Breaking Down News: The Art of Leaving

Similarly, the high life image of Kingfisher Airlines (which was a rather good copy of Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic) is being played up to make an ornate moral fable, in which the idea of limited liability has no place. Channels have been asking government officials if Mallya’s extradition is expected, though he has not absconded. Times Now went on about Mallya having left the country with seven suitcases. Why is this significant? Does it know for sure that the last time he went to the UK, it was with just a toothbrush? All that the nation wants to know is if and when Mallya can be forced to cough up, but the coverage is interested in more colourful issues.

This week, ABP News brought pleasant tidings: JNU has won two of thethree Visitors’ Awards instituted by President Pranab Mukherjee last year, for developing strategies against anthrax, malaria, kala azar and Entamoeba. The news was overshadowed by continuing alarms, excursions and canards against certain other “infections” at JNU, as they have been described by certain politicians and their attendant trolls. Zee aired archival clips out of context of Nivedita Menon, who teaches at the university, and pronounced her anti-national. The poet Gauhar Raza was damned with her, and some JNU professors suspected that the interests which had caused the arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar, not expecting to elevate him to national stature, were now targeting teachers and their peers in the hope of better luck. Unexpectedly,they have repeated history, elevating Menon to national stature. They really must stop trying to turn everyone who’s normal into statues of Liberty.

Menon has performed a surgical strike on Zee TV’s suspiciously confident Sudhir Chaudhary, detailing embarrassing incidents from his past on Scroll.com, with hyperlinks, footnotes and annotations. Academics are crazy about these things and the counterattack has snowballed into a broad-based campaign, backed by academics, artists and activists who want the government to move legally against Zee for trying to drum up lynch mobs against inconvenient individuals.

Photos have been circulating of ABVP members past and present burninga copy of the Manusmriti on Women’s Day. It is a mysterious book, inthe sense that no one knows whether it was descriptive or prescriptive, whether it depicted reality or the fantasy of a conservative despairing of a liberal age. But how odd this is: ABVP students try to do the liberal thing and abjure a casteist and misogynistic text. But their first instinct is to burn it, which is about the least liberal thing you can do to a book.

As this is written, it is raining on Ravi Shankar’s parade but everything is running like clockwork. The only place that’s even more wound up than the Yamuna flood plain this weekend is Zimbabwe, whose long-serving president Robert Mugabe was to attend the show but backed off, citing “substantial inadequacies in protocol and security arrangements” which, he believed, had kept even the Indian president away. Newsweek reports that the African nation wants to know the whereabouts of Mugabe, 92, who is neither here nor there. The hashtag #BringBackOurBob signals the urgency of the quest. Because Mugabe aims to be president until the age of 100 and if he doesn’t return, there will be an unbearably long interregnum.