Enemy of English

Enemy of English

If it were not for a personal tragedy, I would have rewarded the warrior-reporters for the sheer tenacity with which they have been waging relentless war against English in English newspapers. So intense is their hatred for the language they write their story in that they don’t even look at their own edited/ rewritten stories in the paper next morning. And they make no bones about the aversion to the edited stories. Secure in the belief that they can easily get away with distorting the language any which way they can, reporters seem to take pride in their vicarious freedom struggle against English a good 65 years after the British quit India.

My age is possibly the only saving grace, otherwise I would have been a frequent object of open ridicule of the reporters for trying to serve the colonialists by rewriting their copies, an effort they believe is waste of time.

However, their valued opinions expressed behind my back about my love’s labour lost some times ricochet on my unsuspecting ears. Earlier, I used to be pained by such irreverence to my hard work. But, having done the futile job for over two decades, I’m inured to the sniggers.

Dard Ka Had Se Guzarana Hai Dawa Ho Jana.

I often wonder if my untimely baldness is linked to having to deal with reporters’ copies in the last two decades. Sure enough, I am fantastically athletic for my age, very agile. But the thinning hairline is a lone sour point.  I believe you don’t need to demonstrably (and physically)  tear your hair off to lose them fast. This might be an internal process, triggered by the everyday rage over rewriting reporters’ stories only to find they don’t care about this all.  

If I recapitulate here what horrible howlers I confront, an epic-size description would be needed. Besides, differentiating one reporter from another would be a grave injustice to their class. There are reporters whose copies are better than others. But, the ability to treat the edited stories with utter disdain is a common point. Barring a few like P Naveen ( Times of India), Shams Ur Rehman Alavi ( Hindustan Times), Devbrat Ghose (HT) , Archana Khare ( TOI)  or Avinash Dutt Garg ( BBC) , I have come across very few reporters all through my long career who cared to learn from the edited copies. I’m tempted to believe that P Naveen’s remarkable rise in journalism is due to his ability and willingness to correct himself. Today, his most stories are nearly flawless, needing very little editing. A vast change from where he had begun a decade ago.   

Why I’m what I’m and why reporters are what they are? I have clear explanation for my incorrigibility. The reporters’ characteristic insouciance is also, to a great extent, explainable to me. The reporters class has the instinctive protection of semiliterate editors (in terms of English language) that unfortunately we have had in English papers in MP. Late N Rajan, in my life, was an honourable exception. Will write more about it later.