Journalists deserve a day!

 Believe me, being a journalist is quite a high! I should know! During my Ph. D. days, I free-lanced with major newspapers which include "The New Indian Express", "The Hindu" and the "Newstime" of the Eenadu group. 

Well, to begin with, i got all these assignments absolutely on my sheer merit. As for the "New Indian Express", with whom my experiments with journalism began, I just walked in to their office in Hyderguda. I did not know a soul there. I was asked to write a film review.

 Beginning with the title "Amrika to Jana hi tha," my fresh approach to film criticism, which consisted of analysing the 'film', and beyond mere story telling, was so much appreciated that I became a part n parcel of the Features' Desk there n then. My very first book review was hugely appreciated by the author, who, I did not know it, turned out to be the Regional Editor's best buddy. 

Literally, there was no looking back after that. Despite being a freelancer, I used to write at least four articles per week. The themes were as varied as psychiatry and women, palliative therapy, cancer in children, the newly emerging IVF therapy and its impact on women's (emotional) health, for instance. My bylines were varied, but always liked. 

They were often syndicated in Orissa and the four Southern states. It was quite a humbling experience when while reading up research material in the ASRC, some scholar(s) from Orissa, Kerala or Tamilnadu would walk up to me to tell me how much he/she liked some xyz article of mine.

I wrote fun pieces, conducted interviews, wrote reviews of all the fine arts related events, covered all sorts of festivals which made even the Chief Minister admire the coverage. I could practice how to write well, poetically yet precisely, given the deadline and the word limit.  My articles were rarely edited, and were admired because there never was any fluff, but truly good content full of thoughts and ideas. 

It got me a break in to two portals. Of these two, the fullhyd.com chief editor/owner himself came down to the NIE office to invite me to write for them. Articles therein were praised a lot, too. I wrote some ten articles for The Hindu. That intro was through the NIE contact, too. Often Asra of the "Newstime" and I used to cover events together. Thus i got in to the "Newstime" where I even wrote front page leads, and my articles were weekly earmarked by Ramoji Rao garu himself, which was a huge high for the Features' Desk. 

As a sincere, committed journalist, I got to see the good, the bad and the ugly of a cross section of society. Petty academics giving themselves huge airs while the rest of the society knew their non-existing worth used to hurt me a lot, as I was after all from and into academics. 

Child stars to big directors, famous authors, nascent artists, one met and interacted with most interesting people. It was quite satisfying that my film review thumbnails used to be quoted in the newspaper film ads, and along with Subhash Jha's!

Social media, which started dominating especially since the COVID days, was non-existent then. Truth value, authenticity, sincerity were the key-words. Commitment mattered, and as for partisanship, it was not so  very open n blatant! Fake news as of today was not even heard of, forget reels, et al.

Yet,  yes, I even got to know the 'inside stories' such as how a group could run a newspaper to save on the (income) tax. Hence, though I got a free hand to write on varied themes, I understood the pain of my seniors,  mid-career journalists with nowhere to go, when the newspaper was closed suddenly one day!

Now, the world over, newspapers are surely dying a not so slow death. Nobody believes journalists who are often openly canvassing a certain political party, an ideology, while investigative journalism is more for the Youtubers, and to media houses owned t.v. channels to some extent. Sad but true! Times they are always a-changing, and yet the memories of those days remain forever fresh, even when the pages are slowly yellowing!

Pratima@ Ah, to be a freelancer in those happy days! Hence this journey down the memory lane as January 6 gets celebrated as the journalists' day.

Quote of the day:                                                      "Write what should not be forgotten," said Isabel Allende. One of the high's of being a freelancer is that each and every author one has admired has always been a journalist, a correspondent, a reporter in his/her early years!

Word of the day: Media                                               Media refers to the main means of mass communication (broadcasting, publishing, and the internet) regarded collectively. Incidentally, 'media' is the plural of 'medium', and should be used accordingly.

Let us learn grammar:                                              At times, adjectives can be used as nouns, and such usage requires the definite article. Let us look at a few examples.                                               1) The rich do not understand the poor.            2) The young find the old boring.                                           3) The unusual makes life interesting.

Delhi and Students: Two faces of student protest! Two-faced, too?

 Delhi, the capital city, is in news yet again. Are you saying, 'What is so great? After all, the national capital! Would be in the news, anyways'? Well, let me mention the two reasons why I am referring to Delhi thus. May be, you, too, would find the statement newsworthy. 

The first refers to the NTA NET subject specific questions. Well, the NET English Lit exam was conducted yesterday, and, boy, was there a furore! Well, it is always argued that the NET is tougher than the SET, anyways.

I would not know. I have never appeared for the SET, while I have twice cleared the Eng Lit NET, with the JRF/SRF. Both my attempts, moreover, were the analytical, critical essay types, not the current easy MCQ way. The essay questions used to be set by professors from  top universities such as the Delhi Univ, the  Jadavpur Univ, the JNU, the BHU, for instance. Huge authenticity the exam would have for SURE!

As for the SET, those in the know always grumble about all sorts of malpractices, indirect question leak, 'adjusting' the result, et al. I have absolutely zero knowledge about any such issues as I never ever tried the SET. Nor did I need it, given my NET score.

Well, I do have a solid problem with the current MCQ nature of the NET. For one thing, it gets reduced to be more of a lucky guesswork. How/why can such a qualifying test be a mere/more memory test? Lecturers need to analyse, explicate, clarify. Their hold over the language has to be near perfect, especially when it comes to Humanities, Social Sciences, languages, and especially, literature.  

Well, the hoo-haw yesterday was about the difficulty level of the test! Well, if you are going to be teaching literature/language, your own hold over both the content/medium has to be real good! As it is, most PG (Distance Mode, eh?) students boast of rarely attending lectures! Their awareness of the width/breadth/scope is almost nil as answers are often guide (of the guide books or of the AI variety)-based.

Given such products, there are lecturers/professors who are "Ph.D. degree holders", but cannot form a single correct sentence in English, forget orally, not even in writing! Their use of tenses is simply wonky. Articles are noteworthy by absence, for instance. 

How they could get a doctorate is itself worth serious research. Well, I have heard a research "guide" repeatedly boast that his student(s) provide him with "everything" in an apartment upstairs, and voilà, within a week, the thesis is ready!!!As it is, theses are mostly sent to external examiners who are 'friends', and it is a give-n-take every which way!

Sobbingly people talk of their village school/college days, poverty, tough life, et al. Why hurry then for a doctorate or for a lecturer's plum position? Why not first work on the language at least, if not the content? If you pretend to write the thesis in English, there possibly cannot be basic errors from the title page onwards, right? Even after decades and decades after "finishing"  the doctorate, your language is not much to write, forget home, anywhere about, what gives you the right to guzzle huge salaries, without sincerely conducting lectures either?

If your research does not even mention basic well-known resources in the area, what kind of research is it? In other words, at some point or the other, there has to be some quality check. The NET has to have a higher level of difficulty, like the GRE, for instance.

Sure, the NET should be more analytical, explanatory, short notes/essay question types. The MCQ quotient should be minimal. There, in brief,  have to be some stringent measures though that grant some basic minimum quality to being a lecturer, beyond the "connects/contacts, caste/creed, money and leaks" concoction! May be, the NET could clarify the exact portion with more precision.

Students cannot go down the 'i want a fat pay cheque without much ado ' lane, while trying to be a lecturer. If they want to teach in an English medium college, their own English HAS to be good! They cannot argue for easy questions in a qualifying test! 

Similarly, whatever happened in the JNU this morning is a shame, too. For the sake of an undertrial whom the court considers not worthy of a bail, you cannot target the PM, the HM! It is stated openly, moreover, that the delay tactics are by the lawyers of this poster boy of the "kabr khudegi" and "tukde tukde" gang. Moreover, this sub judice case may attract a Mamdani, but there CANNOT be any interference in the sovereign matters of a country. Period! 

And why the attack on a specific colour, please? The colour is not merely political, party specific. And, oh, yes, how about the atrocities committed against the minorities in Bangla Desh? Would the JNU types (who give a bad name to Marx whose books, who knows if they have actually read) roar for "digging a grave" of the perpetrators in Bangla Desh? Injustice is injustice, and cannot be conveniently (mis)quoted!

Pratima@A wrong is a wrong is a wrong!

Quote of the day:                                                          "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, " argues Martin Luther King.

Word of the day: Opportune.                 'Opportune' is an adjective which means suitable, favorable, or well-timed for a particular purpose, often suggesting a moment that leads to success. It describes, in brief, something happening at the right moment, making it advantageous.

Let us learn grammar:                                                 Just as we should learn when we must use the articles, we must know when not to use the articles. When referring to the primary function of places like school, college, university, temple, hospital, prison, we need not use any articles.                                                                        Let me give an easy to remember example. Kasab went to jail (primary function as he is a convict), but the journalists went to the jail to interview him.                                                       2)I am a lecturer. I go to college to teach. My  students'  parents come to the college to watch the dhol performance.                                    3)She is a doctor. She goes to hospital. The relatives of the patient visit the hospital

Vision

On January 4 is celebrated the birth anniversary of Louis Braille. As he empowered the life of the visually impaired through the invention of the tactile mode of reading known as the Braille script, the day is also celebrated as the World Braille Day.

Given the era of the AI-empowered modes of sight improvement, given the aural ways of helping the affected, given the very many softwares, much better is now the life of the visually impaired than it was even a decade ago. There is, moreover, a huge awareness of the human rights of the visually impaired.

Yet has 'vision' improved? That indeed is the moot question. Unfortunately, however, the answer to this query is a big 'no'. In fact, though the physical 'sight' may have encouragingly found many a ways of improvement, 'vision' is getting dimmer and dimmer by the day.

Let us look at a few concrete examples. Remember our blog yesterday that listed a number of women who formally began teaching women, education for women as early as 1811! Yet the power of the enshrined vision is such that truth, factually established through serious scholarship, pales before a convenient casteist vision! 

Such is the impairment of vision these days! Everything is now a group dependent narrative. Depending on the group you belong to, you can maraude any factual truth, too. If your victim does not belong to any power clique, not even God would be able to help her/him, as all sorts of narratives would be released to falsify a truth, a reality, a fact!

In addition to such group identity, what seems to be clouding vision is the self-centred-ness. If an immediate benefit, however small, to self is to be managed, people can trample mercilessly any relationship.  Such are the blinds, the categorical imperatives Kant referred to, made of class, caste, creed kind of usual favourites to plain simple selfishness that totally blurs realities. That is the vision these days! What such victimisers do not  realise is that they would sooner, and not  much later, be the next victims of such a vision!

Pratima@ Opaque vision may blind many to their own imminent victimhood!

Quote of the day:                                                     "Vision," clarifies Jonathan Swift, one of the most ethical of satirists, "is the art of seeing what is invisible to most." 

Word of the day:blueprint                                        A blueprint is the vision of an enriching future. It can be a roadmap to a great vision of the future.

Let us learn grammar:                                                We do not use any article with the uncountable nouns. We work hard so that we can earn our bread and butter, for instance. I do not like rice, but coffee is my favourite.                                                                     However, when we specify the uncountable, the definite article 'the' has to be used. Let me give you an example or two. I prefer coffee to tea. The Bru coffee is better than the Nescafe. Let us avoid butter and ghee, say the nutritionists. The Amul butter and the Chitale ghee are preferred by many home-makers though.

Accepting alternative versions

 What makes one truly human(e)? I suppose, it is accepting that an alternative reality, which may defy your interpretation(s), exists. If you insist that only your version IS the reality, you are falsifying life itself.

Let me give you an example or two. If you think that only your childhood was THE best one, you have neither seen nor understood the varieties of life which is far more complex. Yet another example could be the so-called obsession with some innocent person, and thereby spreading the vulgarest and the vilest rumours about an absolutely innocent woman out of your brainless vindictiveness. Who gives any creep any right to "finish off" clean lives?

Now yet another interesting example! Who initiated, who is the first person who began women's education in India? J. Sai Deepak provides many gazetted proofs of the South Indian realities. As for the then Bombay province, let me tell you, circa March, 1824, it was Gangabai whose brilliant efforts came to a sudden close due to the outbreak of plague.

The Missionary efforts, that had supported Gangabai, continued. In 1826, two hundred and four girls were studying in Mission school. In 1827, Cynthia Farrar came to India from Boston, and superbly continued the tradition. Later, her 1839 school in Ahmednagar had a student, Savitribai Phule. Jyotiba Phule himself praised Farrar's 'teacher training programme', and admitted Savitribai there before initiating the Pune school. Farrar continued her support later, too.

In the then Calcutta province, the story is richer still. There are women educators such as Hoti Vidyalankar, for instance, who ran a school for women as early as 1811! Not only are there many more Bengali women educators who ran schools, even night schools, for women, but there are also women editors who ran journals/magazines for women. All such details are corroborated by contemporaneous documents, including gazettes.

Why not accept the reality then, instead of insisting on an established narrative, which, moreover, suited the colonisers? While the Dilip Mandal kind of fabrication is absolutely problematic, ignoring an existing genealogy because it is inconvenient to one's own (casteist?) narrative(s) is incomprehensible, too!

Pratima@Historical facts must be accepted as they are. As more and more historical documents emerge, become accessible and available, may be, the existing theories need to be re-written. That honest objectivity has to be the base of scholarship.                                  Otherwise, scholarship would be like the now extinct Phoebus Bulb Company that consciously created bulbs that would not last long so that the company would flourish, though at the expense of the customers!

Quote of the day:                                                       "Should we be (re)writing history just to make people feel good? That is not histroy. That is psychiatry," asserts Edward I. Koch.

Word of the day: bigotry.                                           Bigotry refers to an unreasonable and stubborn attachment to one's own beliefs, resulting in intolerance toward those who hold differing views.

A unique day

 January 3 is unique this year. Each year it is, given the birth anniversary of Savitribai Phule. This year, it is the planetary alignment that makes it special; in fact, simply unique. 

It is the full moon day today. This very first full moon in 2026 happens to be a supermoon. Perigee wise, the moon is the closest to the earth. Simultaneously, perihelion wise, the earth is as close as is possible to the sun. In other words, we can say that the sun, the moon and the earth are as close to each other as is cosmically possible. 

As if that is not enough, the earth is at its fastest orbital speed today which makes the imminent meteor shower most remarkably visible. Whenever such cosmic alignments take place, I regret staying in a city as the artificial lights dim such glory.

Earlier, I used to attend the planetarium kind of events to watch such unique cosmic combos through a powerful telescope. In the last week of February, 2026, six planets are going to appear in a row literally, and are, moreover, going to be visible to the naked eye. Here is hoping that I would get to see Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune orbiting in a row!

Pratima@ Each full moon day, I remember Aai ardently because she, despite her aching knees, would make it a point to watch the full moon every month in her eightieth year as it was the year of the "Sahastra Chandra Darshan". Neither rain nor cold nor the moon rising/being visible late could deter her. I love and hugely respect such unwavering commitment.

Quote of the day:                                                        "The sky is an endless dream," says Ralph Waldo Emerson. YES, indeed!

Word(s) of the day:                                                   1)Perigee means the point in the orbit of the moon (or even a satellite) at which it is nearest to the earth.                                                                  2) Perihelion refers to the point in a planet's (or every celestial body's) elliptical orbit where it is closest to the Sun, occurring annually for the Earth roughly around January 3, when it is about 3 million miles closer to the Sun than at its farthest point (aphelion) in July.                                                      As it is the week-end, we would not learn grammar. Hence let us understand a little more how such terms are constructed.                The prefix "peri-" comes from Greek, and means "around, about, near". In Greek, "ge" is the earth, while "helios" is the sun. Thus is it easy to remember such terms that refer to these distant objects and their 'peri'pheries.

N.B.: May be, the God is offered all the veggies as the "naivaidya" today, the Shakambhari (the name, too, supports this interpretation) Pournima, as the earth that gives us all the plants is the closest both to the moon and the sun.

How to...?

 How to wake people up? About empty glory, I mean. That is the worry. Let me give a few examples which should clarify the issues underlying the angst of any sensitive soul. 

Visit any household these days, (but, of course, online! Who invites whom home these days?) and the impression that would be created would be that their kids are overflowing with talent. 

If you were to quietly observe these talent bombs, what do you find? Sorry to have to say it, but all that is there is 'secondary': they can create reels, they can construct rhymes, they can run threads, for instance. Now it is an open secret that the ChatGPT (and/or any number of such AI versions) 'manages' such talent halo around any head! 

Visit any campus event. It would be the same 'games', the same dance steps, the same empty  revellery, the same eatery 'thelas', and so on, and so on, "the same" being the underlying motif. 

Why the worry then? Well, if everything is so very same, and hence, by implication, without 'thinking', without genuine creativity, where is the uniqueness that defines an individual? Yet another grave issue would be the following. If life is just such empty, repetitive fun, have we already arrived the stage of "no work" that M/S Musk, Gates and others of the ilk have been promising five years hence!?! 

Pratima@No, I do not have anything against fun or enjoyment. The worry is against its being empty and repetitive! Just let us think about this 'reality' check. Every season each channel floods the spectators with so much 'talent'. Where are they thereafter, please?!? Are we creating empty crowns on the heads of the next generation? What happens when the reality hits one fine day that there is NOTHING, practically NOTHING, underneath! That is the question! 

Quote of the day:                                                        "Where is the glory," asks Rick Riordan," in repeating what others have done?" 

Word of the day: vainglory.                              Vainglory is the excessive pride in one's own minor achievements.

Let us learn grammar:                                               Let us now start looking at the use of the definite article "the". Let us begin with the basic most. "The" is used when a common, countable, singular noun has a specificity of reference. May be, it is referred to for the second time in a given context, for instance.

Let us look at an example. Let us read a story. "Once upon a time, there was a lion. The lion lived in a cave. In the cave, scurried about a mouse. The mouse thought no end of himself. " Thus would continue the story. Look at the use of "a" and "the" in these introductory lines. We shall understand further aspects of this "defining" as we go by.

A few questions as a new year begins

If it is the very first day of the new year, and you get a chance to listen to a Ph.D. viva voce, it can indeed be a very happy feel, right? Luckily, the BMCC Research Center provided me with such an opportunity this morning. I could attend online the viva of Dr. Lanjekar Sir's research student. 

For me, listening to it was yet another lesson in rural distress. The study related to 2014-15 to 2019-20. It detailed the usual sad story which P. Sainath, the noted "Hindu" columnist and the author of a much acclaimed book entitled "Everybody Loves a Good Drought", has repeatedly brought to the notice of every sensitive soul.

Hence even in Galande Sir's presentation, all the usual suspects, poverty, structural inequities, caste discrimination and farmer suicides, were all present. 

I would have liked to open up a deeply connected but slightly different scope/area. The most obvious fall-out of the terrible rural distress is the huge internal migration. To Pune daily in droves come such rural labourers or even farmers with marginal land-holding. 

Honestly, passing by Swargate, my unavoidable bus-stop, is a vista etched in deep tragedy where, by the roadside, live families who are yet to be absorbed in to the umpteen dingy zopadpatties/slums surrounding the Parvati Hill, now almost a hillock, for instance.

It is easy to talk en passim about the fast pace of urbanisation. These migrant families, who make the faceless majority of the urban swell, how do they exist, especially when they also have to bear the expenses of the aged left behind in the company of the bare barren lands? 

Mostly, they take up gig jobs. They are the backbone of the gig economy which began as a fall-out of the post-LPG era, and flourished like the weed in a farm in the post-Covid era. I would have liked to discuss how this gig economy has affected not merely the rural lower income group, but by extension the rural distress as well.

When the head of a family leads a hand to mouth existence in a city, given the gig economy, how does he, can he at all, support the family back at home? In other words, rural distress flows in to urban disaster, and urban poverty feeds in to rural tragedy, and this vicious circle, running almost in a loop, refuses to subside.

A rice plantation farmer, who drives an auto in Pune, was once sharing his terrible tragedy. I had to travel in his auto because it suddenly started pouring. It was early October. So in his acre or two of a farm, the crop was ready, to be cut before Diwali. With the sudden showers, the ready grains would rot, could not be dried and stored as they thus start to germinate! He told me the same sad story of the previous two years, too!

He was driving the auto-rickshaw as a driver, not as the owner. In a way, it, too, was a variant of the gig economy which now is operational at all levels, almost to mid- management, and in many professions, including teaching!

What could be the solutions? I had suggested collective or community farming and vertical farming alias hydroponics as well as alternative crops more amenable to excessive rain. People have come up with the idea of the corporatising of the farming industry, which could be debated. Such solutions might help rural farm distress. 

As the Indian economy itself is even today more of the unorganised sector variety, what happens to the workers caught in the jaws of the gig economy in most big cities and metros? What about the total lack of any safety nets or social welfare network for them? Aplenty are the questions, answers amiss right now, but hopefully emerging!

Pratima@Yes, across the world, given the climate imbalance, all these issues, rural farm distress, internal migration, city gig workers are dominant. May be, we can learn from those solutions as well.

Quote of the day:                                                       "Out of difficulties," argues Jean de la Bruyère, "grow miracles."  

Word if the day: hydroponics.               Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil, using mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent, often with an inert medium (like perlite or coco coir) for root support, enabling faster growth, less water use, and higher yields in small or controlled spaces, suitable for herbs, greens, and vegetables year-round. 

Let us learn grammar:                                               As we have already learnt to use the indefinite article "a" (it goes with a common, countable, singular noun used for the first time), let us now look at how to use "an". "An", too, is used with a common, countable, singular noun. This noun, however, has a vowel sound word initially.                                       Let me give you "an example".                           "A university"  often has "an hour" long lecture.