[Reader-list] EACH NIGHT(Jamia Shootings)

Fri Sep 26 11:05:32 IST 2008

Dear Aditya,

1.  I think we would all have to agree that there is a major disconnect between
     the initial 'break through' announcements and the facts that are coming
     out.

2.  Everything said and done, with some of the people giving exams when they
     were supposed to be in another city, etc., the 'official version'
is becoming
     extremely patchy.

3.  Even with all our patriotism / nationalism, all of us have seen
enough bungling
     by the police in a number of cases that we take their claims with
a whole bag
     of salt (instead of just a pinch) till the facts match the
initial claims. The Arushi
     and Jessica cases are recent examples which make this obvious. Presume
     you would agree on this as Roots in Kashmir was a part of the movement
     against miscarriage of justice.

4.  If someone from my school / college was caught for a crime
(especially someone
     I know well), my first reaction too would be disbelief.

Rgds, Partha
...................

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 10:49 AM, Aditya Raj Kaul
<kauladityaraj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Interestingly, majority of these "media persons" who have become the enemies
> of a few are pass out from Jamia MCRC. I think Ambreen, Shohini and Sabina
> would agree with me. Here they learnt the art to capture, visualise, story
> angle and depth.
>
> Love
> Aditya Raj Kaul
>
> On 9/26/08, shakeb ahmed <ahmed_shakeb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> EACH NIGHT
>> Each night when the time to go to bed comes it becomes almost a trial. Each
>> night there is a rage inside me…not against the nameless perpetrators of a
>> heinous crime maybe, but against my own self: am I doing enough to scream
>> against something maybe surely bordering on injustice? Am I? I no more can
>> easily return to my bedside readings of J M Coetzee novels and Ian Farell
>> digital photography guides, they both mock me…can I write what madness
>> Coetzee shaped into a Waiting for the Barbarians, can I not take pictures
>> anymore, something I make my living from and now when the whole of that life
>> is under an overstretched shadow of suspicion, my finger seems perennially
>> seized, there is no easy shutter release anymore!
>> Not anymore can I doubt what trauma is?
>> We saw how a decorated policeman dying (in whatsoever mysterious
>> circumstances) can completely sanctify a gory event replete with bullets and
>> blood. If he would not have died could we as a people, as a nation, had more
>> permissible courage to question this Encounter (all puns intended!). What
>> enrages me and many more out here is: we then saw the watchdog of democracy
>> then really proving itself to be just that - a watching dog without a
>> question leashed to its master.
>> Is it really so hard to shake away the infantile druggedness of the twenty
>> somethings thrown down on the ground zero. We hear their lousy attempts at
>> bad poetry, their facts thrown into some nauseous verse, while scampering
>> like parakeets squelching without a shame to get another soundbyte from the
>> only people not too shocked with the proceedings yet – the Special Cell. Are
>> we not a mature enough nation able to sift through this infantile babble
>> issued from our television sets. How loudly proud I am in these moments that
>> I don't work for a television news channel! Shame on them and their
>> ludicrous graphics and sfx jamboree!
>> It at one time looked as if they can have the tongue enough to ask some
>> uncomfortable questions off the state, but they all fell in line once
>> comfortably swamped by the police reeling out information floods. Do we
>> understand with our healthy democratic grown up minds that if you want to
>> undercut an argument, any argument, the best recourse you have to help
>> yourself is to release a barrage of information right/wrong/good/bad or
>> whatever, and then the heads fall so confused under this system overload
>> that they successfully fail to answer even the maiden names of their
>> mothers…that's how you hack the password to sanity! So do you see this
>> happening, the unreeling of a mammoth spool here?
>> Another fact that lied like a lump in my throats: For days since 19th
>> September the neighborhoods are inundated with television crews numbered
>> crazy by these very young footsoldiers. Who are these media techies, the
>> mouthpieces of India's newfound scintillating prosperity and the freedom of
>> its expression?  They are the happy lot whose steadily though very slowly
>> increasing paychecks make it finally possible for them at last to buy their
>> long desired denim and cool T's, and my god they would have killed to get to
>> them; they are often those finally able to take their mommy-daddy to that
>> aggressively seductive shopping mall they would have maybe not missed having
>> died before ever setting their foots inside; these are the proud lot whose
>> auto and house loans are finally getting approved without any pressing need
>> for much paperwork….what would these kids not do to stomp upon their own
>> kinds and inch their head a few further inches more high on the
>>   gargantuan impartial ladder of success!!! Its dog eats dog mister! Its
>> cut-throat all the way dear sir!
>> You might find it offensive the stating of this banal obvious or biased
>> diatribe depending on where you come from or where you want to go my friend
>> - but that's what becomes the addiction and lure that catches them quite
>> young and maybe never leaves them till their hourly demise! And then they
>> are quite well guided missiles in the arsenal of their elderly, very well
>> meaning business bosses These elders well these are very wise in their
>> economics as well as politics rooted deep in the knowledge of how powerful a
>> bearing they can have on their brothers sitting in the parliament benches,
>> and what goods-of-heaven can flow from the portals of governance if forced
>> to do the occasional golden handshake! So you see these very hardworking
>> missives of these very well meaning elders all around, and they smilingly
>> 'extract the trust' from you - they interview you for nearly half an hour,
>> they film your narrow alleys, they make their busy notes and promise to
>>   tell your side of story! But then you sit in front of your television
>> sets and suddenly wonder if maybe that fateful interview-day you
>> hallucinated, you merely conjured up this Reporter in the confused
>> helplessness your circumstances made you fall into, and otherwise you
>> actually took a trip to the outer space that day missing the appointment
>> totally: what it all adds up to is that you are nowhere in the news story
>> running on your screen. Or if you are really lucky,  your witness to a tv
>> camera finally is hacked down, tailored to a different cut, stitched into a
>> pattern which fits to a totally different trend of the holy news making.
>>
>> What everybody in the neighborhoods should ask any television crew asking
>> them for an appearance is…how would you edit the material – my interview,
>> pictures of my street, the seemingly innocent pointing of camera at that
>> bicycle riding skull capped Maulana, or the bearded three friends just
>> standing around the corner…would you be putting soft music in the back
>> ground, or loud one beaming a sense of danger and trepidation; would you be
>> picture-aspect squeezing these images of us, running unsaid tickers down
>> below, then suddenly resizing the picture as you violently solarize them
>> while the very next moment generously splashing them with the color of
>> mayhem, the vermilion red!
>> My humble request then to everybody requested to come to the camera is that
>> they must demand a partnered ownership of his or her story trying to
>> understand the concept with a ferocious rigor. They must surely make it
>> their duty to ask how their lines to camera and the pictures of their
>> neighborhood would be edited together even in the case that they don't
>> understand what technical News Editing means!
>> Even if I seem a little partisan let me still put in what at one time some
>> black American filmmakers like Spike Lee and others did: at times they
>> simply tried making it impossible for any white American at that time to
>> make films on the blacks…our stories, only we would tell was the motto!
>>
>> Let me end at this cruel light note:
>> Today amidst unprecedented almost surreal presence of police the students,
>> faculty, and the like-minded liberal sympathizers of Jamia University
>> carried out a peace march. I was talking to some of the friends who live at
>> Zakir Nagar and find themselves caught leftrightcenter in this maelstrom
>> …one of them related this: when police was asked why Inspector Mohan Chand
>> was not wearing a bullet proof vest when he went upto L18, they gave the
>> lame excuse that many in the special cell are such marksmen as would not
>> miss a target once even when blindfolded, and Sharma deemed in his judgment
>> therefore maybe not to wear one (even if these are most dreaded terrorists
>> he was about to take up one on one)…this friend then delivers the punch – so
>> shouldn't we then send these guys to Olympics, what a ruckus it would be to
>> win some more gold's, and nobody needs to die too!
>>
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Partha Dasgupta
+919811047132