A review of #NLHafta by Sujith, Arvind, Nirmal and Vijay

Dear Abhinandan,

I am a subscriber since November 2017. I took the plunge after listening for free for 6 months or so. For me the best Hafta so far was the Lallantop one which provided great insights about UP. I am from Kerala and I have to say that your (NL’s) understanding of south India is pretty poor. It will be refreshing to hear from TS Sudhir or others once in a while. When you compared Mammootty to Rajinikanth, I lost it. Anyway, that’s for another day.

The reason I am writing to you is to understand how the NL Sena works. You raised funds for Murthal, Kannur, etc. where is the full coverage of that? Do I need to take another subscription to listen/read that? Please clarify. Thanks and I really like the insights that Raman sir, Anand Vardhan (he speaks English like Hindi, but wonder how he gets those Barron’s (GRE) words in his vocabulary) and Atul bring in to the Hafta discussion.

Thanks and regards,

Sujith Sathyadas

Hey Chitranshu and NL team,

February marks a year that I’ve been subscribing to Newslaundry and I thought it might be a good idea to do a recap.

1. Hafta continues to be deeply engaging and Fridays continue to be eagerly awaited so that I can get the next episode in the playlist
2. The app experience for the podcast continues to be a disaster and I am still a strong proponent of finding a solution to make Hafta available via regular RSS feeds (and use the paywall to get subscribers to make an appearance every Hafta – to provide an “aam aadmi” opinion)

Having said that – here are items I’d been wanting to comment on:

1. I turned to platforms like NL because I don’t watch Republic TV or NDTV or Times Now, I know TV news is terrible. Please don’t re-enforce the same during the podcast, it is a waste of time, you’ve won and TV news has already lost
2. The Loya case – I’m a BJP sympathiser and I am willing to donate Rs 10,000 for an NL Sena project to get to the bottom of this case. You are a news organisation I trust. Please do your own story (in a time-bound manner before the 2019 elections) and bring the truth out and call out the real culprits, at this point I don’t know if it is Hartosh or Amit Shah.

3. Last, but not the least – please have somebody document all of Anand Vardhan’s one-liners, they’re a treasure trove.

Cheers,

Arvind

Hi NL Hafta team,

I wanted to comment on the opinion piece by Mr Kishore Asthana “Open letter to our angst-ridden social media warriors”.

I have to agree with the article to a large extent that no other political leader or party has shown us an alternative. I can remember my conversation with friends, some with staunch Left ideology, during the 2014 Lok Sabha election where it was largely the consensus that the NDA led by PM Narendra Modi was the best option the country was left with. This government has shown the potential to take big, tough decisions. The decisions can be debated to be right or wrong but at least it took hard and risky decisions.

Considering that the NL Hafta team comprises an experienced set of panelists; I would like to request if each of you could suggest another person from the across the party spectrum who has the potential to bring together popular support across the country and lead India to more idealistic notions. I currently fear the existing alternatives of coming to power.

Maybe by bringing out those names, we can help promote such individuals from obscurity.

As a disclaimer: I am not a BJP supporter and neither do I hold Indian citizenship anymore and have no vested interest to promote anybody. I am only an individual with an emotional investment to see India develop and with a hope that my young son will grow up to take pride in the fact that he is of Indian descent.

Best regards,

Nirmal

Hi NL team,

I am a regular listener of Hafta and I think it’s one of the best current affairs programmes coming out of India. It remains engaging even when it is 2 hours long! I also like that you listen to criticism and take it well, so here is mine.

In the latest Hafta you covered the rape of an infant and how the Indian media ignored the case. It’s great that you guys covered it but I found Meghnad’s comments at the end of the discussion quite disturbing. This is when he went on a rant about how it angers him that someone could look at an infant as a sexual object. This rant was not just completely unnecessary to the subject but also very insensitive to your listeners, some of whom are likely to have been victims of childhood sexual abuse (as you pointed out – one in three have faced it) and whose memories may have been triggered by someone (a man no less) describing it in gory detail.

While I found the discussion on the news  sensitive enough, the rant wasn’t. News personalities (which you all are) should, in my opinion, refrain from expounding on how disgusting or gory something is when truly it is plain tragic, unless the details are important to establishing facts in the case. Besides, if we don’t rant about how murder is a grizzly affair that one can’t imagine doing, why should we rant about sexual abuse? I think this is an extreme example of the drawbacks of having a casual discussion, which is Hafta’s USP but which ought to be restricted in such cases. Someone in the panel should have stopped him and moved on.

The other drawback of a casual discussion is that facts are sometimes dismissed as to not exist, without even doing a simply fact-check. A small example is from the same Hafta, where panelists simply dismissed the fact that IDFC could have an expansion (Infrastructure Development Finance Company – see Wikipedia first line). These are not mere nuggets but important facts that tell us the origins of these companies and hence the kind of culture/psyche they are likely to carry. So when you read a report on elections by IDFC, it’s relevant where this company comes from. They also tell us about our recent history. There are many such examples like IDBI (formerly Industrial Development Bank of India), ICICI (formerly Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India) – all originally meant for industrial and infrastructure financing but now running on retail deposits and loans, their short-forms hiding their original unfinished job.

PS: PRS has a full-form too. Its official name as a section 25 company is Institute for Policy Research Studies (source: their website’s ‘About Us’ page). It might appear that I’m trolling Meghnad but I am really not; I am a big fan of his work on pParliament and policy. He should run a podcast on Parliament days 🙂

Best,

Vijay Nag