It is a routine which makes us cynical and bad-tempered hacks. Can a journalist in this work environment ever do something 'useful'?Occasionally. Criminalisation of Indian public life is like a mantra these days. Everyone who is anyone is against it—yet no one does anything beyond platitudes. My friend Tony Clifton of Newsweek, a seasoned observer of the sub-continent, believes Indians have become overly smug and complacent, busy patting themselves for the incredibly free and open society they have managed to create "in the face of fantastic odds". This air of perpetual self-congratulation deliberately ignores the mounting and glaring wounds Indian democracy has inflicted on itself—wounds which no one attempts to heal.