"It's an established fact that in nine cases out of ten whatever can go wrong in a magic performance will do so. The great professors of the art are not immune from the malignancy of matter and the eternal cussedness of inanimate objects."
—The Sphinx
September 1928
There, I've done it. Filled up my blanks with someone else's words. Even two first-person pronouns can't now soften the injury to self-esteem; nor will comfort be found in the company of greats who've fallen for the quotation gambit. Some have honourable reasons to adorn their writing with borrowed thought balloons; for most, it's a mask for laziness, an acute want of something to say, and you can't even dock the fellow for plagiarism. Still, in the big bazaar of ideas, it must count as cheap crime: lower than a shoplift, or a petty subway mugging. Just had the feeling, also, that it fitted in with the brief for this piece. That is, to cast one's eyes back and recap the few notable times we in Outlook were caught in flagrante delicto, that is to say, individually or collectively with our pants down. It's a depressing brief, and what better way than to observe it in the breach. And since we plan to swerve off the road into the surrounding countryside as soon as possible, it's just as well to have someone offer cover fire, while we leave you to deduce some kinship between magic, the Magi and magazine journalism.
If you're an oath-taken member of the tribe of editors, you're one of those who's drafted in for the global war against error. The world over, you're supposed to be on night patrol: guarding against iffy facts, indelicate prose, renegade vowels, sins of syntax and a million other editorial gremlins. It's only at gunpoint that these taciturn sentinel types can be persuaded to appear before a tribunal. But pox, scurvy or perdition—no threat or blandishment is dire enough to make them sing. A litany of your own transgressions? Who in his or her right mind has volunteered this information—so, allow me to recuse myself, on grounds of enlightened self-interest. In any case, wouldn't an encyclopaedia of errors be a hopelessly endless project in a world ruled by Murphy's Law?
Strange things do happen by way of newsroom accident. Hitler gets to fight the First World War, the Ram Setu is stated to have been built so that Hanuman could walk across to Lanka, respectable figures in society wake up to read their own obituaries in the papers. And Sir John Simon came close to dying all over again on these pages in 2004. (Doesn't ring a bell? Remember 'Simon Go Back', Lala Lajpat Rai, 1928....) Obviously, one brain can't summon up the ingenuity required for all this revisionist history. It calls for a whole menagerie of geniuses, spread over the media and spanning decades of free speech. Now, then, having been corralled into deposing against one's own, kicking and screaming, might as well turn approver and draft a brief mea culpa. Once, after burning up half the neurons in my brain to parse a particularly garbled teleprinter copy, I had the mortification of having to explain to the boss the next day a sentence that read: "Amid much pandemonium, the Chief Justice of the Kerala High Court staged a walkout from the assembly." (Don't even ask how it came about: all I'll say is I was very young, too young to vote in fact, and was pardoned on account of good behaviour.)
Goof-ups owe to happenstance, the printer's devil, what those wise magicians knew as "the eternal cussedness of inanimate objects". There are, in the full roster of media errata, misdemeanours that rank a whole lot higher. Errors of judgement, lapses in taste, outright malice. What marks out this dotted borderline is, obviously, intent. Did you want to do it? Seen against public lynchings staged for the benefit of TV cameras, where does a dangling participle weigh in? The very word—goof-up—presupposes a scenario of seamless production of information/knowledge, a condition of normality against which these provide comic relief, a throwback to the days of innocence. (There was this newsroom girl who once asked, in all earnestness, 'Who is Phnom Penh?' No, no...no relation to Sean Penn.) But what, one may rightfully ask, is normal? Are our faux pas not mere surface foam? Do we not swim all the time on a frothing sea of folly?
Even with conscious expression, people differ on the margin of error: in the grey space of interpretation, one man's error is another's freedom of speech. Still, it's one thing to err on the side of excess, quite another to tip over into the malafide. There was a time when, faced with an esoteric topic, a reporter might have thrown up his hands and said, "The mind boggles". Now, the mind simply googles. I could pretend the quote that adorns the top of this article came out of a yellowing, dog-eared book in my library, and not Wikipedia. Why, with a little airbrushing, I could pass it off as my own: it's high art really. But information being particularly low hanging fruit on the Internet can cut both ways. It outfits the cop for sleuthing even as it offers easy meat to the poacher. But beyond this skulduggery, there is a higher, more rarefied form of caprice. Pure, unconscious; we do it, yet we know not what we do.
Take that chirpily rhyming, upstart category, News You Can Use—restaurant reviews, show timings, gadget updates. Surely, it makes you ask, of what use is the rest of news? What does it mean really to map the world's triumphs and tragedies onto glossy paper, in little squiggly shapes. You can't brush your teeth with it, and it certainly doesn't lower your cholesterol. Trawling the internet, one came across a Japanese-American architect couple, named Arakawa-Gins, who offer startling ensembles of shape and colour, abodes that help you control your fortunes. They call it Hotels of Reversible Destiny, and one of their mottos is 'We Have Decided Not to Die'. (Check out the apparition atop last page. More on Google images, it's worth a million words.) The same chaos principle seems to run through our media. Pink papers splashed with morphed superheroes, headlines tumbling on each other in a gangbang of fonts, TV screens brimming with five bands of scrolls and six box-windows with heads popping out, everything and everyone talking at the same time. Bells clanging, voices being cut down the moment they begin to make sense.
One thought all this signalled a disengagement from meaning. Fashion TV seemed the most honest, the most totemic in this new economy of indifference: a procession of mannequins, unconnected with each other and anything else; pale, gaunt, bombed-out faces unhinged from all transactions with the real world, a caravan of nothings. The rest of us too merely pretended to have politics, while our real job was to produce spiritual exhaustion, to convey empty, pauseless urgency. But in the light of Arakawa-Gins, one reassesses: behind the pandemonium, might there not lurk purpose? News with a secret redemptive quality? Mofussil TV cameras are certainly doling out instant salvation to petty thieves, resolving domestic quarrels in kerbside courts. This sinister business of altering the event in the act of recording, finally it's only proof of being connected.
On the sheer randomness of terrorist killings and train accidents, it has been said that they are not random at all, but institutionally produced, like farmer suicides and starvation deaths. Not system error, but the system itself. Remember those wardrobe malfunctions, the talk of them being intentional? From those staged evocations of accident, it's just one step down to the public lynchings. Sure, they are an abomination, but you can see in them a parody of what the mainstream media does in more sophisticated ways. A sort of Shakespearean interlude of low farce that cocks a snook at the main plot. Consider the constant enactment of the courtroom, the hearings, the public jury, the subtle lynchings, the invocation of 'public interest' turned over to our custody by some unstated power of attorney, the overall air of juridical authority. It was all begging to be imitated, for the sense of power to be scattered over the land like so much pollen.
Talking of spring fever, Outlook has had its trouser legs in a twist a few times—the infamous Gujarat poll, the pop iconography of Brahmins leaning leftward, and all that. Much of it bears no repetition, which is just as well because we are amnesiac and have outsourced the job of introspection. There's a whole army of ombudsmen out there with a ledgerful of mistakes committed by us, offering us weekly admonitions and moral correctives. The system works just fine. The more extreme of our critics, of course, think the whole magazine is one big mistake. Liberal prigs up to no good, and generating a pretty heavy carbon footprint at that. Might it not be better to let those eucalyptus and aspen trees stand, the wind rustling sweetly through them, instead of pulping them into Light Weight Coated paper to raise an almighty, self-righteous stink?
Light Weight Coated. Yes, that's the parchment you hold in your hands. Just short of art paper. In a way, you can say that about our content too. Not too hifalutin, just about reassuringly upper middle brow. Anything less would be trash, anything finer wouldn't befit a sewer inspector. Maybe it is a mistake, maybe we could always spoonfeed you good news in dulcet tones and never run the risk of going wrong. Bring you a world as calm as the waters of the Pacific, with fine coq au vin recipes and hot stock tips thrown in. But did anyone notice: fold our 12 years, from October 1995 to the present, into book-form and going almost exactly halfway down the spine will be a small event in faraway NY.... Let it be, we sign off with a borrowed solecism—a TV anchor hectoring an official, boxed into a window on the top right corner of the screen, on a runaway intelligence agent: "Does the government want to commit Mata Hari?" No, we are in no hurry to commit Mata Hari. And while we're at it, if you find the odd blooper lying around these pages, just take it as an evil-eye, the editorial equivalent of an old shoe, or a lemon and green chillies strung up to ward off bigger calamities.
