because it would show how the kkkangress has been responsible for a crime against humanity -- forcing 500 million indians to live in dire poverty.
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From: sri
From: sri
A call for missionary journalism
http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_a-call-for-missionary-journalism_1369086
Madhu Jain
Friday, April 9, 2010
The words of my boss still rankle, decades later. "Look, forget all this missionary journalism. Nobody likes to read about poverty." There was a major drought going on that summer in Rajasthan. I had just returned to Delhi after over a week in the remotest corners of the state — barely a stone's throw from the Pakistan border— on the trail of famine deaths.
The government of the day was almost going blue in the face denying famine deaths. But I had found several such incidents, mostly children who had died after successive years of malnutrition — heart-rending stories, each one of them.
Yet, nobody seemed interested. My story didn't make the cover. Shrunk considerably at the desk, it got middling billing. I was even called in by a bureaucrat in the PMO (the Prime Minster's Office) and gently ticked off for imagining things. There was only a little malnutrition, he told me, genially offering me a cup of overly sweet tea and some glucose biscuits.
Two things happened recently that have made me bring up such an old anecdote: a front page lead story in a daily about hungry children eating silica-laced mud to survive in Ganne village not far from Allahabad; and the massacre on Tuesday in which about 76 Central Reserve Police Force troopers were killed in an ambush by Maoists in the dense forests of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh.
I see the two issues as related. Both have to do with poverty. The children go to sleep hungry and try to stop the gnawing hunger in their swollen bellies by eating mud. The thought of children eating mud is bad enough. But it is probably worse elsewhere: I've seen people picking out undigested food from cow dung to satiate their hunger.
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Madhu Jain
Friday, April 9, 2010
The words of my boss still rankle, decades later. "Look, forget all this missionary journalism. Nobody likes to read about poverty." There was a major drought going on that summer in Rajasthan. I had just returned to Delhi after over a week in the remotest corners of the state — barely a stone's throw from the Pakistan border— on the trail of famine deaths.
The government of the day was almost going blue in the face denying famine deaths. But I had found several such incidents, mostly children who had died after successive years of malnutrition — heart-rending stories, each one of them.
Yet, nobody seemed interested. My story didn't make the cover. Shrunk considerably at the desk, it got middling billing. I was even called in by a bureaucrat in the PMO (the Prime Minster's Office) and gently ticked off for imagining things. There was only a little malnutrition, he told me, genially offering me a cup of overly sweet tea and some glucose biscuits.
Two things happened recently that have made me bring up such an old anecdote: a front page lead story in a daily about hungry children eating silica-laced mud to survive in Ganne village not far from Allahabad; and the massacre on Tuesday in which about 76 Central Reserve Police Force troopers were killed in an ambush by Maoists in the dense forests of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh.
I see the two issues as related. Both have to do with poverty. The children go to sleep hungry and try to stop the gnawing hunger in their swollen bellies by eating mud. The thought of children eating mud is bad enough. But it is probably worse elsewhere: I've seen people picking out undigested food from cow dung to satiate their hunger.
... deleted
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