vivid imagery of violence with the same nonchalance? If the writer is swayed by the subject, the editors at Hindustan Times seemed to have relished the ghastly quote even more to have thrown it up into a blurb to ensure nobody missed it. It seems that any talk of chicken is toast for HT.

One can understand Kobad espousing violence. But what was the point and purpose of the writer in bringing such stomach-churning stories from Kobad’s kitcthen to millions of breakfast tables? Shouldn’t somebody at the HT have used the editorial scissors?

Help me figure this one out by making your comments.