In the driver's seat

HELEN KELLER once said, "I don't want peace that passeth understanding. I want that understanding which bringeth peace." Starting her book My Own Witness with a Tukaram verse about dropping out after pulling the hard plough, it seems a frazzled Mrinal Pande too wants more than anything else to understand the frenetic world of Indian journalism. Here the commitment is to glamour, not truth, and probe sensationalised reality. Disaster and catastrophe are reduced to catchphrase and sound byte. Pande examines these paradoxes, injustices, hypocrisies and false values, with the assurance of someone who has viewed it all upclose as the editor of Hindi publications, and as senior editorial advisor to NDTV. She is well known to TV viewers as news and anchor person. With her literary family background, she has published novels, short stories and essays in Hindi as well as English.

What irks Pande's protagonist, Krishna, most is the yawning gulf between Hindi and English journalism, in both the print and the visual media. The entire book is an attempt to raise issues concerning the vernacular media, the how and why of the stepmotherly treatment they get at every stage. The largest section of readers/viewers in India opt for their news in Hindi, but it is the English media which get stamped as the national voice, the upholder of the world's largest democracy. Independent India remains a slave to English supremacy. "Hindi and other vernaculars, once forced into regional ghettoes, had grown uncouth, xenophobic and mean."

So much gets communicated in the Prologue itself. The following chapters expand on this theme, trying to make it dense with associations of other socio-political, cultural and spiritual derelictions which result from such an unnatural, unhealthy divide. Later the author has an obvious image for it. The Hindi journalist is like the untouchable whom brahmin grandma fed in a separate set of vessels, from a safe distance. They were necessary, but pollutants all the same. The sweepers accepted the separation and hoped that being good would ensure their rebirth in a higher caste!

The thin narrative centres around Krishna, who, to the consternation of family and friends, gives up teaching English in a college to join a Hindi news agency. The place smells of asafoetida and mustard oil, the deskmen are ageing, scruffy and bleak, the ambience is dingy and disenchanting, the pay dismal. But she feels compelled to continue, though almost entirely without hope of any betterment. To be a woman was a disadvantage in that feudal network. "She learned ... to feign ignorance or indifference when sexist remarks were deliberately flung her way.

"She trained herself to roll with the punches and deliver them herself." She learns to be unflinchingly rude.

She finds too that the Hindiwallahs have "no class" in anybody's eyes, in the political or social worlds. They get grudging entry into Third World embassies, especially if they translate some poet from the Eastern Bloc into Hindi. But mostly they had no options but to draw poor salaries and contemplate their "English" colleagues working for the same publishing house, swinging it everywhere, comfortably ensconsced in the New building of comparative luxury and elegance. If you think adversity united them, think again.

We move through the years and events, from the Prudential Cup to the assasination of a Prime Minister, the razing down of a mosque, uneasy coalitions at the Centre, beauty contests frontpaged in newspapers across the subcontinent ... multinationals springing up "between the democracy's legs". She sees former firebrands cooling down to spiritual pursuits, and newscasters turning into assured astrologers for the nation, if not its gods. Krishna is pained by the feeling that the real news is slipping her by.

The last part of the book describes Krishna's stint with TV, as senior editor in the Hindi bulletins of the best known English channel. Disillusionment swamps her even faster here than elsewhere. With her mother's illness sharpening her sense of values, she resigns the "cushy" job which demands demeaning compromises.

"Abusive leaders. Poverty. Massacres. Protest rallies ... the brilliant stories and interviews gurgling out of Bihar, the besieged State where the upper castes and backward castes had unleashed a bloody river of vendettas. They made it seem like a distant place to the viewers - not an Indian state at all, but just an exclusive preserve of a certain TV empire."

Reads good, doesn't it? But that is about the only time the book flames with genuine emotion. The rest drums itself into you with the tedium of a morally edifying lecture. Also, Pande hardly succeeds in getting beyond a barrage of information, gossip, and easily recognisable sketches of Delhi personalities in government and media circles. This trivialises the endeavour, sidelining whatever issue it details, to indulge in guessing games of who's who. Nor do the characters - including the protagonist - ever come to trimensional life, with the fleeting exception of the mother. Krishna is a convenient peg for what the author wants us to know and feel.

But the major problem with the book is that it doesn't rise above the observations and records of straight autobiography. Creative fiction demands something more than good writing and skilled assemblage of fact and purpose. Pande is unable to transform her undoubtedly rich personal experience into something transpersonal. Thereby arriving at insight, or understanding.

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

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