Hear no evil; see no evil

The tragic death of Pallavi Purkayastha is a chilling commentary on urban life today

It’s a nightmare scenario that every woman replays ever so often in the dark corners of her brain – along with the fevered prayer that it never comes true. But for Pallavi Purkayastha, that nightmare became all too real when she was attacked and killed in her Mumbai apartment by a building watchman, Sajjad Ahmed Mughal, who had become obsessed with her.

It was sometime after midnight when the lights went out in her flat; she called the building’s maintenance to complain. The electricians came upstairs to repair the fault, accompanied by the watchman. When the electricians had departed, the watchman saw his opportunity. He stole the house keys, waited for a while and then let himself in to attack Pallavi, who was by then asleep in her bedroom.

He tried to rape her, she resisted; he attacked her with a knife, she fought back. He slashed her wrists and throat. Bleeding profusely, she ran out of her flat and rang her neighbours’ bell (there are four other flats on the floor; she is believed to have rung the bells outside at least two). Nobody responded. Her assailant dragged her back into her flat and continued to attack her. He then left Pallavi Purkayastha, a 25 year old lawyer with a bright and glittering future ahead of her, to bleed quietly to death. Her murder was reported only at 5.30 am when her partner, Avik Sengupta, came back home and found her lying in a pool of blood.

I can only marvel at the bravery of this young woman who fought so doggedly against a man who was holding a knife to her throat. I can only salute the courage that led her to escape his clutches long enough to run out for help. And I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of fear and desperation her last moments must have been when nobody came to her rescue.

And while we all mourn for Pallavi Purkayastha today, her death is much more than a personal tragedy for her parents, her soon-to-be husband, family and friends. It is also a chilling commentary on urban life today.

It doesn’t matter how hard you try to stay safe. You can live in a gated community, you can have private security, you can install CCTV all around, you can have intercoms to summon help. But in the end, you are on your own. You can’t rely on the security guards who are supposed to safeguard you. And you certainly can’t hope for any help from the people next door.

It has become something of a cliché now to complain about how neighbourly ties are breaking down in our metro cities, and how people are becoming increasingly anti-social. There is certainly no denying that everyone increasingly lives in isolated silos, not caring to even know the name of the person next door. We revel in the anonymity that city life affords us, allowing us to do our own thing. And while we all have stories about neighbours from hell (whose children deface our walls with graffiti; who throw garbage over their walls into our backyards; who lure our staff away; who play loud music late into the night) our choicest abuse is reserved for those who are perceived as being ‘nosey’ – as in taking an interest in your life.

I have to confess that like most people of my generation, I have always been leery about neighbours who try to pry into my business. But today, as I sit down to write this, I can’t help but wish that Pallavi Purkayastha had been blessed by such ‘nosey’ neighbours, people who were curious enough to peep out when the bell rang late at night, and who would then take the trouble to investigate if anything was amiss.

Instead, the people living on Pallavi’s floor seem to be part of the ‘let’s not get involved’ fraternity, who turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the goings-on next door, on the grounds that it is none of their business. But even so, I imagine it takes a special sort of indifference to not respond to a blood-splattered woman ringing your doorbell in the early hours of the morning; to turn away and go back to sleep even though the landing outside is soaked with blood; to not even pick up the phone and call the police control room or emergency services.

We do not know whether Pallavi’s life could have been saved if her neighbours had intervened – if not personally than by summoning help – but at least she would have died knowing that she was not alone. The knowledge that there were people out there who cared enough to come to her rescue may have been of some comfort to her as life bled slowly out of her.

And at the very least, if her neighbours had been vigilant enough – leave alone caring enough – they could have helped apprehend her attacker who dumped the murder weapon and fled the scene. It was a stroke of good luck that the police caught up with him at the train station before he boarded the train to Kashmir. But he could just as easily have gotten away – and that really does not bear thinking about.

I can only hope and pray that those people who claim to have not heard the bell ringing in the dead of night never find themselves – or their children – in trouble. And that if they ever do, they are not met with the same indifference with which they treated that desperate, frightened young woman.

The medium is the message

Lessons the Indian media can learn from the TV coverage of the Wisconsin gurudwara shooting

All acts of senseless violence are reprehensible, but there is something particularly disturbing about an attack that takes place at a place of worship and targets people at prayer. As the news broke late on Sunday night of a shooting at a gurudwara in Wisconsin, I watched the nightmare unfold live on American TV news channels and via Twitter updates by people who were on site.

What has stayed with me since then was the incredible bravery of the president of the gurudwara, Satwant Kaleka, who lost his life in a bid to tackle the gunman; the tragic death of the priest Prakash Singh, who had just moved his wife and son to America; the helpless grief of those who stood outside wondering what had become of their loved ones inside the building; the courage of the policeman who engaged the shooter in an encounter and killed him before he could do any further damage; and the astonishing news that the Sikhs gathered outside had offered food and water to the journalists reporting on the incident as part of their ‘langar sewa’.

But as I think back on the whole episode, I am also beginning to appreciate the restraint and tact of the media coverage of the incident. And try as I may, I can’t help but contrast it unfavourably with the way we in the India media cover such acts of terrorism.

In Wisconsin, there was never any danger of the terrorists getting any tactical advantage from watching the TV news. All the news channels abided by the diktat that they should not show any footage that gave away the position of the SWAT teams that were deploying to storm the temple. The cameras also obediently pulled away from aerial shots of the gurudwara once they were asked by the authorities to do so. And despite all these precautions, they still erred on the side of caution by putting out a delayed feed so that the terrorists didn’t have any real-time information of events unfolding outside.

Contrast this with the way in which the Indian news channels covered the events of 26/11 in Mumbai. There were a cluster of TV crews outside the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels giving minute-by-minute coverage of what the security agencies were planning so that the terrorists only had to turn on a television set to find out what they were up against. Some reporters even gave away the location of where some of the hostages were hiding, thus enabling the terrorists to hunt them down and kill them.

Live pictures of every development were beamed all across the world – including Pakistan, giving the terrorists’ handlers a front-row seat to the carnage. For instance, when the NSG commandoes rappelled down on Chabad House to rescue the hostages, their operation was show in real time by most TV channels (only a couple had the wisdom to put in a time lag) thus taking away the surprise element that is crucial to any such attack.

And then there was the insensitive, even callous treatment of relatives and friends who were waiting outside hoping for news of their loved ones. It can’t have been easy having microphones thrust into their faces and asked variations of that old chestnut, “And how are you feeling?” (“Aap ko kaisa lag raha hai.”). In Winsconsin, on the other hand, the loved ones of those inside the gurudwara were corralled away from the site at a safe distance, and the media questioning – when it happened – was both sensitive and sensible.

But the pictures that still haunt me from the TV coverage of 26/11 are the ones of the hostages finally emerging from the Oberoi hotel, having been rescued after a hellish night. The moment they came out, the TV cameras were on them, the microphones thrust into their catatonic faces. “Tell us what happened”, “How many people are dead inside?”, “Did you see the terrorists?”

Can you even imagine what that feels like? To spend the night wondering whether you are going to survive to see another day, to see your friends and family mowed down in front of you, to finally emerge from that nightmare – and then have to negotiate a bunch of loud, raucous reporters walking all over one another to ask you a bunch of asinine questions. That’s exactly what all those who had been rescued had to encounter the moment they walked free.

Contrast this with Wisconsin, where we didn’t even see a glimpse of the hostages. The authorities evacuated them once they had sanitised the gurudwara interiors, but safely out of sight of the cameras. Their traumatised faces were kept out of the press; their privacy was respected by the authorities who did not give out any names; and they did not have to run the gauntlet of a media grilling the moment they walked out.

Leave alone the hostages, we didn’t even see close-ups of dead bodies, or screen shots of injured people. And the hospitals refused to release the names of those who were being treated out of respect for their families. In India, the camera crews would have been right outside the emergency room, trying to get in as many gruesome shots as they could for the benefit of their viewers.

Yes, there is a lot that is wrong with America – its gun laws, for instance, which allow such lunatics access to serious weaponry. But there are some things that it does get right – and its media coverage of such terror attacks, for one, is worth emulating.

Making up is easy to do

But would you be willing to go bare-faced in front of the world?

You know how they say that no matter how tired (or drunk) you are, there are certain things that you do on auto-pilot. Take off your shoes before collapsing into bed. Put your wallet into your bedside drawer when you get home. Keep the car keys on the table just beside the front door.

Well, in my case, the auto-pilot works best when I am leaving the house. A squirt of sunscreen to smear over my face and neck. A slash of kajal on the lower and upper eyelids to (as all those make-up artists promise optimistically) ‘open up’ my eyes. A dab of concealer to banish the dark circles earned after decades of reading much too late into the night. A dash of lipstick. And then to round it off, a fritz of perfume.

And voila, I am ready to face the world.

Now I know that this sounds ridiculously low-maintenance to all those ladies out there who start off with toner, go on primer, then slather on the foundation and blend, blend, blend. And for those who wear eye-shadow and mascara as a matter of course, my amateurish attempts with kajal and concealer must seem laughably crude.

But however slapdash the process of putting it together, this is my work face. My world face. This is the face I must put into place before I have the courage to face the world. And even though it isn’t all heavy-duty pancake and lashings of blusher, I still feel naked if I venture out without it.

And with good reason. On the few occasions when I have sailed out to face the world without kajal/kohl/eyeliner (say, after an eye infection) I have always been greeted with such solicitous stock phrases as: “Have you been sleeping well?” “You look a bit tired” “Are you feeling all right?” “You look a bit pale; all well?”

At first I played fair. No, no, I’m fine, I would assure everyone. It’s just that I’m not wearing kajal today. Yeah right, they would say, stopping just short of rolling their eyeballs, all the while wondering why I couldn’t just admit to being a trifle out of sorts. So now, I just play along and say that I’m feeling a bit under the weather and resign myself to the pampering that follows. (If you can’t convince them, hoodwink them.)

But if these experiences have taught me anything, it is not to be ever caught without my face on. It’s really not nice to scare little children. Or, for that matter, to make my friends believe that I am secretly suffering from some terminal disease.

So, you can imagine the awe I felt when I saw the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, leave off her face when she made her recent trip to the sub-continent. There she was in Bangladesh, without a scrap of make-up on her face except for a slash of red lipstick, her eyes hidden behind large, black-rimmed glasses, her hair pulled back in an untidy ponytail, laughing away as if she didn’t have a care in the world – and certainly didn’t care what you thought she looked like.

Oh my, the bare-faced effrontery of it all! (And how I wished I could be half as brave.)

Clearly, I was not the only one to be gobsmacked because Hillary’s no make-up look even warranted a mention in her interview to CNN. When asked why she had left off the gunk, Hillary laughed and said: “I feel so relieved to be at the stage I’m at in my life right now...if I want to wear my glasses I’m wearing my glasses. If I want to wear my hair back I’m pulling my hair back...at some point it’s just not something that deserves a lot of time and attention. If others want to worry about it, I’ll let them do the worrying for a change...It’s just not something that I think is that important anymore.”

That, of course, spawned reams of commentary on what this aversion to make-up (open itals) really (close itals) meant. Was it an indication that Hillary was finally ready to call it a day as far as politics was concerned? After all, why else would she no longer palpably care how she looked to the American electorate as she traipsed around the world as their representative? Did it mean that she was too old to bother with ‘tarting’ herself up? And what did this augur for other women of her age who were still in the public eye?

Was it okay to give up on grooming after a certain age? Or was Hillary letting her sisters down with this I-can’t-be-bothered-with-make-up attitude? Didn’t women have an obligation to themselves to look as good as they could? Was giving up on make-up a bit like giving up on life itself – and all its glorious possibilities?

It all seemed a bit bonkers to me, but then I live in India where our women politicians can’t really be bothered with dabbing on the foundation and slapping on the lipstick. Whether it is Sonia Gandhi or Sushma Swaraj, Sheila Dixit or Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati or Jayalalitha, none of them has ever bothered with putting a full face of make-up on before facing the cameras.

But all this psycho-babble in the Western press prompted me to conduct a little experiment of my own; a strictly unscientific survey with an entirely unrepresentative sample of the ladies on my Twitter timeline. How many of them, I asked, would be willing to face the world without a shred of make-up?

And what did I learn over the course of the day?

One: most of the ladies on my timeline were happy to go bare-faced. But that’s only because they didn’t seem to regard powder, kajal, eyeliner, lip gloss, lipstick and bindis as ‘make-up’. Without anyone quite saying so, it was apparent that to them make-up meant eye-shadow, foundation, mascara, blusher, and other such heavy-duty, face-altering products.

And two: all the women on my timeline looked absolutely gorgeous when they finally agreed to go bare-faced on a dare. After I took the plunge and posted a make-up free display picture of mine on my Twitter profile, all the ladies joined in like the good sports that they are.  And very lovely they looked too!

Yes, I know this is hardly a novel idea. Such celebrities as Demi Moore and Terri Hatcher have beaten us to it. We’ve seen Terri’s Botox-free forehead straight out of a shower. We’ve seen a bare-faced Demi in bed. But hey, these women are stars and are expected to look beautiful even without any help.

But it’s a special moment when women like you and me dare to bare ourselves (just our faces, I hasten to add) to the scrutiny of an often cruel world – and live to tell the tale. And it’s even more special when that path to a happy ending is paved with compliments and kind words.

Make-up? Meh! Who needs it?

          XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

You know you are a prisoner of make-up when

a)   You refuse the leave the house without making sure you have kajal and lipstick on.

b)   You hide behind a giant pair of sunglasses if your eyes haven’t been ‘done’.

c)   You panic when you discover you have left your make-up bag at home and can’t affect repairs through the day.

d)   You cry for days when your favourite make-up brand discontinues your favourite lipstick shade.

e)   You stock up on your favourite foundation/eyeliner/mascara just in case they phase that out as well.

Because we are like that only...

Some Olympic categories in which Indians could go for gold

Did you know that the oldest person to ever win an Olympics medal was a 73-year-old British graphic artist called John Copley? And that he won the silver medal for etching in the 1948 London Olympics? Yes, that’s right. Etching. That was an Olympic category back in the day, along with literature, architecture, music and town planning. (I can just about imagine the Doordarshan commentary as these contests got underway.)

I don’t know about you but this bit of Olympic trivia left me longing for a simpler world in which people weren’t so hung up on sporting talent – at which we are, quite frankly, completely rubbish – but had time to appreciate the finer things of life. Like...er...etching.

Now, I’m not sure that any of us would do very well in the town planning department (just drive around any modern Indian city if you don’t believe me) but there are some areas in which our teams would be an absolute shoo-in for the gold. So, maybe sometime in the distant future, when all those ghastly memories of the Delhi Commonwealth Games have faded, and India is hosting the Olympics, we could smuggle in some of these non-sporting categories so that our boys and girls can, at long last, improve on their medals tally.

Here are just a few ideas, off the top of my head. Feel free to add to the list, and we’ll petition the Indian Olympic Association in good time.

1)   Whining

I’m not dead set on ‘Whining’, you understand. You could call it ‘Outraging’ or even the more boring ‘Complaining’. But no matter how it is titled, I’m pretty sure we would make a clean sweep of this category every four years. After all, this doesn’t require uniforms, special training equipment or large stadiums to practice in. We can all hone our talents in front of the television set, on social media, at office, while shopping. Hell, we could even put in a couple of hours of practice while commuting back and forth from work. And God knows, we’ve been doing just that years and years. So, let’s not let all that good work go to waste. Let’s at least get a medal or two for our plaints.

2)   Musical choreography

Nobody does the choreographed musical number better than Bollywood. And thanks to all those dance shows on TV like Jhalak Dikhla Ja and Dance India Dance (or whatever else they’re called this season) the jhatka-matka school of modern dancing has taken root in our hearts – and our feet – as well. Rare is the Indian who can sit still when the Hindi music begins to blare. So let’s get those pelvic thrusts an Olympic category of their own. And see India shine and shimmy and go for gold.

3)   Driving recklessly

By that I don’t mean driving fast on Formula One tracks (because, yes, we are pretty rubbish at that too) but driving recklessly: taking turns without using the indicator; fender-bending with panache; braking suddenly, changing lanes with abandon, and never ever taking your finger off the car-horn. I’m just thinking aloud here but maybe all of these could be sub-categories in this competition. And I’m quite sure the Indians would make a clean sweep of all of them.

4)   Eating deep-fried snacks

We have a pan-national advantage in this sport, what with every region in India having its own deep-fried specialities. If the Bengalis have their luchis and the Punjabis their paranthas, the UP bhaiyas have their kachories and chaats. The Tamilians and Kannadigas have their medu vadas, the Maharashtrians their chaklis, the Malyalis their banana chips. I could go on but I’d then have to take a break to have a deep-fried snack of my own. Maybe I should do that; get in some early practice on the off-chance that I make it to the final squad. It may be my only hope of ever winning a gong.

5)   Sexual harassment

You know we’d be brilliant in this category, don’t you? Come on, admit it. All those decades of practice at whistling at the ladies as they walk down the road, groping them when they travel in public transport, harassing them at the workplace, molesting them when they have the temerity to go out at night, raping them when they ‘ask’ for it, all of it would pay off finally. Score!

Then, of course, there are the minor categories, like haggling for a good price, making tall promises that we know that we can never keep, and that old Indian chestnut, ‘jugaad’, which we are so inordinately proud of. And let’s not forget ‘Late-coming’ as well.

The only problem with the last though, is that given our attitude to time-keeping, the competition will probably not start until the next Olympic Games roll around. And then, they’ll be held in some stupidly-sporty nation like Australia or Germany, and it will all be over for us and our Olympic hopes.

The Dress Code

It really doesn’t matter what you wear; you can be a feminist in both a sari and a skirt

Women and clothes. It really doesn’t get more complicated than that. There’s conflicting advice coming from every corner. Everyone has an opinion on what you should or should not wear (and where you should or should not wear it). There are people who seem to believe that your choice of outfit has a direct connection with your personal safety. But no matter how much care you take to dress every morning – or evening – you can rest assured that there will always be someone out there who believes that in those clothes, you are simply asking for it.

As for me, all through my life, I have tended to take the path of least resistance when it came to clothes. Growing up in Calcutta, where I went to a school and college run by nuns, there was a certain assumption that ‘good girls’ always dressed conservatively. And quite frankly, I never had a problem with that. I wore salwar kameezes and churidar kurtas routinely and felt incredibly grown-up whenever I wore a sari on special occasions.

Looking back, I often wonder why more of us Loreto girls didn’t rebel against the unspoken dress code that even outlawed something as tame as pedal-pushers (if you have no idea what these are, consider yourself lucky). My guess is that it was mostly because we never really paid that much attention to what we wore. We didn’t see clothes as a means to making some sort of political statement. And I most certainly didn’t think that they defined who I was in any manner.

Clothes definitely did not make this woman, I would have said if I had given any thought to the matter. But quite honestly, I never did. I had more important things to think about (like when I would finally get through the interminable James Joyce opus; and why I could never keep all the characters in War and Peace straight in my head).

After college, I began working at the ABP group, which – in those days at least – was a bastion of orthodoxy. All the women wore saris to work (only one lady with a particularly racy reputation would wear tight kurtas with trousers, which was regarded as the height of daring) and I duly took my cue from them before relaxing into the odd salwar-kameez and finally graduating to that old journo standby, blue jeans.

However I may have dressed on my time off, at work I always veered towards the line of sartorial safety. I would no more have worn jeans and a T-shirt to cover an election rally in a rural area than I would have worn a bikini to an official banquet at Rashtrapati Bhavan. The idea was always to blend in, to seem non-threatening. If I was going to be the proverbial fly on the wall, then I had to be a cipher, nondescript enough to disappear into the background. I couldn’t be that girl in a Bermuda shorts, who thought she was striking a blow against patriarchy by showing off her legs.

But then, these are choices that most women of my generation made, because we wanted to be taken seriously – and we had bigger battles to fight. So, we wanted attention to be focussed on our brains rather than our bodies. And we wanted the conversation to be about our talent and professional abilities rather than our clothes.

I guess we’ve come a long way from that (er, baby, as the sexist Sixties line would have it). And in a way it is comforting that we now take enough of our freedoms for granted to finally be able to have that conversation about clothes. At some level, I suppose it must be seen as a sign of progress that women are all charged up to fight for their right to wear a mini-skirt and not be leered at.

But speaking for myself, I still find the idea of a Slut Walk risible in the Indian context, when women in rural areas who are wrapped up in six yards of fabric get sexually molested, assaulted and raped every day. And call me sexist if you will, but I find it hard to sympathise when women complain of being leered at after putting their breasts out on display in their latest push-up bras. Hell, there are times when even I gawp in horrified fascination at those acres of cleavage on display, so I’m not one to point fingers.

When it comes to clothes, though, I think the common-sense argument is the most compelling one. Of course, you can wear what you like. Of course, you can go where you like while you’re wearing it. And of course, nobody has the right to molest or rape you because of the way you’re dressed. But there is such a thing as ‘appropriate dressing’, and we would be fools to deny it just to sound politically correct. For instance, I still wouldn’t wear a short skirt to a political press conference. And I certainly wouldn’t wear a skimpy top while reporting from a rural area.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that clothes are really not that important. Because what you wear is not who you are. So, let’s not make the mistake of believing that our identity is wrapped up in our clothes. It is possible to be a feminist in a sari as well as a skirt – and we should never forget that.

Telly talk

News television has its own lexicon; here’s a ready primer

These days, as I settle down in front of the TV every evening, I am increasingly struck by how news television seems to occupy an alternate reality of its own, completely removed from the world as we know it. Events unfold at a breakneck pace; everything (no matter how trivial) is informed with a certain urgency; and yes, of course, everyone is much, much shriller. There seems to be no place for subtlety; no feel for nuance; and certainly no room for shades of grey – it’s all black and white even if it appears to be depicted in brilliant technicolour.

And in this parallel universe – populated by shouting, hectoring anchors, breathless, sometimes near-hysterical reporters, and guests who yell louder and louder in an attempt to be heard – words and phrases tend to take on a completely different meaning from the ones they have in the real world.

So, in an attempt to help you decipher the workings of your favourite news channel, here’s a ready reckoner of what things mean in the real world – and how they translate when they’re used on TV news.

Breaking News

In the real world: This means news that is of earth-shattering importance. The kind of event, announcement or development you hold the front page for. The key word in this phrase is not ‘breaking’ but ‘news’. What matters is the quality of the ‘news’ and the impact it has on us, not the fact that it is ‘breaking’.

For instance, it may be ‘breaking’ that Rakhi Sawant has had breast implants; but that does not make it ‘Breaking News’. On the other hand, if a bomb attack has been reported, a volcano has erupted, or a minister has been sacked, then the term ‘breaking’ may usefully be employed.

In the world of news TV: However, the term ‘Breaking News’ has come to mean any old bit of news that is coming through on the wires and will provide a welcome break from the tedium of half-hourly updates. So, it doesn’t matter if the news item in question is as frivolous as Deepika Padukone making a dig at her former boyfriend Ranbir Kapoor or as unexciting as the release of the list of candidates for the local municipality elections, it will still be described as ‘Breaking News’ and conveyed to the viewer in a suitably high-pitched tone.

As if this was not enough, one channel has gone even further and titled one of its prime-time shows ‘Breaking News’ – as if genuine ‘news’ would ‘break’ at a time of their choosing – thus making a complete and utter mockery of the phrase.

Exclusive

In the real world: There is no confusion about what the term ‘exclusive’ means. It means something that is available to only some people. In journalistic terms, the meaning is even plainer: an ‘exclusive’ refers to a piece of news, a breaking story, an interview, or some information that only one particular news outlet has access to.

It could be an ‘exclusive’ interview with the Prime Minister (assuming our Prime Minister ever found his voice). It could be the revelation of some documents in the 2G case. It could be a story about Rahul Dravid’s retirement; or even an interview with Shah Rukh Khan about his mid-life crisis.

But no matter what the story, it is only an ‘exclusive’ if nobody else has it. Pretty self-evident, don’t you think? No, not for the denizens of the news telly universe, apparently.

In the world of news TV: The word ‘Exclusive’ seems to mean the complete and exact opposite. Even when a news story is ‘breaking’ simultaneously across several channels, and even when all of them have the exact same information, each channel still insists on branding their story with an ‘Exclusive’ tag. Why do they bother when their viewers – who tend to surf through all news channels – can see for themselves that there is nothing ‘Exclusive’ about their information? Don’t ask me. I am as puzzled by this self-serving mendacity as you are.

First Look

In the real world: This means pretty much what it says. If a magazine says that it is bringing you the ‘first pictures’ of, say, Angelina and Brad’s new baby, then it means that nobody else has access to these pictures. If a newspaper promises you a ‘first look’ at some documents relating to the Adarsh scam, you can rest assured that these will not crop up in a rival publication on the same day.

In the world of news TV: Though, everyone rushes to assure us that they have been the ‘first’ to bring a story to our attention, even when this is patently untrue. But no matter what the event (or how tragic the circumstances), news channels vie with one another to tell us that they are the first to bring us visuals of a bomb blast/an earthquake/a tsunami/insert catastrophe of choice. Not only are these contradictory claims completely baffling but it also begs the question: is it really necessary to insert such an inappropriate note of self-congratulation in the coverage of what is essentially a disaster in human terms?

Spoke to our reporter

In the real world: This old chestnut means that the politician/film star/industrialist/sports star/celebrity actually spoke to the publication in question on a one-on-one basis, answering questions that a reporter put to them.

In the world of news TV: This seems a handy way to describe any press conference, where the channel’s reporter was also wielding a microphone on the grounds, presumably, that the reporter was also being ‘spoken to’. Go figure.

The Prat Pack

Bring up your kids to believe in their non-existent talent; and they’ll soon be making fools of themselves on national television

Have you been watching some of the auditions for the so-called reality shows on Indian TV? You know the ones I mean: which promise to find the best singer in the country; the leading dancing star; or even the most talented performer across genres.

Well, if you have, then you will have been just as bemused to see some of the so-called contestants perform on these shows. There are putative singers who can’t hold a tune to save their lives and give the term tone-deaf an entirely new dimension. There are modelling hopefuls who are short and stout and could do with a spot of dental and dermatological work. There are actors who can’t act; dancers who seem to have been born with two left feet. I could go on, if it didn’t mean that I would rapidly lose the will to live.

I don’t know about you, but every time I watch some of these abominations which make a mockery of genuine talent, I can’t help but wonder how some people can be so delusional about their abilities – or more accurately, the lack thereof.

And now, much teeth-gnashing later, I have come to a conclusion: I blame the parents.

Sounds a tad harsh? Perhaps it is. But it is true nonetheless. Just think about it. How did these people grow up being so deluded about just how good they were about their singing/dancing/acting? It can’t have been because all their chums at school told them how brilliant they were. There is nothing like your fellow students for taking the mickey out of you and telling you that you are making a damned fool of yourself. And they certainly couldn’t have been encouraged by extended family or friends, who have the necessary distance to tell the truth – and with luck, the goodwill to have your best interests at heart.

The only people who could have made them believe in their non-existent talent were their doting parents, who gazed on them fondly through those proverbial rose-tinted glasses which make even the most unpromising youngster seem like a budding genius. Result: we have a whole set of people who have grown up believing in themselves despite every evidence to the contrary, only because Mummy and Daddy told them over and over again how brilliant they were, how so very wonderful, the absolute acme of perfection, in fact.

In some ways, I think, this is a generational thing. The New Age parent genuinely seems to think that the best way to bring up children is to tell them that they are perfect and that they can do no wrong, no matter how hard they try. Their slightest literary effort is praised to the skies. Their sporting ability is exaggerated beyond all rational bounds. And artistic talent is thrust upon them even when there is no evidence that they posses any. These kids are told over and over again how marvellous they are; that the world is their oyster; and all they have to do is go out and conquer it, like the alpha creatures they are.

Is it any wonder than that these kids grow up believing that they are absolutely fabulous? That they can do no wrong? And that the sun, as it were, shines out of their perfect posteriors?

The one place that these children could have the stuffing knocked out of them is at school. But even here the reigning philosophy seems to be to encourage children rather than bring them to terms with a realistic appraisal of their abilities. Now, it’s all about not grading the little mites, so as to not destroy their self-esteem. It’s all about not keeping score in games so that nobody feels like a loser. So, medals all around for merely turning up. And everyone is a winner.

Except that they’re not. There will always be kids who are rubbish at sport (I certainly was; that sad kid always last to be picked by any team). There will be children who can’t make sense of physics or math (yes, me again). And there will be students who can’t write a readable essay no matter how hard they try (aha, not me this time round, thank God). And no purpose is served by convincing the poor dears that they are actually any good at this stuff, when they are patently not.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am all for nurturing the self-confidence of children, of boosting their self-esteem, of inculcating a sense of self-belief in them. But let’s not kid ourselves. We are not going to achieve this by giving them a completely unrealistic view of their own abilities and talents. In fact, you could argue that it is the duty of every parent to tell his or her child just what he or she is good (or bad) at. Because sooner rather than later, these kids are going to go out into the real world where there are no prizes for coming second, let alone last.

So, for God’s sake, be honest with your kids as they grow up. Praise their achievements. But be sure to make them aware of their shortcomings too. Encourage their strengths but don’t fight shy of pointing out their weaknesses. They will thank you for it one day, no matter how much they hate you now.

And if you don’t, then be warned. One day in the not-so-distant future, it could be your kid up there making an absolute ass of himself (or herself) on national television. And believe me, you don’t want that.