Tense Day in Delhi with Pakistani Journalists

Earlier today I took a break from a comfortable air-conditioned home-car-office existence in Delhi, and peeled off to attend a media seminar, something I am doing after years. Attending media seminars, I mean. And. Wow. My oh my. They make me sigh. How they've grown, though the fundamentals remain the same, but there is a lot more name dropping, see and be seen. You might just be at Kamani or Shri Ram Centre, listening to music or seeing a play you don't understand. I mean, Sensex was shooting up, but still. So I said, let me also do name dropping?

When I was driving my car, I combed my newly cut hair, and realised I didn't need to. Comb it. Then I did an un-Delhi thing. I looked in the rear view, and observed that there was a "RAM" sticker on the rear window, placed there to assist in parking at Shri Ram Sharnam on Ring Road Moolchand which is a devotional satsang house of religion near my home which my mother attends every Tueday. That's more or less the only time this car gets any exercise, which is more than I can say for myself too. It is big car and consumes a lot of petrol and on the bonnet it carries the bow-tie logo of an American company about to go bust. Maybe the sticker could help it? The "RAM" sticker will re-appear in this report, and caused some tension, and I am meddling with the syntax here in one sentence just because I feel like it, past tense, present, and future.

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The book by my friend Aniruddha, who is under protection by Uttar Pradesh Police and so often does not have to pay toll on DND, which is 22/- rupees one-way and terrible if you have no change, where the Managing Director is my friend the Kannada speaking urban turban Hardeep Singh Puri, but back to the book, it is called "Bunker 13", and has a part where it talks about female pubic hair trimmed in the shape of a swastika. In the book, not at the toll booth. It also won the Literary Review Bad Sex prize in 2003, here is an extract extract: "She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high. To wait any longer would be to lose prime time...", it is actually the winning bit. And reminds you of cars revving while stuck at toll-booths. But on the swastika, which is also a Hindu symbol not much in vogue anymore, clockwise or anti-clockwise is not made clear, those who remember Scindia Steam Navigation and Shipping Company ships landing up in, say, Hamburg up the Elbe or Rostock up the Kiel, as well as ardent Hindus, who re-appear in this report, will understand the tension of such chapters.

Declaration: I hold shares in the DND toll company, mainly because I like attending their share-holder meetings.

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"The event is a panel discussion on --"Is Media Jingoism Fanning Indo-Pak tensions". There will be five journalists from Pakistan participating in the event apart five panelists from India. From Pakistan the journalists coming are Beena Sarwar, Muniba Kamal, Rahimullah Yusufzai, Saeed Minhas and Nirupama Subramanian. The India panelists are Arundhati Roy, Swapan Dasgupta, QWS Naqvi, Bharat Bhushan and Amit Baruah. The discussion will be followed by lunch. Your contribution to the debate will be much appreciated.""

Date:15 April 2009, time:10:00 - 13:00, Location:India International Centre (Main Auditorium), Street:Lodhi Road.

Host:Foundation of Media Professionals (www.fmp.org.in , my friend Aniruddha Bahal of the original sting journalism in India school of fame and a thriller on Indian Armed Forces and kinky sex, presiding.

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Usual suspects will be there. Later in this essay there may or may not be a poem on the India International Centre by my friend and relative through marriage, Dr. Professor Sanjiva Prasad, and his son. He has two sons. He also has a lot of family, all of whom have Doctorates in non-medical fields, and when they get together, they play guitar. Loudly. Through amps and speakers with a lot of wires, over which their dog trips, while we trip, too. Lead guitar. Bass guitar. Rhythm guitar. Rock group famous Indian Ocean guitar. All those decades in so many engineering colleges, IITs, BITs, and then they play guitar. After vodka. And the most famous Engineer Doctor is Rahul Ram, who is called Bhaiya, because he came back from Berkeley, and then there is also another famous cousin called Krishna, who is called Mac, I think because he came back from San Francisco. But Sanjiva is incorrigible. His students apparently incorrige him too much, during one lecture on meta-physics, they introduced a real puppy dog into the classroom, who fell in love with Sanjiva's trousers. Much tension, and you can also see it on youtube, it is actually funny.

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The poem was going to be here, but it may get us in trouble at the IIC, so avoid this time. It talks about people getting bored and falling asleep, and things like that. I once filed an RTI on IIC, and they are in tension since then, I think. Let it ride.

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4 guys shouting Pakistan Hai Hai, 6 random supporters variously demanding Freedom Of Speech, 10 Left Of Centre jholaas shrilling back for silence, 30 tv cameras unclicking from tripods, 50 still cameras giving up on taking photos of Arundhati Roy's low-back blouse type entourage, 75 mobile phone cameras recording blurs, 100 RAF/CRPF/DP worthies joined everybody else for lunch. Fried fish was OK. Icecream and HCS was tasteless. Parking was difficult. Summer is here. Seminar was like that only.

Speeches from Pakistani side including Arundhati Roy was mainly about the poor misunderstood Pakistanis, they are not responsible, it is the bad guys responsible from elsewhere. One of the Pakistani lady journalists was some page-3 type entertainment media person, throughout she kept doing hair to the left hair to the right with her locks. Please be aware - the male Indian journalists on the stage were of the "we have 30 years of journalism behind us" variety, so that was a sure way to distract them. I tell you, the Pakistani media is realy clued up on how to set these things up, ours end up going there in long khadi kurtas and are often unbathed.

The male Indian journalists were thankfully not from the "Hai Saada Lahore" chest-beating club. They spoke about how media was not responsible, that there really was tension, and then I remembered - the tension I had in getting my car in because of the RAM sticker. I would never have been stopped in Pakistan. They don't read the Devanagiri script anymore. Even though the most famous hospital in Lahore, where they took the Police Academy shootout victims and blamed India, is called Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Lahore.

But back to the Ram Sena guys in Delhi who created the only excitement, just in that period of time where people are dozing off, slightly before the gong goes off for lunch. I saw these guys drive in, air-con Maruti SX4, and they could have been any other Freedom Fighters, jean pant t-shirt, but I knew they would cause tension when they did not fill up the register at the entry right after I went in. Then they sat near me too. Ouch. And throughout, because of that, Dibang from NDTV-Hindi watched me suspiciously. So, to get his goat, I asked him who he was. Never, never, ask a TV anchor to introduce himself, or especially herself, they will scorn you in the most desperate way after that. Later, therefore, when I was talking with Ajmal Jami, also of NDTV and an old friend, though he now has gout because of too much protein in his diet, Dibang sneered at me some more and asked Jami how he knew me. And then. And then? SENSEX jumped 321 points or something like that, and my broker called asking if I wanted to buy more or sell more. The tension of choices.

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Arundhati Roy deserves her own paragraph, given that we get her long prolix prose, often. It seems, unconfirmed reports, that she has floated a new company. Some said, though I am not sure, that her supporters are not trying to sell shares in this new company floated to promote her latest foray, "Hai Mera Dantewadi", now that the previous companie "Hai Mera Narmada" and "Hai Mera Bhopal" are in limbo. Short paragraph for her. Though she does feel that the Maoist rebels in points beyond Raipur are to be compared to the Taliban in points beyond Peshawar. Amazing. The Taliban will not permit women to do anything. Sigh. She does sigh a lot when speaking. Hai. Sigh. Bye.

One sad looking beard from Peshawar was also on stage now claiming that answers were forced on him by bad television anchors from India. For commercial reasons. Everybody was suddenly upset with Hamid Gul, ex-ISI chief and currently also in charge of city bus service in most of Islamabad/RawalPindi. Other journalists spoke off-topic, mainly about the competition between print and media, each blaming the other for the jingoism which increases tension which then everybody forgot.

Around that time, my driver said that more people were asking about the RAM sticker on the rear windscreen, I told him to tell them to look at the PRESS sticker with the name of a famous newspaper on the front windscreen. That sorted things out.

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After the one-way speeches, the floor was then thrown open for questions, at which point all the people who were not called on stage gave their views on various subjects unconnected. This included the hirsute wonder from IIT-Delhi, another Doctor Professor but non-guitar player, Dinesh Mohan, who used to be my friend and maybe still is, who gave us a short talk on road traffic safety, maybe he was at the wrong seminar and woke up then. Something good came of the Ram Sena Pakistan Hai Hai thing, though I have a sneaking suspicion that most people were waiting for shoes to fly, also. Atleast sandals.

Thus ended the seminar, and nobody was the wiser. One of the lady journalists from Pakistan then asked me where she could get designer stuff at best discounts. That will surely ease tensions, I think, between India and Pakistan. Try the whole lot of them Indian designers are in tension, and giving mucho-discount, in some cases as much as 90% off.