Hi NL,

Am a three-times NL subscriber and donor to The Wire here. In Hafta 144, the panelists made a few points about The Wire which I believe are vain.

As someone with lots of experience using Disqus, the popular commenting software running on both the NL and the Wire, I believe here is what happened. The comments were probably automatically removed by Disqus. It removes duplicate comments by the same author; if the comment has been removed once, it will be removed again and again (5 times). Why did Disqus remove the comment when posted the first time? I don’t know. Maybe some reader marked the comment as spam triggering its automatic removal, or some URL was in the comment (this often is a red flag while using Disqus) causing automatic removal, or the moderator did not like the comment and removed it. It may be coincidence that the comment was critical of the posted article.

When it comes to respecting the comments on the website, NL is not much more democratic compared to The Wire. First, Hafta panelists in their last week’s discussion do not seem to possess deep experience of using Disqus before taking the high pedestal asking The Wire to keep its ears on the ground. Second, my comments containing no abuse have been previously removed on both NL and The Wire. I feel comments get removed because moderators are not active in managing Disqus content (including Disqus rules that automatically remove comments). Third, I personally have often provided constructive feedback on NL comments section but nobody from NL seems to respond to them. For example, I gave feedback about a wrong hyperlink in a Consti-tuition episode but it never got fixed.

I have a few other things to say about Consti-tuition, NL, and your other points about The Wire. Probably I will write in a separate email if I get the time, but in short I believe The Wire maintains as good standard as NL, contrary to negative “side comments” like “pompous less intelligent persons”. The whole discussion on accents was simply a medley of personal opinions, pretty much useless for subscribers. Whenever un-researched and under-researched extempore is passed, I find the Hafta too casual for journalism.

In any case, there is a lot of good journalism going on in NL. Hope you keep it going!

Best regards,

Amit

Dear Newslaundry team,

My name is Himanshu Tyagi, this is my second email. I continue to be a subscriber since, among other reasons, it doesn’t cost too much to be one.

I regularly listen to NL Hafta and often have mental debates with most of you, but I mostly don’t find time to articulate my arguments and put them down in an email. But I want to comment on a discussion related to Modi’s image as a bachelor and the political mileage he gets out of it. I find that individuals are complex and the societies are simple. And complex individual will manipulate simple societies. In Modi’s case, he has gained some political mileage from his poor economic background and the fact that his mother went through hardship to raise her kids. The public seems to be convinced that this humble background is an indispensable part of Modi’s background and he gets brownie points for it. While in reality I feel that Modi’s entire existence is based on rejecting this background. He has put in great effort to not let this background define him and all the actions in his life seem to be towards not letting people ignore him as a boy from a humble background. Similarly, on the other topic of working for long hours, while the public appreciates it as some extraordinary feet, I bet Modi has nothing better to do. As Anand said, it is a disease and is prevalent in our modern lifestyle. Everyone I know is working all the time — it is sort of cathartic to do that. The interesting point is that while such a gap between individual and social thinking is prevalent in all cultures, in a conservative society like ours it is even larger. I rarely see any famous public figures expressing a sophisticated thought that is counter to the general public belief, although most of us in our individual capacity will reject the consensus. We the poor citizens of this ancient nation of great intellectual traditions have to make do by hailing the Kangana Ranauts and Amir Khans of our world as the intellectual mavericks of our society.

Regards,

Himanshu