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What's in a name?
With the stage set for the February 15 Assembly polls in the Northeast, a surfeit of names crop up that extend from the ordinary to the bizarre. There are namesakes and names for names' sake.
Adolf Hitler, for once, is not a member of the German National Socialist Party. He is not a protagonist of Nazism either for anybody to be alarmed of but just the Congress(I) nominee for the Rangsakona (ST) seat in Meghalaya. Adolf Hitler R Marak is his full name.
The Great Dictator of the Third Reich is not the only fiend to contest in the ensuing elections in the state. The very name of a candidate for the Mendipather (ST) constituency would send a shiver down the spine of one too many. One was told that Mary Shelley's monster did destroy its creator. But Frankenstein is alive and kicking for he (Frankenstein W Momin) is the Congress(I) man out here.
Utterly bitterly malicious
We have a new national pastime these days – humiliating our heroes, degrading the very people who have done our nation proud. If the jeering of Sachin Tendulkar by the lumpen scoundrels of Mumbai masquerading as cricket fans wasn't enough, the takeover mafia of Gujarat has done a moo de grace by hounding out Verghese Kurien.
It is all fine, some might say. The old order must certainly changeth. And it must just as certainly yield place to the new. You cannot fault the contention – it is the law of nature. But you can drill holes in this contentious argument when it becomes a ruse – when you seek refuge in the laws of nature to serve your pernicious wishes. Subterfuge it was the way the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation debased the very person who made it the biggest cooperative marketing success story in the world. It is fine, the old-fogey order must change. Pal, we are a nation of young people aren't we?
No money in Manipur
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Did you know one plus one can make zero?
You didn't, you say?
OK, take these two gospel truths:
i) The Northeast does not quite make news in the Indian mainstream media
ii) Media owners are loathe to disseminate news items about journalists through their outlets.
Now take an incident which has these two incontrovertible truths as the background: the offices of many newspapers in Manipur and the state's only television channel were shut down on March 21 after threats to four journalists from an Islamist militant outfit.
No points for guessing, even if you are just Paanchvi Paas, that the coverage of this incident in the our country's venerable mainstream media was a mere zero.
The news did trickle out from this landlocked state in the form of an Asia News International (ANI) creed. That was all. No one seems to have carried it. No media coverage.
