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Journalism of Courage
There was, this year, a deluge of words that conveyed raging water. They drenched our collective consciousness and heightened our insecurities. The December 26 tsunami breached the shores of 2005, even as flash floods rendered urban habitats into wet wastelands from Mumbai to Santiago. New Orleans, became the Big Uneasy, with its levees torn down by the putative Hurricane Rita, and even water-starved Chennai found the ground under its feet in a swirl.
It was that kind of year, when tragedy appeared a split second away. When bombs arrived in backpacks and cement trucks, when bonfires of French vanities lit up the banlieues, when bird flu threatened to fly in, and when the mountains shrugged and united a divided Kashmir in common grief, loss, trauma. And even though Google Earth kept an ubiquitous and close eye on the world and the neighbourhood, and the Titan mission probed the creme brulee-like surface of Saturn, nature was always one step ahead in terms of its unpredictable lobs. Thank heavens then for the occasional breaks. Like Baby 81, who was miraculously restored to his parents’ arms after the tidal wave had snatched him away. He was the real Million Dollar Baby of the year, no doubt about it.
It was a year when life, as we knew it, got dramatically altered. The world had heard of heart, kidney and liver transplants, most certainly. This year saw a face transplant, even as the world’s first ever cloned dog, Snuppy, took his bow in the pantheon of instant celebs. As for Terri Schiapro, the courts decided that she was in a Persistent Vegetative State and the machines must come off. God then, even if s/he had really spoken to George Bush as claimed, must have felt just a little less secure in heaven. Sometimes even Intelligent Design can be decoded like a Sudoku grid, it seems!
It was the year of the Argumentative Indian in the raucous circus ring of Indian politics. Parliamentary democracy was all about questions and answers — some good, some bad, some sold, some bought, as Parliament’s Dirty 11 caused embarrassment all round. The Congress emerged punch-drunk from some spirited jabbing from the Left, even as History looked set to deliver a knock-out blow as the sins of its past appeared to catch up with it. The 1984 anti-Sikh carnage, the Mitrokhin Archives disclosures, and the Oil for Food scam gave the party many anxious moments, but it chose to brazen it out for the most part in characteristic fashion, keeping its ramshackle coalition caravan going after throwing out the decapitated carcasses of Jagdish Tytler and Natwar Singh to keep a howling and hungry opposition at bay. Meanwhile old Sudarshan unveiled his Hum do, Humare Anek formula and hurled his chakra against the old guard in the BJP. L K Advani, haunted by the djinns of Jinnah, joined A B Vajpayee in the ranks of the tired and retired. It was year when the sanyasin found herself once again embracing sanyassa, and when Laloo’s samosas suddenly lost its alu stuffing. Morality and regional pride loomed large on the political horizon. The Khushboo of Tamil Honour permeated the air; Maharashtra home minister rushed to protect the “decency” of his state by barring bar girls from doing their little Kajra re number, and Bangalore’s handlers decided to give the city’s name an ethnic twist by Bengaluru-ing it. As for the Union health minister, he prescribed a cigarette-free film diet for the country.
Icons—some came, some went. If Sania Mania continued on centre court, Sourav Ganguly’s cheap dismissal from the Indian team almost saw West Bengal secede from India — there are, clearly, few in the state who consider a Chappell worth the worship. As for Amitabh Bachchan, who as the congenial host of KBCII had instructed all of us to ‘‘Please, please, please, take very good care of yourself’’, he ended up in a hospital bed with diverticulitis, sending his fans and the 24 hour TV channels into a feeding frenzy of Bachchanalia. And if we needed an anti-hero for the year, well, we did get to say Salem,Namaste.
It was that kind of year, when the Oy Buntys and Oy Bubblys of the world could set the streets alight with delight and rage in equal measure, even as the ad scripts urged all lamebrains to just pleasure up, man, for time is short, too short…
