In this column we will be featuring the writings by award winning women journalists in India found in the collection of the book ‘Making News Breaking News Her Way. It is a publication by Tranquebar Press in association with Media Foundation, New Delhi which instituted the annual Chameli Devi Jain Award for an Outstanding Women Mediaperson in 1980.
0ff the prime-time map
Nilanjana Bose
[dropcap]A[/dropcap] month before the Chameli Devi Jain Awards were announced, I had just returned from Gujarat to understand how life had changed in the state, five years after the riots that followed the 2002 Godhra train burning. I still remember six- year-old Muskaan sitting next to me, drinking a glass of milk looking me straight in the eye and telling me with all the directness of a child, ‘You will never be my friend. ..you are a Hindu, I am a Muslim.’ For me, that summed up the hours of footage I had filmed so far.
The previous year, in 2006, when the Lancet report on foeticide estimated that lakhs of girl-children had been aborted, many journalists did scathing reports on illegal clinics, and the government banned ultrasound tests. I got on a train and travelled to Punjab, where I found ‘son temples’, temples that supposedly guaranteed the birth of a son. Expectant parents told me how they prayed the coming child would not be a girl, and teenagers admitted what a curse it was to be born a woman. For most, the Lancet report was a stack of horrifying figures, to me. It epitomised the plight of young girls mired in the sands of self-hatred.
At CNN-IBN where I work, one of my first assignments in 2005 was a half-hour feature on Andhra Pradesh’s AIDS orphans, children whose parents had died of HIV, and who are now child-heads of families. I travelled to Guntur district thinking I would find a group of unfortunate children. Instead I found a band of brave little life-soldiers reconciled to their fate, yet determined to make the best of it. They were young children who were trying hard to be brave every day of their lives. The only time one of them actually broke down was when I did the most natural thing that would come to any human being -pull a fourteen-year-old child under an umbrella when it started raining. I still remember her looking up at me, with tears in her eyes. She said to me, ‘No one touches me here in my village. They think they’ll get AIDS from me because I am HIV positive.’ A moment later, she had wiped those tears off her face and was back to playing the role of the brave little girl destiny had charted for her. The days I spent with these children, trying to gain an understanding of their world taught me more than any data on HIV-AIDS ever could.
It’s been six years since that trip to Guntur, but very little in me has changed. I continue to be the storyteller I was –I continue to search for that one story that few others will tell, and I continue to be surprised by the little lessons I learn from every assignment that I have taken on since. It never ceases to surprise me that in the stories of other people, life passes on its little teachings. Earlier this year, I went back to the city where I was born, Kolkata, just before West Bengal went to the polls. I happened to step into Trinca’s -a restaurant on Park Street. It’s one of those places that play old English numbers from the 1970s and 80s while faithful patrons eat their medium-rare tenderloin steaks.
I was sitting in a comer listening to a young man play the drums while the lead singer sang ‘Tell Laura I love Her. There was something about the young man -perhaps it was the look of pure contentment on his face -that made me ask him whether he’d like to speak to us about the city and the elections coming up. After discussing politics, we got down to talking about him. He turned out to be a schoolteacher who taught the entire day at one of Kolkata’s most renowned schools and then came to Trinca’s to play the drums. ‘Do you do it for the money?’ I asked. His answer wasn’t what I expected. ‘My father always wanted me to be a teacher, while I wanted to be a drummer,’ he said.
I love my father. ..This is my way of making him happy and, at the same time, living my dreams. I’ve never been happier!’ It was a simple lesson on how to balance your reality and your dream, but for me it Was the story of a man who had just managed to conquer what so many of us strive to do -find a balance between what we have to do and what We Want to do.
It is so simple to just go for an assignment, do your work with clinical precision and then come back, knowing you’ve done your job and done it well. A lot of us do that. But it’s in the little moments spent with the people you’re filming that can make all the difference, more often to us and sometimes, in the stories we tell.
When in 2009 I went to Bhopal, twenty-five years after the Union Carbide Gas Tragedy, I was unprepared for what I was witness. Children still being born with congenital defects, children who could, at best, make animal sounds when they tried to talk, parents who could not fathom why their sons or daughters had to pay the price for what happened a quarter of a century ago. In the midst of filming that episode, I met two people who had been scarred for life -with their names. Twenty-five-year-old Zeher Lal and Gas Devi were given these names because they were born on the midnight of 2 December 1984. When I asked Gas Devi whether she’d ever wanted to change her name, the answer I got was not a ‘yes’. It wasn’t even one that was angry or bitter. It was an answer that was unsentimental and devoid of any emotion. ‘No,’ said Gas Devi. ‘There’s no point being bitter about my name. Bitterness hasn’t changed anything for us in the last twenty- five years. It won’t change anything in the next twenty-five.’ when you look at the reality of Bhopal today, in the aftermath of the Union Carbide Gas tragedy, you know Gas Devi is bang on.
Ten years into the profession, I still continue to search for the Muskaans, for the little brave fourteen-year-olds, for the contented drummer in a restaurant, for the woman named after a tragedy. For I know, through each of their stories – stories that are waiting to be heard from places that fall off the prime-time map -the storyteller in me learns those precious little lessons of life.
Nilanjana Bose is based in Delhi and currency editor, special features with CNN-IBN. She has been in the television news industry for more than ten years. She started her career with NDTV in Kolkata before moving to CNN-IBN in 2005. Nilanjana has travelled across the country and reported on a variety of topics. In 2007, she received the Ramnath Goenka Award for covering India Invisible. Nilanjana Bose won the Chameli Devi Jain Award in 2006. She shared the award with Sreerekha B.
