Journalistic Fraud

INDIA THAT IS BHARAT

People can be really weird. Especially people who take up journalism.Satiricus knows. Satiricus knows because he is a journalist. Still he was not a little surprised to find that it takes all sorts of journalists to make the world. Take this female, Lucy Mathen, who was the famous (or lately infamous) BBC’s first female Asian news broadcaster. It was a well-paid, even glamorous, job. Then what happened? What happened was that she mistook the job of journalism as something else altogether as a way to change the world. To quote her, “I thought the world could be changed through journalism. Ten years later I felt like a fraud.” So she gave up journalism, became an ophthalmologist, an eye-doctor, and now goes about curing people’s blindness.

See? It took this lady a full decade to discover something so obvious. Satiricus could have told her so right in the beginning, for as a practising pen-pusher he has been faithfully following this fraud. He could have even pointed out to her that the bigger the fraud you are as a journalist, the more eminent you are as a journalist. Take, for instance, this reportage of the RSS chief’s recent remarks on the subject of marriage. He said one thing, the journalists reported quite another.Why? Because the eminent frauds running English newspapers are illustriously illiterate in Hindi. And why shouldn’t they be? Had not Sonia Gandhi once chided an Italian journalist, saying, “Speak English, we are Indian”? What does that mean? It clearly means you cannot be an Indian if you knew Hindi. At least not a respectable fraud if you are an Indian journalist. Fortunately, for journalist Satiricus he is equally illiterate in both English and Hindi. That saves him from being a big fraud as a journalist. Only a small one.

Biblical Exclusivism

Why is Satiricus a Hindu? Simple, he doesn’t have the brains to be anything else. Hindu simpletons like him are taught that God takes care of all his creations, from men and women to birds and beasts. But that is the Hindu god, with his dismally disorganised divinity. The Christian god, on the other hand, is impressively organised. He has separate saints servicing separate sections of society. Satiricus recalls that Encyclopedia Americana has a full page listing which Christian saint is in charge of which Christian class. There was even a patron saint for typists. So he was not unduly surprised that there should be a patron saint specifically for domestic pets as well.

      Still it was interesting to recently see in the papers the photo of a woman in a church in a city in Mexico with a parrot she had brought for blessings. The caption of the picture said the ritual was part of a ceremony commemorating the patron saint of domestic pets. That explained why this parrot went to church, but bird-brained Satiricus wondered if this bird would merit a saintly blessing. For parrots are good at parroting, and thanks to human coaching they can put up a fluent flow of foul language. In fact Satiricus recalls that some time back a parrot in the US of A had been sentenced to a week in prison for using language that was so offensive as to be an offence even by American swearing standards. That apart, the question for this non-Christian nitwit is, was this parrot a Christian to deserve the blessings of a Christian saint? Has this bird been baptized? If it was given a test in biblical theology will it pass with flying colours, or will it just manage on a wing and a prayer?

Being Celebrity

Like everybody else, Satiricus wants to make a name for himself. He thought that would be a big achievement. But now he knows better. In fact he now knows that making just one name would make him a numerical nonentity, he needs to make a string of half a dozen names. Only that would make him a celebrity. At least that is what Hollywood celebrities seem to say. Take, for instance, the Hollywood star Uma Thurman. Satiricus read in the papers the other day that she has named her new-born daughter Rosalind Arusha Arkadlina Altalune Florence Thurman-Busson, finally also called Luna. See? Even if Satiricus were to make a name for himself, would he ever be able to make so many names?

Then again, if Satiricus asks himself, is there meaning to life if he cannot make a name, the answer is not unless the name has a meaning. And the deeper the better. Take this celebrity Beyonce. One of the names she gave to her child was Ivy. Actually it’s not ‘Ivy’, stupid, it’s IV, the Roman figure 4. And why four? Because four is a significant number in her (the mother’s) relation with the child’s father. That marriage is not a significant relationship goes without saying.