A city newspaper has been claiming lately that Calcutta is incomplete without it. The hoardings show the name of the city and drop the two ts, which then appear in bold as the first two letters of the name of the paper, The Telegraph. One of those smart ad ideas that might have made an eager faced copy writer run to the boss or made the smug faced client swivel back in approval or who knows, considering the sloppy alliterative flavour that is the stock in trade of the newspaper’s copy editors, made even the journalist shake in approval. That would all be fine.
Except that the city is no longer called Calcutta. It is now, whether we like it or not, Kolkata. The decision to stick with the old name is not just some standing fancy. It is symptomatic of an Anglophilia that some sections of upper-middle class in the city with tales of my grandpa, or great-grandpa, was a babu who went to London wallow in. The Telegraph is now the newspaper outpost of this section. Nowhere was it more evident than the way it covered the London bombings. There is no denying that the serial bomb blasts merited display. A banner headline, perhaps. All of 72 points. But the play it got, photographs, graphic element on page one (“Laden in London,” an alliteration no less, nothing else would suffice, with the station signage of the London underground as if every reader or most of them have traveled in it), what was I doing when they went off, and then the inside pages, made it seem that it was the Kolkata edition of the London Telegraph that we were reading. It continued over the next couple of days. Features on those killed, the investigations, photographs of wreaths.
If this were an academic piece comparisons could be made with the Bali bombings. But the white man dying in London is just so much more important that being blown away in some town in Asia. There is no doubt that factors like the Reuters, AP and other news feeds from London make it possible for more stories and pictures available to the desk. But to simply ascribe such a treatment to availability would be to miss the point. The task of editors comes to the fore either when material is not available and has to be creatively sourced or when excess has to be intelligently spiked.
But it is the tenet of proximity that is at work here. It is a rule of thumb that what happens in one’s backyard is more important than what happens in another part of the state; what happens in one’s country is more important than what happens in another country. All news is supposed to be local because people want to know how things affect their lives. Notice the popularity of city or state supplements that tell what is happening close to us. Ten dead in Kolkata is equal to 100 dead French and 1000 dead Africans is how this rule goes, though why 100 French equal 1000 Africans is a matter for another day. To get a sense of how this works all that is needed is to see how Indian newspapers treated Goma or Serbia or Darfur.
Physical proximity, however, is one thing and moral proximity is another. I might think that my dog dying is of more import than two human beings killed in an accident. The death of a friend in another part of the globe will bring more sorrow than ten unknowns dying of tuberculosis. And similarly bomb blasts in a city one lived and tried making love, where one discovered the dormant babu genes with arms akimbo and tried to shape the received pronunciation into a recalcitrant tongue that refused to suck the air for the “would” instead of blowing it away, is another matter and the blown bits of brown limbs oozing foreign blood is another. It would be just swell if newspapers were put together to satisfy the whims of journalists and publishers. It is not supposed to be. But then the freedom of the press, as the wise A. J. Liebling remarked, belongs to the person who owns it. And by extension those who work in it. In a building on Sooterkin Street there lives forever Calcutta.
