As a voracious reader of OPEN magazine, I loved reading Avirook Sen’s long, multi-page piece on how he settled with his former employer, NewsX – that woe-ridden television news channel that now seems to be the most constructive of all, albeit with limited viewership; constructive because they seem to be having the least number of ‘breaking’ news.
I have no awareness or connection with what transpired back then at NewsX, but I do recall reading K’s blog (look him up in the OPEN piece) when the issue broke out.
It made for great gossipy reading, but I still do not understand why Avirook opts for a caricatur’ish and mocking tone all through, particularly when he’s talking about his ‘moral’ victory. He makes fun of accents, physical appearances, idiosyncrasies and even uses allegedly-comic versions of names of all (most) people involved as if this was a salacious page 3 gossip! I’m just wondering aloud – doesn’t such a tone make his own effort in getting his side of the story out seem trivial? I completely understand that they (former employers) have done a lot to Avirook and he may be mighty pissed too, but still…
Just because all those people mentioned are ‘bad’ (sorry for the broad, single stroke – that seems to be the tone of the piece…just going with the flow, for argument’s sake), does Avirook get a blanket license to make fun of all of them? Didn’t OPEN feel it was looking odd?
On that note of OPEN feeling odd, I’m not sure who’s idea this mock tone is – Avirook’s or OPEN’s. Why? Because, the article by Avirook quotes Martin Luther King, in the end – â??The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justiceâ??. Elsewhere in the same issue (dated 16th October, 2010), there’s a really good piece about an RTI activist in Rajasthan that has one of the sub headings as, ‘Where the arc of justice bends’. So, is the text and tone OPEN’s idea?
Coincidence? Am I reading too much into this? Possibly…just that the mocking tone, while satisfying the voyeur in me, seems like a very strange choice for what otherwise is a solid piece.
Two more points, on an unrelated/ mildly related note:
- Is it a good idea to burn bridges, like this, with so many people, at one go? Isn’t the media/communications world rather small and don’t we all bump into/need each other every now and then? I’m not posing this question from an ethics perspective, but from a learning perspective. I advise younger ones in PR to not burn bridges, and express discontent in a mature way. This approach seems new to me.
- Anonymous blogs are taken more seriously than I envisioned – some lesson, that!!
Picture from Squirt Gun Show.