Lead Kindly Lead

Today, I complete 22 years in journalism. In this span, I have earned neither the glory of celebrity scribes nor the power and prestige of go-getters who decorate imprints in bold letters. I have made little money beyond what is needed for a comfortable, want-free existence and I have no pantheon of awards to display. I am at best a 4-point footnote in a fat volume on the history of world journalism, falling short of all the popular measures of success and visibility.
Yet, my career and life couldn’t have been more successful. After these many years, the spark of adventure that I felt on my first day in the profession is still alive and my yearning to tell a good story still intact. I fall in love with my job every day just as headlong as when I first flirted with it. I wake up every morning — sometimes mid-morning and sometimes the wee hours – saying a silent thanks to the clash of circumstances that made the choice for me.
And oh, what a journey it has been!
My byline has been published in every newspaper of consequence in the world; but that wasn’t always a good thing.  One day in 1993, I went to the Marina Beach in Chennai with a friend who treated me to a packet of flavoured chickpeas that we so lovingly call “sundal.” And he was more embarrassed than I was, to discover that the snack had been wrapped with pages of one of my stories. When this extraordinary coincidence was pointed out to the boy-vendor, he sheepishly explained that this particular magazine’s paper had just the right dimensions for a “sundal pottalam.”
Then there was the astrologer who didn’t know his future. In 1994, when the Shoemaker Levy 9 Comet was going to crash into Jupiter, all the beat reporters were talking to scientists and writing about the astronomical impact of the event. Being a beatless beast of burden, I had to think of a story idea that wouldn’t intrude into the their zonal privileges. Astrology was a natural choice. I spoke to a string of “jyothish mahamunis,” asking them about the zodiacal storm that the event was forecast to kick up. One particular seer gave me an appointment for the same afternoon, obviously excited about his own good luck in being interviewed by India’s largest business newspaper.
When I went to his house at the appointed hour, the gate and the main door were both open and the whole two-storey house dead silent. There was no answer to my several knocks. I entered tentatively, ready to be told off. A young man passed me from the house and into the street, without acknowledging my presence. A lady, with much of her saree’s edge covering her mouth, peeped out from upstairs only to nod to me and vanish.
And then, the sight I saw in the living room! A capacious gentleman, apparently out of breath, was stretched out on the floor with cotton in his nostrils and a feeble lamp on the starboard side. His toes had been joined in holy morbidity.
I was later told that the astrologer granted me the appointment, watered some plant, had lunch and lay down to rest. He never woke up from his siesta. His other appointment took precedence.
And that proved to be my first and last story involving astrology (though I often write stock-market analysis these days).
When a 19-year-old boy meets a girl of the same age to discuss sex, you would expect a steamy interaction of genetic impulses. When I met this girl in Arakkonam, we discussed her gang rape. Every single detail. She told me how her husband became friends with 10 riff-raffs to form a football team. How the entire team would descend on her house on Sundays for lunch. How the thugs often played offside with her, eyeing her voraciously. How she warned her husband of their intentions. How he ignored her. How she got news one late evening that her husband had been injured badly in the field. How she rushed there, leaving behind their toddler crying. How the news proved to be a trap. And how she was raped by ten people on the field in front of her husband.
Then, who can forget my meeting an assassin on May 21, 1991?
Haribabu, the photographer implicated in the killing of Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister of India, was en route to buy the deadly garland made of sandalwood shavings, when I and my dearest photographer-friend, S. Kumaresan, bumped into him. The location was Royapettah Clock Tower. The time was just after 3 p.m., seven hours before the assassination. Kumaresan introduced me to him, him to me, but it seemed as though Haribabu ended his weak handshake a bit too soon. Little did I suspect that my new acquaintance would be dead within hours, having fulfilled his part in the killing.
July 16, 2004. I was at a burnt-down building in Kumbakonam rummaging for the tell-tale signs of the terrible fire that had engulfed the place just hours earlier. One school bag caught my attention, for it was virtually untouched by the flames. In it were a lunch box (curd rice, predictably), a few textbooks and notebooks. There was also a receipt for the payment of school fees. The girl whose bag it was had paid for the entire year.
Eighty three children perished in that fire, including the girl with the fee receipt. The school had been built in violation of all safety rules. The owner had crammed hundreds of children on each floor to maximize his profits from running this “English-Medium” school. He had created an extra floor by covering the open terrace with thatched roof. His austerity extended to the mid-day meal kitchen too. He used a fire-wood stove. In the July heat of the Cauvery Delta, even a damp cloth can catch fire but he let dried-leaf roofs to hang above the fireplace. The children had no chance.
It was also the first and only time I cried after reporting a story. It would change me forever.
The death of children is the worst thing a journalist can be called to report on. And I had to do it again before the year 2004 was out. The Tsunami, of course!
Parents stood in a long queue that wound its way to a heap of little corpses. A bulldozer was on standby near a huge pit. A couple had to come forward, identify their child/children from the heap and move away to await further instructions. Once the deaths were documented, the bulldozer scooped the kids and put them in the pit. It also covered them with the soil. Burial over.
I stood there on the side, thinking of my three-year-old daughter back in my Bangalore home. For a moment, I couldn’t help thinking what if I were one of the parents here. I didn’t know if I could handle that.
Just then, I saw one of the kids being buried was not in soil-ravaged clothes, but in bright silk skirt and blouse. I was later told that her parents had made one last request to the bulldozer driver, pulled out their child from the heap, dressed her up in her most favourite dress and returned her to the heap.
That piece of journalism made me a better parent that day.
These days, as I lounge in the much gentler climes of financial-market journalism, I think of those countless people whose lives crossed mine in comic and in tragic circumstances. The assassin, the astrologer, the naked wife in the football field and the little faces that faded away behind a fire or bull-dozed soil.
It is for them that I am in journalism. My job is to tell their stories. If I can refocus away from my occasional but alternating bouts of hubris and self pity, and reinforce the belief that positions of power and fame don’t matter in this profession, but a commitment to stand by the underdog and be the voice to the voiceless, I would have succeeded.
Till death do us part.