Off the record
Breathing fire
Whenever and wherever an agitation is to be launched, one can find the irrepressible Medha Patkar leading from the front. So a day after she spewed venom on Nitish regime for its inaction in Forbesganj firing incident in which four persons from the minority community, including an infant, were killed, she hit the streets in Patna slamming Bihar Chief Minister for shoddy rehabilitation work in Kosi region.
Regretting that no action had been taken against those responsible for the August 2008 Kosi flood disaster, the veteran social activist said, “Only a few hundred houses have been constructed in the name of rehabilitation of Kosi victims, while the silt brought by the Kosi had destroyed any possibility of cultivation on nearly 50,000 acres of land.”
Medha went on to charge Nitish with only following the directives of World Bank and Asian Development Bank, and caring little for the homeless. Shortly after she gave a call to the slum-dwellers to stay put on the land occupied by them, she hit the main thoroughfares of Patna and marched towards the residence of the chief minister. “Nitish is neither giving time nor is showing any inclination to talk to us. So we are marching towards his residence,” the fiery leader said during her brisk walk.
It was, however, after much persuasion and intervention of senior officials that she relented to have a face-to-face with the Bihar chief minister. Eventually, she, along with a ten-member delegation, met Nitish’s secretary and handed him over a memorandum before winding up her Bihar trip.
It was only after she left the state capital, the top babus heaved a sigh of relief.
Abhay Kumar, Patna
Quite on the record
Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi has been travelling and campaigning extensively to recover lost ground for the party in Uttar Pradesh. Gandhi, who does not believe in much interaction with the media, decided to have off-the-record discussions with journalists after continuous persuasion from scribes covering his poll campaign in the country’s largest and most populous state.
Gandhi’s media managers told journalists that the Congress general secretary will have off-the-record discussions only and that nothing should be reported and published. However, next day a Hindi daily newspaper came out with a report based on the discussions with the Congress’ star campaigner in the state and quoted him that “Rahul Gandhi told reporters in an off-the-record discussion...”
Khalid Akhter, New Delhi
Grammatology of a memoir
If a ‘memoir’ is written from personal memory, then you better not tinker with it. This was the ‘grammatology’ of memoir that veteran editor Vinod Mehta found himself prescribing as he was in Chennai on Friday to launch his latest book, ‘Lucknow Boy’.
‘If You are going to write a memoir, you have to be completely honest; or don’t write a memoir at all,” was Mehta’s advice, saying that he began with this ground rule before embarking on his memoir: “I am not going to fool around with memory, neither embellish it, nor suppress anything.”
And thus spake Mehta of all his angst in a thought-provoking and sensational autobiography that also reflects, as he put it, “all sorts of useless wisdom I collected as Journalist in the last 40 years.”
From being shocked to read in England as a student in the early 1960s’ when the British Press portrayed Nehru as a “war monger” in the wake of the Chinese crisis, struggling to educate himself with wider issues that went beyond his cosy Lucknowi world of ‘chasing University girls’, to confessing to a relationship with a woman in the UK, Mehta poured it all. Former West Bengal governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi, among the audience, even had a word of praise for Mehta’s “candour and disarming self-criticism.”
M R Venkatesh, Chennai
