A review of #NLHafta from CV Anthony, Shipra Garg and Saikumaar Nagarajan

WrittenBy:NL Team
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Hello NL Team,

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Been a Recent subscriber of your endeavour to change news. My journey so far has been more than Satisfactory. I can ascertain within my family and friends circle that there is fatigue arising from watching the same BS called prime time news on our idiot boxes. Change is slow always has been and always will be. However change is inevitable. I am doing my best to increase the rate of change by spreading the Good News called Newslaundry as far as possible.

The issue I would like to discuss in brief is about nepotism due to recent iifa awards’ debacle. Personally I do not take advice,listen to or follow Celebrities but unfortunately they pop up from no where and are difficult to avoid. Even on your last podcast Manisha suggested to read the reply to Saif’s Childish attempt to justify his so called opportunity just to talent in the genes and not privilege. So even newslaundry is not immune to celebrity garbage. Hopefully my attempt to elaborate the favouring culture of humanity is a bit more mature than the Nawab.

Society is itself inclined towards giving favours and preferences to family members, close relatives and friends, nothing new.Political families are one example like the film fraternity.This is a worldwide phenomenon and not exclusive to India. Unlike lawyers, Doctors, civil servants etc… merit is not rewarded, however the public will deliver its verdict irrespective of the person be it the Gandhis’ or the Khans’. You make good policies – the people will vote you to power, or a movie that makes 100Cr at the box office – the producers will return for your signature . This is the challenge they face, don’t deliver and they become irrelevant.

Yes it is difficult for an outsider to achieve relevance in these industry, but not impossible. Opportunity must be made equally available to everyone. So my question to all the panellist would be, What should be the solution to such a situation?

Should the Government intervene in private matters specifically in the film business and big corporate’s where nepotism is rampant to bring equality. This solution sounds a bit “Hammer & Sicklish”, or Should we just highlight the issue of nepotism in these sectors, criticise the relevant people involved who directly or indirectly don’t let legitimate people rise and let the public decide. I feel the latter to be the appropriate way of dealing with this menace. Should laws be made making nepotism illegal? Would like to hear the panels take on this issue.

Yours Truly,

C.V. Anthony

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Dear NL Hafta team,

I listen to all the Hafta podcasts regularly without fail. It is an important part of my weekend I really enjoy the banter and the tone of the podcast. It sounds to me like some friends having a heated discussion on some contemporary issues. The mix of the participants is also like real life where you find an “aging hot head”, a “know all”, a “goodie- goodie” and whoever else their hapless guests maybe. However, from the past few episodes this equilibrium seems to be disturbed. Rather than having a friendly discussion the participants have become more rigid in their views and display entrenched positions.

Newslaundry, a news critiquing website is in danger of becoming a news curating website, the very purpose of your being was to critique various news items as per your  panelists  viewpoint and the audience could then get an informed opinion from both the sides of the story. Recently, I feel you have been following the pattern of tv news debates, one can hear a lot more shouting, belligerence and an attempt to drown out the voice of opposing participants.

This section is for Abhinandan only. I grew up in Bihar in a baniya family in proper Patna. I attended a convent school and a convent college in Patna and then one of the IIMs. My relatives all lived in Delhi so I visited Delhi every year during the summer vacations. I was teased alternatively as a “Stinking Bihari”, or they trying to make fun of Bihari accent by my cousins. I didn’t find it funny then and I don’t find it funny now. My opinion of Delhiites did not change much in my post grad as well, they were a most singular bunch of self-centered as&%$#^ .

Your prejudice in your class politics is very clear when you proclaim that mali type of people greeted with “jai ramji ki” in your youth and RSS wouldn’t welcome convent educated English speaking upper class citizenry because of their(RSS) affinity for which type of people??

As a rule, I am all for freedom of expression and do not mind expletives, but your use of offensive language against great Hindi poets really disturbed me;

a)       They are not present to either defend their work or their opinions

b)      I really enjoy their poetry which I discovered on the internet, which I wasn’t taught in my  convent high school.

I write this with great pain as I really do enjoy NL Hafta and do want it to deteriorate to a level where it might be unsalvageable. I also missed Anand Ranganathan on “hafta 130”, though his absence was mitigated by Vardhan’s presence to some extent.

Thanks

Shipra Garg

P.S.

Subscriber since July 2016

Word count 460 approx.

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Dear NL team,

I’m a subscriber, and a big fan of Newslaundry right from it’s inception. Clothesline has been my favourite in the past, but it’s a whole new level with Hafta. I wait on Sundays as to when the next Hafta episode will drop, and become completely plugged in for an hour, much to the annoyance of my wife and mother. I’m a fan of Abhinandan, both Anands, Madhu, Manisha and Deepanjana. While each of you come with your own ideological baggages, the level of honesty you display, and the respect you have for opposing views, plus the premium laid on facts – all of this endear the NL team to me a lot.

Which is why I became troubled enough when I read “He’s angry, he’s upper caste, meet superhero R Madhavan’ by Rajesh Rajamani. There are lots of logical fallacies, and cherry picking of facts that the author has used to support his hypothesis, but that in itself isn’t the cause for my concern. So allow me to lay out my problems with the piece first, and then come to what hence bothers me now about NL.

The author picks 4 films of Madhavan between 2001 – 2004, where he alleges he plays a ‘Brahmin masculine man’. When the author himself mentions that of these 4, in only one film does the character played by Madhavan explicitly calls out that he’s a brahmin, I wonder how he makes the leap to his sweeping trope that Madhavan had adopted the ‘brahmin masculine man’ in that phase of his career. The author has conveniently forgotten that in this same 4 year period, Madhavan played leading roles in a dozen films across Tamil and Hindi. 

Curiously, he missed the other film Madhavan played in this period, in which he explicitly calls himself out as a brahmin – ‘Nala Dhamayanti’ (2003). In this film, he plays the role of Ramji, a village bred brahmin cook who tries to make his fortune in Australia, falls in love with a non-brahmin girl from Eelam (Sri Lanka, for you folks). Notably, Ramji is a severely emasculated man, who gets routinely beaten up by white supremacists and the antagonist in the first half of the film. He seeks help from the non-brahmin Eelam girl, relies on her to learn martial arts and punch back. Was this film left out, because this inconveniences the author’s phantom platform of Madhavan being a “brahmin masculine man”? Curiously, Madhavan also featured on two films regarded as cult classics in the same period: in Kannathil Muthamittal by Mani Ratnam, as an author who travels through war torn Sri Lanka, barely able to protect his wife and daughter through the carnage. In Anbe Sivam, he plays a clueless urban ad film luddite, who learns important life lessons from a Marxist no less, essayed by Kamal Hassan, and in the process even gets punched by Kamal. Where does brahminism, or machismo fit in here? 

The author himself says that Madhavan is unable to portray non-urban characters (which Madhavan has routinely acknowledged, due to his appearance, and his language limitations). If he hence cannot portray a person from other backgrounds, which Madhavan routinely acknowledges as his limitation and regret, why does the author have a problem?

Again, in the next section of the article (‘return of the brahmin superman’) he cites precisely 4 films between 2007 and , again in which only one character is an avowed brahmin. That film (Evano Oruvan) is actually a dutiful remake of the Marathi hit Dombivali Fast, and the tamil remake was directed by the original film’s Marathi director himself. Is it too much to expect a remake to be faithful to the original film and it’s characters, given the critical acclaim received by the original?

What is also missing here is another crucial context – that of how brahmins have been portrayed in modern Tamil cinema. The NL team wouldn’t probably be aware of the social dynamics in Tamil Nadu, in the backdrop of the Periyar self respect movement and the Dravidian movement which succeeded it. Long before Mandal, TN succeeded in pushing out brahmins to the fringe of society in all spheres: administration, power, arts of all forms, and electoral politics. Brahmins are a minor loose end of TN society, with no political power and zero social power. Given the weakness of the brahmin community, Dravidian parties still continue to trash ‘brahminical forces’ in their manifestoes, and fringe groups still flog a horse which has been dead for more than 50 years. Fringe chauvinist groups go a step further, and routinely indulge in violence against people who outwardly display signs of brahminhood (i.e. the tuft in the head). I hope a news item of how a fringe group plans to adorn a pig with a ‘sacred thread’ opposite Sanskrit College in Chennai, on the day in which brahmins change their threads, wouldn’t have escaped the NL team’s notice. 

Given this popular disdain, and even animus against brahmins in TN, it was only a matter of time for this to seep into popular culture and cinema. Since the 90s, a typical brahmin character is shown to be severely emasculated, completely weak in nature, unable to defend himself or his family against anyone. Such a character routinely serve as props for comic relief for the protagonist, and worse becomes a punching bag for the hero’s sidekick. 

With this background, if by some strange accident, a brahmin hyper masculine protagonist does emerge in tamil cinema, that would be as anti-mainstream and counter culture as a female protagonist bashing up baddies (this actually has happened a lot in tamil cinema). The author appears to be from Tamil Nadu, or at least familiar enough with Tamil cinema and TN’s social tropes, and hence cannot claim innocence of all of this context. One can only assume wilful ignorance or plain malice in not considering all these aspects before jumping to a conclusion which fits the author’s ideological leaning.

Which leads me to what the author concludes: that Madhavan hasn’t been critiqued for his supposed hyper masculine roles because he is a brahmin. Such a claim is laughable given TN’s social context: that brahmins have no social or political clout to be above any sort of criticism, and are in fact routine targets of criticism negative social commentary in all forms of media. 

But outside TN’s social context, the claim of hyper-masculinity in itself being a pattern in the actor’s acting choices falls flat purely in terms of facts: that the author chooses to arrive at this conclusion picking 11 films out of an acting career spanning nearly 20 years – starting from TV to more than 40 films in leading roles, and a web series right now should show that the author cherry picks from facts to fit a predetermined narrative. 

I would like to suggest to the author that he take of his ideologically tinted glasses for once, and look at the possibility that Madhavan isn’t criticized for his hyper-masculine roles because he has a far more varied filmography in terms of diversity of characters, and that most of Madhavan’s scripts are with socially sensitive directors with scripts which take care to portray female protagonists as having a lot of agency (case in point: Tanu weds Manu, Irudhi Sutru/Saala Khadoos and many more).

There are many more errors in Rajesh Rajamani’s piece, but I will stop here, as the intention behind me writing this note isn’t a critique of the author’s idiotic view that brahmin’s aren’t supposed to portray masculine roles. This article has so many factual errors which can be easily checked even for a supposedly North Indian editorial team by a simple Google search (or at worst, asking another Tamilian to fact check). Newslaundry cannot hide behind the boiler plate of “….include views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. This does not indicate that we agree with everything that is published” to escape from simple fact checking, even if it is an opinion piece.

This article gave me a little concern – and many questions. 

1. Does NL team follow any editorial process for opinion pieces? If not, is it open season for anyone who can type and has the patience to cherry pick facts and construct a narrative?

2. If such disclaimer-laden opinion pieces are allowed, without verification, what is the difference between NL and a blogging tool like Medium, or even Facebook?

3. Is this a sign for more such insane and untruthful pieces to come?

I am a subscriber of NL, and only NL among all subscription based new sites, because I have always believed that the NL team, along with open discussion across ideologies, also believes in due process when publishing any material. I have always held that belief, which has been dented slightly by this piece of tripe built on top of half-truths and selective facts and open bias, which the NL team has seen fit to allow into your wonderful portal. 

While I appreciate Abhinandan taking up cudgels on the form of critique in this article in Twitter, in response to a Right wing ‘history checker’s’ tweet, I wish the same energy had been expended in ensuring all facts have been considered when publishing an opinion piece.

I wrote this letter because I greatly respect Newslaundry and its team as a very rare source of honesty in Indian news landscape, and also, as a subscriber and a free-market capitalist, I have the temerity to expect a response of even an acknowledgement of my concerns: 

Please please let me know whether it will be a stated editorial policy of Newslaundry to allow opinion pieces to be published in NL, without any sort of fact checking or editorial oversight. If I want to read ideological, unverified, nonsensical drivel, I’d rather unsubscribe: neither Kafila nor Satyavijayi has paywalls.

Yours sincerely,

Sai

P.S.: Disclosure: I’m a member of the savarna-brahmin community, which the author of the opinion piece seems to despise so much – just in case you guys believed that kind of ‘context’ is needed to judge my response.

P.P.S: Abhinandan, if by some chance, my letter features in NL Hafta – I promise to like and RT every tweet you send out, even if it supports Shri Kejriwal and the AAP. And please also spare me of any of your fond Punjabi cuss words, if you feel my concerns or observations are in error.

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