On the day all national newspapers came wrapped with the message from the caped crusader, J Jayalalithaaaaaa (her name echoing across the nation that day), a small advert in the classified columns that also appeared in all the national newspapers went largely unnoticed. In the paper I was reading, it was placed between an EMPI Business School ad asking for applicants for ‘caterers and restaurants’ (sic) and another one that required a receptionist/front desk executive (and the difference in the two being…?) at Fun Town Resort in Bahadurgarh

The ad in question was intriguing as it was for a job which all these dailies and other news agencies and news channels had put out: ‘Urgently required: Telepath, having capable and verifiable skills in reading minds and the space in between the lines, deciphering motives and confirming the truth in statements. Psephologists need not apply. Send resume to….’

If there’s one thing in common with all media houses, it’s that they all still need journalists (read: content providers) – if for nothing, to keep a buffer between those who really run the paper and those who need to be criticised in the public space from time to time. So I assumed that this job advert was for a particularly specialised category of journalists: Principal Mind-Reader.

Which, if you think about it, isn’t that much of a surprise. A few media organisations — Hindustan Times (where I work) with c Fore, CNN-IBN with GfK Mode and ABP News (the old Star News) with AC Nielsen — conducted ‘Mood of the Nation’ surveys in league with market research companies, coming up with their findings last Sunday. The occasion was the third anniversary of UPA 2 and it came at a time when the Central government has been perceived to be a stationary train with the tracks speeding forward underneath it (with, as physics students will understand, the net result of the train moving backwards).

While you don’t need to be a Yogendra Yadav to wet your finger and take it out to see which way the wind is blowing, the media forever looking at novel ways to conduct a dipstick national survey thought up a new idea: asking a carefully random selection of (preferably young) Indians what they made of the UPA’s second innings, who they would like to be in government if polls were conducted now, who would be their choice for PM, etcetera etcetera (sung to the tune of ‘Que sera sera’).

Three things struck me in these surveys as interesting: one, that most of the surveys came to the conclusion that if elections were to be held now a majority of respondents would vote for the NDA; two, that most of those surveyed wanted a younger PM (I presume younger than the current one and thus allowing Pranab Mukherjee to have yet another shot at PM-ship as he is three years younger than Manmohan Singh); and three, no one in the surveys lied or tossed out the first answer that came to his or her head. Or did they?

Anyone who has ever played the party game ‘Sex-Marriage-Cliff’– where three names are given and you have to choose one of them as a sexual partner, another name as a spouse, and the other to push off the cliff’s edge – knows that the first name that pops in your head may not be the final choice. There have been occasions when given the choice between J Jayalalithaaaaaa, Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee, my first reaction is to choose Mamata for ‘marriage’ and Jayalalithaaaaaa for ‘cliff’. But logistical considerations have made me change my mind and opt for Jayalalithaaaaaa for ‘marriage’ and Mamata for ‘cliff’.

So when a bright young spark tells the survey man on the other end of the phone line that Rahul Gandhi is his choice as Prime Minister (as most people surveyed in the HT and CNN-IBN polls did), or another respondent says that Narendra Modi is her choice as Prime Minister (as most people in the ABP News survey did), what does it mean: that it’s a Modi-Rahul presidential-style race for 2014? Or that the ideal situation would be if Rahul moves to the NDA and leads the next non-Congress government?

Running a survey, of course, is the easiest way to make a pop quiz seem like a verifiable trend with the empirical stamp that only professional journos can provide. It’s also tremendously helpful to conjure up a ‘big news’ rabbit from the empty hat. What makes the difference between a good survey – by which I mean a survey that actually sheds light on matters that are not obvious – and a bad one, is the way the questions are posed. So if one asks a respondent, “Is it time to elect a younger PM?” and gets the reply, “Yes” when the media is offering a ‘younger PM’ option as a code word for Rahul Gandhi, what does the answer matter if the dice have already been loaded in the questionnaire. (The fact that more respondents in the HT C-fore survey prefer Manmohan Singh as PM than Pranab Mukherjee should have prompted counter-questions from the surveyor: “Are you sure? Pranab is younger than Manmohan, you know. And, um, what about Sachin Pilot or Akhilesh Yadav? Both are younger than Rahul Gandhi?”)

Ask the same folks who opted for Narendra Modi as Prime Minister of their choice, “Would you have a PM under whose rule as chief minister hundreds were butchered in riots, or a PM whose stint as CM was relatively peaceful?” and I’ll bet my bottom 55.04 rupees against the dollar and sinking that very few respondents would go with the first option.

And to showcase the subjective beauty in which survey results are read, we had Congress MP Satyavrat Chaturvedi on an ABP News panel on Sunday displaying the Hindustan Times (where I work) and telling news anchor Deepak Chaurasia how the ABP News-AC Nielsen survey is bunkum and that everyone should go by the Hindustan Times-C fore survey.

Unfortunately, for Chaturvedi, who must have just read the headline – ‘Young India wants a young PM’ and the words on page 1 which were in a bigger font size (‘One out of four Indians wants Rahul as PM’) – Ravi Shankar Prasad of the BJP, a fellow panelist, had also read the HT-C Fore survey news story. After Chaturvedi was done explaining his version of the general theory of relativity, Prasad calmly told him that he should read the HT page 1 survey story more carefully as it also mentioned that, “if elections were held now, more young Indians would vote for the NDA than the UPA”. And that was the end of that.

So what about the demand for telepaths in news organisations? Will they be needed to get into the minds of people who are surveyed in ‘Mood of the Nation’ polls and gather what they are really thinking instead of hurriedly replying to questions that mirror that old quip by Henry Ford about customers having a choice of any colour for the Model T they buy as long as they chose black?

No, silly. The minds of humans, especially potential voters, are in constant flux. So, asking a survey question such as ‘Will the current UPA government be able to complete its second term?’ (asked by the CNN-IBN-GfK Mode poll) – which is more like a quiz question rather than a query such as ‘Are you satisfied with the current term of the UPA government?’ (asked in the same survey) that hopes to reveal one’s thoughts – is as good as asking, “Who’s your daddy?”.

I would think that the mind-readers in demand are going to be deployed for a more worthy purpose. Considering the Prime Minister, the UPA Chairperson and the young(er) man about whom the media, more than anyone else, obsesses about aren’t exactly talkers, the media could finally know what they think on issues that matter and are being constantly yapped about by others, sometimes on their behalf: public spending, the ever-hanging Lokpal Bill, FDI, Air India, inflation, financial scandals, quotas…

Not too long ago, the Prime Minister uttered a few words on the Kudankulam nuclear power plant. And after months of insect chatter, work on the plant was suddenly underway. Last week, the man reportedly muttered to governmental colleagues, including Union Sports Minister Ajay Maken, about not making statements regarding the current IPL. And so, journos have had to scamper to find inane sound bites and quotes from other worthies like Lalu Yadav, the father of the dud non-playing member of the Delhi Daredevils, Tejashwi Yadav. So speaking his mind does hold benefits for Manmohan Singh and the nation. And yet…

Whether Rahul Gandhi wants his future government to welcome or stop FDI in retail, whether he actually wanted to campaign the UP assembly elections earlier this year as a chief ministerial candidate but wasn’t ‘allowed’ by party ‘colleagues’… and for answers to many such questions, it would be better if he spoke and we got to match his statements with what his party and party-men are doing about them.

As for Sonia Gandhi, being the strong and silent type has a sell-by-date quality to it, especially if the silence – both in Parliament and in the media – hasn’t managed to work wonders to turn the tide.

But the PM, the UPA chairperson and the almost 42-year-old Boy Wonder still want to speak less, work mysteriously. Which is where journalism needs telepaths to figure out what the trinity are thinking, so that we can match their utterings with what is being done. Aren’t you glad I just read your mind?

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