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India That is Bharat
Perfection as a privilege of Politicians
Satiricus
Satiricus is in an introspective mood these days. He has been thinking. And wondering. If, as he fondly supposes, he is a journalist, why is he not a shining success? More honestly, why is he a dismal dud? On reading editorials and articles and columns and sundry journalistic gems by prestigious pen-pushers, he has become convinced that he is an illiterate as the best of them. Then why are they the flattered fourth estate of the realm, while he is a feckless, floundering failure?
His search for the answer to that question has led him to the amazing discovery that there is actually a variety of answers. For starters, why is Satiricus at the bottom when others are at the top? The answer to that, believe it or not, is that he did not practise climbing stairs. He would have been a top-notch journalist if his legs had been sturdy enough to make it to the top. At least that is what he learns from the Japanese. For only the other day he saw a newspaper photo showing a couple of executives of one of Japan's leading garment retailers conducting job interviews at the top of Mount Fuji (height 12,400 feet).
According to the photo caption, "the job interview was held atop of Japan's highest mountain to make sure new employees can also scale the heights of business, the company said. See? Satiricus now realises that he would have reached Himalayan heights in journalism had he not made the Himalayan blunder of not joining Tensing Sherpa's Himalayan Mountaineering Institute. Then his strong legs would have made up for his feeble brain while writing this column. Even then, would this have been a perfect column? Satiricus suspects not.
A professor at an Australian university has conducted research which shows that certain hormones in the human brain become so active when a person sits or stands or walks, that they interfere with the thinking process, but when that person lies down their activity slows down, and then he can think better.
For we live in a less than perfect world, and a perfect column can be written only by a perfect pen-pusher. Satiricus, alas, lacks the necessary perfectfor the simple reason that he has not passed a diploma course in how to become perfect. At least the Chinese seem to have decided that perfection can be learnt. So the prestigious Peking University has recently launched a "perfect woman" training course, and it has become an instant hit despite its high tuition fee of over Rs. 1.5 lakh. The initial quota of 50 seats ran out in a short time.
According to the official in charge of enrolment, the ten-month course is aimed at grooming Chinese women to achieve success in career and to improve their charisma. Well, well, what do you know? Even this mere male, despite a wart on a snub nose, would not mind learning how to become a charismatic picture of perfection in ten easy lessons.
So how about an NCERT primer on the subject, Mr Arjun Singh? Or is perfection the privilege of politicians (like you)? Anyway, these are not the only eastern answers to the abject imperfection of Satiricus as a journalist.
Yet another is from Australia. A professor at an Australian university has conducted research which shows that certain hormones in the human brain become so active when a person sits or stands or walks, that they interfere with the thinking process, but when that person lies down their activity slows down, and then he can think better. Which means, so far as Satiricus is concerned, when he sits at his writing table and industriously scribbles this column (as he is doing right now), he is going about it very much the wrong way. What he should do is to go to bed and dream up this column, so that the reader finds it a dream of a column and falls asleep. And even if journalist Satiricus cannot achieve such supine superiority, the research insists that a lying man (as apart from a lying politician) is a ten per cent faster thinker than a man on his feet. And there are other experts who agree. One of them has even written a whole book titled How to be idle.
So there! Being idle should be the ideal of Satiricus if he wants to become an ideal journalist. But is that enough? Should journalist Satiricus's introspection, with which he began this column, end with the realization that his indecent industriousness is his undoing? No. For if he turns from the Far East to the Far West, he finds the Americans suggesting to him in so many words that if the reader is to like Satiricus's column, the reader has to first like Satiricus. So what he needs to do is, in Americanese, to perform a self-esteem check. And this, ladies and gentlemen, can be done by just visiting a website and using a technique called `Instant Messaging'. As a recent feature in an American newspaper explained to this Indian ignoramus, instant messaging is the way tens of millions of Americans connect with their buddies faster than e-mail.
And now a brand-new version of it is on the market, which makes it possible for five crore Americans to perform a self-esteem check by visiting a website called www.aimfight.com and asking that question of questionsAm I more popular, at this very moment, than the person who is instant-messaging me?
A complicated algorithm (whatever that is) works out the answer and gives you your popularity score. Now Satiricus would have happily lapped up this laptop technique of measuring self-esteem, but what if there is no self-esteem to measure?
And finally journalist Satiricus's search for success takes him to the tool of his tradelanguage. Here Satiricus's basic failure is that he writes English, he does not write American. So even when he would like to abuse some people, he never wants to bad mouth them. He still forgets that body is out, bod is in. Fortunately, the editor of this journal is sure to be as ignorant as Satiricus. Otherwise he would immediately eighty-six Satiricus. "Eighty-six : verb, N. Amer.: Reject, discard, or destroy". God save Satiricus from this numerical nemesis.
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