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A matter of style, sense and substance

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For the print media journalist, the raw material is words. How he or she uses them, or plays with them, decides whether the package of information presented is interesting and appealing to the reader. It is a craft that calls for diligence, apart from skill. Some words chosen for effect or impact may produce unexpected reactions from the target – the reader. When they react, some of them may be nitpicking, but many raise issues of substance.

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I have said that communications without addresses will not get a response. But when one of them raises interesting or important points, we try to find out the address, using the phone number or email id. But when the mail to the id given in the phoned in (no number was given) message bounces, what do you do?

The questions raised by the “reader” needed an answer. (I wonder whether the woman’s name given was genuine.) One reader, Dr. Y.P. Joshi from Varanasi, reacting to an earlier column, says he is amused that readers fight shy of providing their addresses. When we make this demand, there are no motives behind it; all we seek to know is from which part of the country, or the world, readers contact us. This point has been made again and again in these columns.

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The first question in the message was: the word “coolie” has been used “prominently” in the main article in a Chennai MetroPlus issue. Isn’t this an offensive word? Yes, it is. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, tracing the origin of the word to Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, says it means a hired labourer or burden carrier, but is also used to refer to a person from the Indian subcontinent, or a person of Indian descent, and is considered derogatory and racially offensive.

The Senior Associate Editor in charge of MetroPlus conceded the point and said it was a mistake to have overlooked the word in the copy. He explained, “The word originated as the white man’s word for black menial labour. Ironically, the offensiveness of the word is often not recognised in the Indian context. The man quoted in the story referred to himself and his fellow labourers as coolie.”

The conversation, I assume, must have been in Tamil. And therein is a paradox. The word becomes offensive in English; but in local parlance it is commonly used to mean anyone engaged in hard, unskilled labour, and has nothing derogatory about it!

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The same reader raised another issue. An editorial (May 3, 2007) said, “… a warrant of arrest against an American actor for planting a kiss on the cheek of a Bollywood actress …” Isn’t The Hindu style & #8220;actor”? It is, and I have repeated this to any number of objecting readers that the word actor is gender neutral and refers to any person, male or female, whose profession is acting. So the reader’s point was valid. But the word “actress” is there, and it is not taboo (you still see it occasionally in news reports in The Hindu). In this instance, as the Editor-in-Chief pointed out, its use was necessary in that particular context to convey the sense and e mphasise the gender.

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From his regular messages, their tone and content, I visualise Kapil Kitchlu (Mysore) as a man with a perpetual frown, anger in his eyes, and vitriol in his pen (keypad). He does make good points occasionally but these have to be ferreted out of the surrounding froth. I enjoy reading his missives, though sometimes I wince! I cannot but agree with him when he slams the use of “galloping inflation” for a decimal point rise and “slashing prices” for a one per cent drop, or attempted innuendos like “incentivised defection.”

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Legal reporting, I have always held, should eschew literary flourishes or unnecessary adjectives but should stick to facts, so that unwarranted interpretations by readers are avoided. A master in this field is my friend T. Padmanabha Rao, now in retirement in Delhi, whose work at the Supreme Court won him accolades from the bench and the bar. Ponderous his reporting sometimes might have been and not easy to grasp at first reading, but it was always accurate and gave no room for misinterpretation. (There was one instance of a sub-editor rewriting his story to make it brighter; what came out in the paper was the opposite of what the judges said!). I was reminded of T.P. Rao when reader George from Kottayam cited an agency report that termed as a “landmark verdict” an Allahabad High Court ruling that Muslims were not a minority. That adjective displayed bias, the reader said. And why call a Supreme Court judgment “significant”? Aren’t they, if they are being reported in newspapers?

Such laxity or superfluity is also seen in examples such as (1) “A suspected hired killer was allegedly shot dead by special party police” (M.K.V.G. Krishna Murthy, Ravulapalem, East Godavari district). Why “allege dly”? (2) “The Congress demanded a thorough probe into the murder of Sohrabuddin Sheik, who was killed in an encounter …” (P.V. Raman, Pattabiram, Chennai.) (3 ) Allied to it is the reference to this killing as in a fake encounter when the Supreme Court is considering whether it was fake or not (N. Vembu, Chennai). (4) Every time an aircraft makes an emergency landing, the occupants have a “miraculous” escape; no marks to the crew for their skill and courage (Cdr. Arun Visvanathan, Chennai).

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