It all began with Bill Clinton. On spotting what seemed to be the ninetieth front-page story on his transatlantic antics, I told myself it was time to focus on Indians writing in English newspapers. The questions crowd into my mind. Why are newspapers so politics-centric? Why do they make no attempt to find out how their readers assess them? Why can't more writers use wit and humour as tools of deflating analysis? Can't crosswords, village fairs, flowering trees, Tirunelveli halwa or a child's first day at school be the subject of an editorial? Don't editors have dimples?We have just celebrated fifty years of independence of the press. Notwithstanding which we find ourselves in a polity in which the spoken word is used to sow anarchy and reap personal gain. Prophets. Pinnacles.Pontifications. Kaleido-scopic in their permutations. Yet the Indian today is politically orphaned. I wonder if other readers find this newspaper obsession with politics, politicians and personalities irksome.If a remote,water-starved community were to implement some radical water-harvesting techniques or a miner give his life to save nine others, or women in an Andhra hamlet unite to send the local bootleggers packing, would not it merit the front page? Would the press ever care to bring the enterprising and the public-spirited back into the mainstream of reportage?Journalistic style too can be an area of concern. Cliches like `Godman' and `Supremo' have reduced norms to abysmal lows. `Magic figure' is another chestnut. With political parties now democratically fighting election results, should this ceaseless tinkering with the people's mandate be called `magic' or `realpolitik'?Political correctness has not challenged the slew of euphemisms: `eve-teasing', `ragging', `chain-snatching', `dowry death', `liquor death', `lockup death', `dropsy death'. Misnomers all, displaying a peculiar esprit de corps that enables the perpetrator to vanish. Replace them with terms that underline the gravity of the offence, becausethe National Impunity Index has become impervious to minor fluctuations caused by the passing of new laws on old crimes.What else is happening to our daily dose of prose? Our public discourse seems to be based on the shifting sands of semantics. Secularism-fundamentalism. Liberalisation-swadeshi.Proliferation-nonproliferation. Backward-forward. Propriety-impropriety. Note how antithetical concepts have been interconnected by the hyphen. Long live our illustrious Guru Humpty-Dumpty.Sadly, even those who shape opinion in our volatile milieu often function as if they were analysing a sensational blockbuster novel - a compelling political saga of innumerable generations, drawing on a cast(e) of 900 million plotting and sub-plotting against each other.We have reintroduced divide-and-rule. Reinvented Partition. Both in public life and in public discourse. And we continue to blame the Foreign Hand - fifty years after it waved its bloody farewell.My plea goes out to all writers, editors andpublishers: please let your word help us forget our caste and overcome our religious differences and live in a spirit of fair play. When some are made more equals than others, agony begins to share only a wafer-thin dividing line with antagonism.For the ordinary millions who have no Black Cats, no private armies, who live under thatched roofs or plastic sheets or the open sky, and for you and me, communal harmony is our only guarantee. The Constitution, having withered away, has long ceased to enshrine much of what it was originally intended to. Let the written word promote universal love in the time of orchestrated fissiparousness.
