Tidbits of region’s media

MR NICE GUY Who was the most written-about man in the Southern Hemisphere for a couple of weeks in May 1990? Why, Atal Bihari Vaj- payee, of course. All Asian and international newsmag- azines (Asia editions, mind you—for it cannot be imagined that a Time reader in the American Midwest would follow the shenanigans in the Lok Sabha with great interest) carried stories on Atalji. And before you knew it, he was gone. But the incongruousness of it all came through in the write-ups: Mr Vajpayee is a nice man, they all said. It is just that he is in the wrong party.

RIAZ HUSAIN Khokhar vs Indian media. Who wins? Mr Khokhar, the Pakistani High Commissioner to New Delhi since 1992, who has the knack for "needling India on Indian soil" as one columnist put it. Just before the general elections, the irrepressible/irresponsible (depending on your geopolitical perspective) diplomat told the India Abroad News Service that the poll exercise in Kashmir was bound to be rigged. The media backlash was deafening, but a preoccupied Rao Government did not respond with expulsion, and a light rap on the knuckles by South Block foreman Salman Haider seemed to be enough. The extremes of the Indo-Pak pendulum now seem more moderate, which means that a Subcontinental nuclear war is not as near as we thought. And Mr Khokhar provides the key.

AT LEAST UNTIL the elections in mid-June, trust Bangladeshi newspapers to provide equal column inches to ladies Zia and Hasina as they go about their pre-poll whistle-stops. So, if you have a picture of Sheikh Hasina with newcomers to Awami League at her residence, next to it you will find another one of the same dimensions of Begum Khaleda receiving bouquets from former MPs. And if Hasina wants tornado-hit people saved, then the headline on Khaleda appealing for help for victims cannot be far away—in fact, next door.

A DART WHICH strikes deep and hurts bad to the editors of The Kathmandu Post for printing a closeup of the decomposed body of a rape victim, with accompanying text that describes in meticulous detail the position of the victim´s legs and the stage of putrefaction of the body parts. This brings up once again the lack of photo-editing sensibilities in the subcontinent, where the editor-sahebs themselves jump to print the most gruesome picture they can find, be it the decapitated head of a bomb blast victim being carried around by the hair in New Delhi, or a cleanly sliced body part on a street surface in Colombo. Not to mention the alacrity with which we have been printing pictures of the gruesome street scenes from Monroville in Liberia, showing Krahn fighters being killed in various imaginative ways.

NOW THIS FROM a wildlife column about the amazing Mallee Fowl, from a nature column in The Independent of Dhaka. "Leipoa ocellata is a large chicken-like ground bird which belongs to the Megapodidae family of the order Galliformes. It is well known as the Lowan. The Mallee fowl, an incubator bird, lives in very dry desert areas of [and now get this] Australia…" Sorry, not interested. Next bird.

WHICH CAME First, Duck or Egg? Is it for or against the SAARC and SAPTA spirit if one objects to Indian eggs being smuggled into Bangladesh, hitting Bangladeshi poultry bad? These will be the stuff of discussion as South Asian trade picks up. So let us look deeper. I learn that the southwest region, with Jessore as hub, is reeling under the accumulated avarice of "a section of unscrupulous traders in the border districts [who] started smuggling Indian eggs including duck eggs into the country." Well, how Bangladesh today handles the duck and chicken egg crisis is therefore quite important, but I would like it sunny side up, please. Quack.

MOST LEVEL-CROSSING accidents involve express trains, said a Times of India headline, which finally speaks of something that I have had in mind for quite a while, which is that it is lack of basic physics which leads drivers into fatal accidents all over South Asia. According to the report: "Most mail and express trains approach level crossings at speeds as high as 90 kmph. This means that a train travels 25 meters in one second. If the road driver sights the train at a distance of 300 meters, then the train will reach it in about 12 seconds. However, in many cases, the drivers are not able to negotiate the crossing in 12 seconds." To take the idea further, the rash driving occurs because drivers have not gone to school where they are taught that mass times velocity equals momentum. So, what drivers have to be taught is not traffic rules, but physics.

"BECAUSE IT IS THERE" was the laconic answer by George Leigh Mallory back in 1923 when someone asked him why he wanted to climb Everest. Now, Peter Hillary, son of Sir Ed, has come up with a modem-day rendition of that same phrase. Writing in The New York Times oped page in the aftermath of the many deaths that the mountain saw this spring, he writes why climbers risk everything to tackle the Himalayan giants: "To challenge  the very essence of oneself."

UNEQUAL EVEN  In  Death
April-May was the time of killing in much of South Asia, and the media played its part in the quickly forgetting act. Four deaths in the bomb blast in lmran Khan´s hospital in Lahore, for example, garnered many times more ink and air time than the 500 deaths by tornado in Bangladesh. Over fifty Santhals were massacred by Bodos in Assam, while eight Nepali workers at a stone-crushing factory in Kashmir Valley were executed by militants. The death-watch in Karachi started winding down, but Colombo seemed to be bracing itself for another one. In Nepal, there were 20 deaths in the Tarai, but what got international attention, with covers in Time and Newsweek, and wire services going all out to provide coverage, were the deaths on Mt Everest.

EDITORIAL IN The Independent of Dhaka, titled City´s Drainage System, says "the capital city lacks any drainage system worth the name" and that it gets water-logged "every time it rains for about an hour." Apparently, the problem is no longer confined to the city´s "low-lying areas", and it takes two or three days for the roads to emerge from under the water. While those of us from more undulating tracts can sympathise, is there anything to be said for the fact that water seeks its own level? Bangladesh is a country where inclines are measured at a metre per two hundred kilometres. So, how can you make water flow to a lower level (which is what the editorial wants) when there is no lower level? I trust I have made my point.

POLITICAL HUGGIE BEARS. For the 13 days that the BJP government was in power, there was lots of hugging all around and laddoos being downed in parliamentary committees and street comers. After making sure the press photographers were present, Mr Advani would feed laddoos to Mr Vajpayee, and Mr Vajpayee would return the favour. Murli Manoharji awaits his turn, salivating, while Shri Jaswant Singh looks like he would prefer some barfi instead. As for the hugging, nobody dared get close to, much less hug, the formidable Vijae Raje Scindia. And how do you hug Ms Sushma Swaraj, soon-to-be Information and Boradcasting Minister for 13 days, without outraging anyone´s modesty? With party stalwarts on standby, Mr. K.L. Sharma made a go at it, and a visibly uncomfortable Ms Swaraj wished that bearhugs by male colleagues did not have to be part of winning Lok Sabha elections. Men politicians can hug much more freely, with no body part coming in the way, as Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda and Bihar Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav demonstrated.

AN OBSCURE ITEM in The Hindustan Times of 18 May, sourced to an agency named ANI, announced, "Baluchistan in Ferment Again". Apparently, the return from exile of "the veteran leader" Ataullah Khan Mengal in January 1996 fuels speculation that something big is in the offing. Citing some other events, and mixing all known metaphors, the writer warns: "With all this political cocktail brewing the province appears to be sitting on a time bomb." Interesting thing is, no one else is saying so. Does it mean that this was just prejudiced reporting, or are the Baloch up to something?

TALKING OF BALOCH nationalism (centred originally on the Kalat state, a Baluchi speaking area), the same article makes an interesting point: The Khan of Kalat had preferred independence in 1947 to being joined with Pakistan. His argument was that "the legal status of Nepal and Kalat was different from other princely states, of the Indian subcontinent. While the other ´native states´ dealt with the British Indian Government in New Delhi, Nepal and Kalat maintained their treaty relationship directly with London."

A PHOTO AND caption in the Dhaka Independent shows Salman F. Rahman, the paper´s publisher and boss of the Beximco group which seems to own half of Bangladesh, receiving a bouquet as convenor of the Samriddha Bangladesh Andolan. Mr Rahman has been known to have political ambitions, and the SBA does have the looks of the beginnings of a political party, but more research is needed. Well, if Imran Khan can get political on the other side of India, why not Salman F. Rahman on the near side?

I REPEAT PART of an article by Sujeet Raj an in The Times of India of 17 May, which indicates that the reporter does not know his Mount Everest from a polluted sand bank on the Jamuna. The article ends with: "Despite the Everest having been scaled nearly 600 times, the Indian Mountaineering Foundation processes nearly 60 foreign and almost 200 Indian mountaineering expeditions every year." I have no doubt that the IMF indeed does all those things, but Mr Raj an does not seem to know it would have next to nothing to do with processing applications for Chomolongma/Sagarmatha, which comes properly under the jurisdiction (if I am not in a different century, a different planet) of Nepal´s Ministry of Tourism and/or the Tibet Mountaineering Association.

Truism of the month: headline in The News of Lahore