By John Cheeran
A dog should not eat another dog.
A journalist should not eat another journalist for breakfast.
The dirty secrets of Indian journalism never come out of the closet, because the opportunities for livelihood for a journalist in India are very, very limited.
If you are going to ditch one media organization, there is hardly anywhere else to go. If you speak out against or write against an editor, you can be sure that subject of your criticism will never employ you in future. He will also see to that you will not be taken by other editors too.
Editors are merciless not to the establishment but towards those who do not suck up to them.
And if you displease a management, even if a small fry management that is, you can be certain that they will shut their doors forever on you.
So the sins of media barons rarely come out of the press clubs. Being a journalist you cannot displease the managements of Times of India, The Hindustan Times, The Hindu, ABP or Malayala Manorama. Not even the Indian Express for that matter.
How many bargaining chips an Indian journalist can carry to the table?
Knowing this, I'm not surprised that Vijay Nambisan reached the end of his tether while trying to get payment for his commissioned articles from Tehelka, the people's paper.
Managements often expect journalists to live on fresh air.
An editor, who I hold in high esteem even as I write this, asked me "why do you need money now", when I told him the reason for my resignation. I did not answer him because both of us knew our peculiar situation then. I never felt then, don't feel now, that my editor took advantage of me by paying me less. Those were certainly strange times.
There are, however, many others who do take advantage of journalists by paying them peanuts. And if you are not a high-profile freelancer, it is the norm that you will not be paid at all.
Nambisan was not an employee of Tehelka but was told to write for them. As thehoot.org shows, even as of today, Tehelka has not cleared Nambisan's dues. And this is from the moral police among journalists, from the sting operators, from the conscience keepers of the nation. As Nambisan has pointed out during his epic email battle, if there was a financial problem in Tehelka, he should have been told by those who responsible for the paper as it is.
What I do not know from the email summaries published in thehoot.org is that whether Tarun Tejpal and others behind the People's Paper were starving and were not having enough clothes to wear during those time.
If that was the case, that was a pity indeed!
I must then say that Indian journalism has been made richer by Tehelka team's poverty.
I would not have known about Nambisan's travails if not for a space like thehoot.org. It would have been impossible to expect India's mainstream media to publish such stories that put a crusading media company in bad light.
I'm interested in this affair basically because, if possible, I want to die as a journalist. I was wondering whether I can keep the pretence of a journalist by being a freelancer. As it is, that is going to be pretty, pretty difficult.
Second, I have met the main characters -- Vijay Nambisan and Shoma Chaudhury --in this drama. Years ago.
I approached Nambisan for an interview in 1994, when he was working with the Hindu in Madras. Now, as then, I was aimless and jobless.
I had seen Shoma Chaudhury years later, when she joined my then paper, if I remember correctly, as books editor. Nambisan told me that he became a journalist because having failed to complete his degree (I don't want to give his personal details) this was the only profession open for him.
When I met him, he had already won acclaim as one of India's best promising poets in English. Viking Penguin had published his poetry in the Gemini series. These were, I must say, big things by the 90s yardsticks. Anita Nairs of the Indian English writing were yet to happen then.
My interview with Vijay Nambisan was never published. It was never meant to be published. He was told the reasons for that and since those days we haven't met; we haven't even emailed. Nambisan in fact did refer to our conversation when he wrote on something in Hindu's Literary Review, sometime later. That was my brief encounter with Nambisan.
As a man out of work now, I can understand Nambisan's desperation to get hold of a cheque which should have been his without those 86 emails.
Shoma Chaudhury left the paper much before I left from there. We haven't met since then. But last year, I had the fortune of reading a piece on Indian actor Amir Khan which appeared in Financial Times's Asia edition under Shoma Chaudhury's name.
The piece appearedwhen Khan's Mangal Pandey film was about to release, if I remember correctly.
If anyone wants to know how not to write, he can be given that piece as a classic example.
It is always good to have good contacts in the right places.
It is always good to read thundering editorials.
It is really a tough job to run a media organization.
More difficult it is to be honest and direct in your dealings while the life lasts.
Amen.
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