News today is sensational, fast and often fake — attributes I have been taught and trained to avoid. But there is a fourth attribute to news that journalists don’t wear on their sleeves. It defies all stereotypical notions associated with the profession. Emotion, it is. Newsmen are reckoned to be detached and untouched. Almost Zen-like. They are the ones who can cover a gruesome tragedy and then head straight out to have a hearty meal. On many levels, the intrepid journalist is not much different from a beat cop: Both encounter the worst of mankind. Both are exposed to the scum of the world. Both put on a brave face, admirably reticent to tragedies and comedies. But beneath the façade, there is a beating heart — one that pines for that little girl who was raped and murdered; one that sobs for that beautiful woman whose husband was murdered by her own father; and one that prays for the safety of those twelve hapless boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. Write Feelings is all about this. It brings out the emotion that I had bottled up during four decades of his journalistic existence. These are words that the heart refuses to say out loud but gush out in the comfort of solitude. A cathartic release.
Know Write Feelings
“Even as he flirted with the Web, the Print stayed at his heart. It was a lifelong affair. He was a foot soldier of the Print who vehemently fought to safeguard the queen of the media. Peekay would have preferred a shower of ticker tapes on his last journey to the cemetery of Lino and Print veterans. He would have wished for one of his students to read the psalms of articles and prepositions from Wren and Martin as his mortal remains were spooled for the last edition. He still wouldn’t have forgiven those who believed English is a smorgasbord of words arranged on a platter with a smattering of articles sprinkled randomly.”
OBITUARY OF A LIVING SCRIBE
“Tim Berners-Lee, the “www” inventor, was still a toddler. Karen and Edward Zuckerberg were yet to conceive the idea of a Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. Romance still blossomed. Love still happened. Politics were still played. Elections were still fought. Congratulations and condolences were still conveyed. The world was devoid of all the dangers of the digital world. Life was all about the goodness digitisation has wrenched from humanity.”
TEA SHOP AND SOCIAL NETWORKING
“I have a dream that one day, India’s 200 million Dalits will be better off without the piecemeal system of reservation thrown into their begging bowl every time the cries for equality ring in the corridors of power. I have a dream that the sons of Dalits, the sons of landlords, the sons of Hindus, the sons of Muslims, and the sons of Christians will all be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
INDIA OF MY DREAMS
“Mnorama was raped. She was my friend. The palm-leaf fence between our plots never divided our hearts. My mother didn’t say it in so many words, but conveyed. he tragedy in a carefully crafted lingo that missed the enormity of the crime. At the innocent age of 13 or 14, we didn’t know what rape was until a college-going dude in the neighbourhood explained. Manorama was one among us, a battalion of village urchins who roamed around doing what normal kids did. The violator, three-four years older to us, was a black sheep, a ruffian, among us”
WOMEN AREN'T THEIR BIRTHRIGHT
“It’s my unquenchable yearning to live life again. And live with all its follies. Give me a second chance, I would tread my own footprints. I would sing the songs of experience with the same village girls.”
IT'S YESTERDAY ONCE MORE