F Scott Fitzgerald's ' The Great Gatsby' will always remain somewhere at the peak of my list of favourites for its scintillating language and sarcasm.
I couldnt identify with the author more when he says - I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me a victim of not a few veteran bores.
Unsought confidences would vex me earlier since I have never really perceived the role of an agony aunt as a desirable one but being privy to the secret griefs of unknown and known people did exhilarate me in a certain way. I was the keeper of stories - that’s how I preferred to look at it.
I always had a deep yearning for stepping out of my own skin to inhabit other worlds.
Books then were the best mode of transport that helped me glide to different places ..places unheard of ..places that have probably never existed. It is easy to travel back and forth between covers. Books have allowed me to take on new identities, explore new places and assume different roles. When it comes to a story, I could wish, I could write it down and I could have the world. You write the world castle and it conjures up one. The idea of love could be achieved with a single idea –a ‘glance’ - “his luminous eyes fleetingly held mine and my heart stuttered at the thought of him…his walnut brown eyes shaded by fanned lashes met mine…”. Words can sometimes help you invoke images more articulate and evocative than tangible objects. I always wondered what was the central cohesive element that propelled me towards books, pictures, films or peoples lives - 'STORIES'. Each one of them tells a story.
A few days back I came across a picture in the newspaper. It spoke volumes in a silent sort of way amid all the cacophony over whether Salman Khan deserved the sentence that was handed out to him for killing antelopes of the endangered species. It was a picture of a woman from the bishnoi community hailing from a small pocket of Jodhpur. It was a telling picture of the woman breast-feeding a black buck fawn. Therein lied a huge story of compassion, of reverence. A blackbuck fawn was injured by poachers, who wanted to make away with it in their jeep. The Bishnois rescued it and the fawn, which was only a few days old, was brought home by a young man. His wife who had borne him a child only few a days ago felt really moved by the plight of the fawn. She breast-fed the fawn along with her own son and both of them would sleep with her on the same bed. The fawn grew up and when it was able to fend for itself, they released it in the forest. It kept on visiting its foster mother and the house it grew up in even after attaining adulthood. The prominence of stories in the life of a journalist can never be exaggerated. One of the spin-off benefits of being a journalist is the opportunity to catch up with people, who unwittingly teach you a lot about yourself. Vicarious learning is one form of learning that we tend to discount but people’s lives and their eccentric dreams can be your classroom.
Imagination can be your vehicle. Fantasy sometimes can provide an ideal excuse to tell the truth about the quirky quality of human existence. Stories can miniaturize the vast space in the expanse of my mind.
Fortuity smiled upon me and my job allowed me the chance to meet P Sainath, the Magsaysay, Asia's leading development journalist - a term he himself avoids - writing frequently about issues such as poverty and the effects of industrialization on India. He is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award for journalism, literature and creative communication arts. A very pertinent observation that he made was that a lot of what we call journalism today is stenography to the powerful. We are stenographers to power. We basically reflect what the establishment reflects.
Media is in the business of implicit consensus…the focus of each medium is to dwell on what the competitor has covered and not to concentrate on something that probably all the media had overlooked. The most important function of journalism is to bend it back to whence it sprang- to the lives of common people.
In 1992, many poor peasants from Thane, mainly adivasis, marched into Mumbai in protest, with their starving children and they congregated near the Stock Market. That day, the Sensex touched an all time-high of 2,000. The press churned the staple photograph with an obvious caption: "Farmers Demand Remunerative prices". Actually, those farmers were saying something else. They were saying the devastation inflicted on the public distribution system was hurting them, the collapsing public health system was endangering their lives and that they could not afford the new costs being inflicted on them at a time when spending on the poor was being slashed. Their march ended at the Stock Exchange but we were too busy monitoring the Sensex to notice the protesters on the ground. Two weeks later, 29 children had died of hunger-related problems in Thane.
Then of course, the press disparaged the Government; there were big stories that exposed the government's public distribution system. It was a failure though of the media to have missed the huge story of the crumbling public distribution system earlier. He was queried in terms of what was the best way to sell such a story to your editor in the age where news content is driven by TRP ratings. His answer to this pertinent question is something that will always guide me throughout my career as a journalist. He said --Don’t state statistics…tell the story that lies beneath. He gave an example of how one of the ‘Lakme Fashion week’ events coincided with the high incidence of suicides of Vidarbha farmers. Statistics in terms of the abysmal ratio of reporters covering the plight of these farmers to the number of those covering the ‘Lakme Fashion week’ pointed towards the story which was screaming to be told….but we obviously missed it…we missed the juxtaposition. We missed the juxtaposition of the buoyant emergent superpower of a country that India is touted as with the country, where the dominant population consists of toiling agriculturists…farmers. The irony was that the models strutting at the Lake Fashion week were displaying cotton wear…and the Vidharbha farmers who were killing themselves were cotton farmers.
Paradoxes make the best stories… the magic of conflict….as I love to call it. Tell it like it is and the irony will work its charm lending a luminescence to a poignant story.
To digress a bit, I would love to mention one of my friends who has been among the ones who has been feeding my passion..whose many observations and points of views have been a source of redemption for me and whose friendship will always be a sort of emancipation for me….and I stand by the testimonial I wrote for her on Orkut…she tunes into the secret hopes and dreams of people…including mine..and verbalises some of the most inexplicable feelings – Indira.
She kindly parted with a few of her favourite lines from Tarun Tejpal’s “Alchemy of Desire”.. which broke the spell of my mental block and urged me to write this blog after a space of about three months. Here are those lines.
"More than anyone else, it is lovers who need the gift of the story. They need to tell stories to each other continually to keep themselves from disappearing.
Passionate love has nothing to do with any obvious attributes of the lover - class, intellect, looks, character. It has everything to do with the stories the lover can tell.
When the stories are stirring, complex, profound - like great fiction they need never be crudely true - then so is the love. When the stories are thin - their grammar sloppy, their life-force weak, their plot tawdry - then so is the love.
The stories lovers tell each other are tales about themselves, their past, their future, their uniqueness, their inevitability, their invincibility. Stories about their dreams, fantasies, the nooks and crannies of their fears and perversions. Those who can tell their stories with power create powerful love. Those who cant, never know the emotion.
Love is the story - the wine in the bottle. The teller is merely the bottle, of some significance only till the wine is tasted. Grand bottles die on the shelf if the wine fails - if the stories flounder.
We all know beautiful people who have never known love.
Like great fiction, the stories lovers tell each other can be about anything and can be told in any tone. They can have the exuberance of Dickens of be spare like Hemingway; they can teem as Joyce or confound as Kafka; they can be mad as Lewis Carroll or sad as Thomas Hardy. They can be anything - grim, comic, philosophic, loony. But they must be true.
In the peculiarly false way great fictions are true.
In the peculiarly false way great love is true."
-This is one of the most convincing explanations of love I’ve read by far.
One word probably to describe me is someone who is perpetually questing. I have always ruminated about the one passion that defines me, gives us a name other than the one my parents gave me, one space that I can call my own, one activity that I can claim to know everything about, one identity besides the one everyone knows me by….and I wish I’m known someday for the stories that I tell .. stories that I’ve heard and recounted.
So much to take, so much to give
Before I leave, a million lives to live.
