Vir Sanghvi is not a Brain-dead prick
My friend sent me a link to a Vir Sanghvi column in an email with the subject line “Vir Sanghvi is a brain-dead prick.” Surely, I said, my friend exaggerates. Not brain-dead, I thought. The fact that the fellow is a major TV and newspaper journalist, I supposed that he knows how to write and talk, and therefore could not be brain-dead. But then I made a mistake. I read his column, “Setting the record straight.”
I had never read Mr Sanghvi before and now I wish that I had continued to be ignorant of his writings.
It appears to me that Vir Sanghvi has the morality of pond scum and the mentality of a cretin. You will have to read the column to see what I mean but don’t blame me if you feel nauseated. Self-righteous smugness and outrage oozes like puss out of an infected wound. He attempts to whitewash his influence peddling as routine journalistic procedures entirely above board, and fails miserably. In the end, the sole effect of his column is that it shows him to be a pathetic caricature of a journalist too far removed from reality.
My friend was wrong. Sanghvi is not brain-dead. He’s merely suffering from delusions of grandeur, as often happens when one’s senses of morality and ethics have been anesthetized by all the money that is floating around in high places.
What these journalist were doing (and are still doing) is just as corrupt as behavior of some corrupt govt officials. However no one calls the journalist’s behavior corrupt. Corruption is somehow linked to government alone. I think that is a mistake.
The influence peddling of these journalists have far reaching effects, many times extremely negative, to the development of the country than a traffic cop asking for small amount of money in return of not issuing a traffic ticket.
Atanu: Hope you read Hartosh Singh Bal’s expose of VirSanghvi’s statment http://bit.ly/gFfCsa
Pl do, in case you missed it.
Man! Your writing is terrific. Your description of Sanghvi is accurate!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Atanu Dey, rajeev srinivasan. rajeev srinivasan said: RT @atanudey: Vir Sanghvi is not a brain-dead prick http://bit.ly/i3SWrx [...]
He is a very talented writer.
You might ask what good is talent on a journo who sold his soul to the devil. That’s a good question. But the fact remains he’s amongst the best columnists of India in terms of articulating a viewpoint clearly and engagingly. Another positive fact about him is that he’s among the very few ‘liberal’ journalists who espoused a consistent viewpoint on freedom of expression. For example:
http://j.mp/h3seJQ
Anyways: The moral of the story is that while talent may take you to the top, it cannot help you stay there if you lack character.
The media has truly become the medium for all that is unholy.
He is a very talented writer.
Not so sure about that. I think the lack of intellectual life in India is also apparent in the quality of the english print media, as it is in the English literature coming out of India. The only person I can think of who wrote anything engaging was Arun Shourie and types like that are fading away fast as journalism gets ever more trashier and void of depth of perspective in India. I think this is why it was said in America in the 20’s that if you are not good at anything, try jounalism! So true for even today. I think jounalists ought to have a mastery in something other than just being able to write correct English, so they may write with a view point which has a bit more depth than “pop” thinking…I have noticed that the best journalists are always something else in addition to being journalists…
larissa,
You appear to contradict yourself. In the first line, you say, “He is a very talented writer,” apparently agreeing with Oldtimer. Then you write that he is not. What gives?
@Atanu
Sorry I forgot to implement your rule. I was responding to Oldtimer and that first sentence (Oldtimer’s sentence) was supposed to be in quotes, which I forgot. Sorry I know you had a small tutorial on how to quote on HTML for the likes of me!
Well, Vir Sanghvi is a good wordsmith. I do concede that he conveys his thoughts in a lucid and clear manner.
I have known that he is a terrible journalist – one of the poodles of the Nehru family – for quite some time now. In fact, I started writing responses on his website explicitly referring to Congress as “your party”. How right I was !
What Bloomberg writes is known to all Indians but the fact it appears on international news and never on Indian news tells us something about the quality of Indian English mainstream news media where such things are never reported or given importance! Someone needs to start a paper with such issues reported daily, so they can start opening people’s eyes to what is really happening in India!
Headline from DEC 1 bloomberg:
One-Dollar Bribes for India Licenses Contribute to World’s Deadliest Roads
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-30/one-dollar-bribes-for-india-licenses-contribute-to-world-s-deadliest-roads.html
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