Firangi reporter, desi tales: Book Review of Daniel Lak’s Mantras of Change
This one appeared in Hindustan Times, Delhi, about a week ago.
Mantras of Change: Reporting India in a Time of Flux
by Daniel Lak
Penguin Viking India; Rs 375
Hardcover; 252 pages
For me, the benchmark of non-fiction short writing will always be P. Sainath’s Everybody Loves A Good Drought, a collection of quietly brilliant news and feature articles written by its lowkey journalist author for newspapers over several years.
Proving that the ‘best’ in bestseller occasionally does refer to quality rather than sales figures, that fine collection went through several printings and an updated edition. Sainath’s simple journalistic integrity and utter lack of literary pretentiousness allowed the people he interviewed, and their ordinary everyday life stories, plights and predicaments, to seep through the page, pass through your fingertips and enter directly into your heart, to linger there long after you shut the book and your eyes.
That, for me, was the last collection of journalism in India that deserved to be collected into a book, and perhaps the first since Joseph Mitchell’s Up In The Old Hotel that truly moved me.
We cannot have too many such books, and with Indian journalism now filled with endlessly pontificating columnists jostling each other for bum space and page 1 turned over to the paper nazis of celebdom, it’s one we’re unlikely to find often.
This book doesn’t quite aspire to the same standards.
Mantras of Change fits more into the sub-genre of ‘firangi journo does South East Asia and lives to tell the tale’ brand of collected essays. Lak is probably a well-known and respected name in journalistic circles, and has clearly spent his time and paid his dues, workwise.
The essays are intelligent, informative and interesting. A Canadian national reporting for the BBC, these pieces are essentially rehashes of his reports on various topics he covered during his postings in India, Pakistan and Nepal.
Like Mark Tully, another intrepid India commentator and BBC-wallah, Lak isn’t afraid to speak his mind, pointing fingers where needed. His reportage is honest and direct, his research accurate and his views unsurprising but not preening or facile either.
He covers a variety of topics and themes in fifteen well-defined wide-ranging pieces, covering the IT boom in Bangalore, changes in sexual orientation, Kashmir and the troubled history of border violence, poverty, caste, the frustratingly fascinating contradictions of Bombay life, AIDS, the Ganga, Khajuraho…
Lak is well aware of the essential incongruity of a foreign eye perceiving Indian complexities and reprocessing them for western news audiences, an act akin to a translator forced to choose between recreating a lyrical masterpiece in minutest detail and risking loosing his listeners, or paraphrasing it into easy-to-follow journalistic shorthand and losing the intrinsic beauty of the original.
Like almost every other firang journalist, he shortchanges the very topics and people and cultures he covers without even knowing he’s doing so, skimming lightly over the surface without ever getting under the skin.
In the end, he’s saying what a hundred others of his ilk have said before, more or less as well as they, and without any greater insights or intellectual stimulation.
It’s like sipping oversweetened overboiled chai drawn from a street vendor’s stainless steel dispenser: all of them taste the same.
To his credit, Lak does seem aware of the inherent shortcomings of his task, and is quick to point out that he hasn’t filled the book with the usual close encounters with prime ministers and Bollywood stars. But that doesn’t make the overboiled brew taste any better.
Perhaps the only essay that, to this reviewer’s eye, came close to doing something more than simply reboiling old themes, was the essay titled No Lesbians Please, We’re Indian.
Though here too Lak retells stories that have reported in the Indian press before, by focussing on an area that most editors largely eschew, whether through personal distaste or out of fear of public disapproval, Lak’s fairly balanced essay lifts the lid of simmering cauldron of reeking repression.
The close of the essay, retelling a harrowing old incident wherein a vengeful male police officer moves the IPS authorities and courts to regain ‘possession’ of his absconded fiancee, forcing her to marry him despite being aware of her sexual proclivity, and condemning her innocent lesbian partner to jail is perhaps the first that brings a rush of blood to the head, making one wish that Lak, and his firangi brethren, spent more time seeking out and reporting grassroot-level stories like this that expose the brutality of our chauvinistic hypocritically religion-toting moral mahatmas and give the endless terrorism and Kashmir reports a rest, permanently.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 6th, 2005 at 10:07 am. It is filed under Ashok.
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