Mard ko Dard Hoga and other sesions: Bangalore Lit Fest 2018 Day 2:

On day 2 of Bangalore Lit Fest 2018 on Sunday 28th of October 2018, I attended the following sessions. I was occupied in the morning and could attend only the afternoon sessions.

Mard ko dard hoga: #MeToo: Sandhya Menon, Sister Jesme, Tushita Patel and Vinta Nanda with Barkha Dutt

I reached late for this session. All of us who follow #MeToo in India know the panelists, except I did
not know about Sister Jesme. Later I read that she is the author of the book 'Amen, the autobiography of a nun'. Vinta Nanda is the one who started it all when she accused actor Alok Nath of sexual harassment, long time ago in the sets of Tara, the iconic TV serial. Tushita Patel worked for Asian Age and was the 16th woman to accuse MJ Akbar of 'opening the door of his hotel clad only in an underwear'. Sandhya Menon is a journalist tracking, chronicling the movement in India and offering legal assistance to the victims. I reached the session to hear Sister Jesme about her struggles after he was thrown out of the church in which she was a nun. For six months, she was supported by her women friends, fortunately, she said, if it were men who supported she would have been called a prostitute. 

I did not recall any specific key points made by other panelists that has not been reported already. 

The session was elevating and inspiring due to the fight being put up by this brave woman. Barkha Dutt on her part, gave a lot of space for the women to speak about their experiences and observations.

ISRO: A personal history: R Aravamudan with Gita Aravamudan

The book 'ISRO: A personal history' is written by R.Aravamudan, one of the pioneers of Space Missions in India and who was a member of the team that set up ISRO and his wife Gita. The book seamlessly meshes the life of Aravumudan's with that of ISRO. The story of ISRO is a scintillating story of delivering cutting edge innovation in the face of meagre resources and general Indian lassitude. On being asked if corruption could enter into ISRO, Mr.Aravamudan said it was unlikely due to three reasons. One, head of ISRO reports directly to the Prime Minister and is unaffected by bureaucracy that generates corruption. Two, the customer of ISRO is the organization itself  and hence it is out of the ecosystem of multiple stakeholders that engenders corruption. Third and most important, the outcome of ISRO is transparent and both success and failures are visible to the entire country. 

He also mentioned the excellent project review mechanism at ISRO. Before any project goes on stream, the project director has to convince more that 600 stakeholders right from members of the senior management to low level mechanics. It is an excellent approach that I could use in my project check points.

Another point that he mentioned was about the pride of working for ISRO. The satisfaction you get of seeing  the output of your work revolve around the planet is immeasurable.

He also mentioned two important points. The GPS that is available, the military GPS, belongs to the US. If US government decides to shut it down for any country, most of the business of that country will come to a standstill. IN the light of this, ISRO is trying to develop its own GPS system. That clarified my long held doubt as to why ISRO was trying to reinvent the wheel, by working on GPS technology when one already existed. Google already had Google Earth, right?

This is not an illogical doubt. US has a history of imposing sanctions on India. As an example, Mr.Aravamudan explained the time when US stopped the transfer of 'Liquid Hydrogen' technology to Indian. To overcome this, the Indian engineers developed our own Cryogenic technology, that was used in 'Mangalyan'.

There was one incident during the session that I want to mention. I saw Sreenivasan Jain standing there listening to the speech. Clad in jeans and a white shirt tucked out, he looked smart an casual. I went to shake hands and only thing that I could tell him was 'I always wanted to meet you' or some such stuff. I was embarrassed and he was embarrassed. I could have asked him many things. But no, 'I always wanted to meet you', nonsense. That is a conversation stopper right there. What do you expect him to say? 'I also was looking forward to this?'.

Only consolation is that it is better than 'You look exactly as you look in TV'. 

I am Walter Mitty. I have many secret lives in which I am a legend. In public? I am Chandler Bing redux.

Chitchat on Bofors and Rafale: Chitra Subramaniam with Chidanand Rajghatta

From reading her tweets on Rafale, I had developed an impression that Chitra Subramaniam has lost her investigative zest and is mouthing points that support the government. So it was with a little bi of skepticism that I went to listen to here talking with Chidanand Rajghatta for a 'Chitchat on Bofors and Rafale'. Here messaging was not very sharp. Only point where she was very clear was that the current crop of journalist were doing a shoddy job of following up on the Rafale deal. They were taking advantage of the current polarization in the country and saying what they thought their supporters wanted to hear rather than what the facts were. It has become a 'cart before the horse' scenario. Journalists, instead of driving conversation on social media are looking at SM to act as a source for the news items that they can use.

I agree

She kept going back to how idealistic she was to follow Bofors scam and how government and her employer at that time, 'The Hindu', put obstacles on her path. She doggedly pursued the case with deep support from her husband.

It is very difficult to believe that this little lady brought down the Prime Minister of the second largest democracy in the world!

Having said that, in here current avtar as editor of Republic TV, she is doing herself a disservice in my opinion. It is difficult to see that TV Channel standing up for any of the principles she passionately espoused in the Litfest.

Nautanki Dairies: Dominic Franks

The most fascinating session of the day was by Dominic Franks, author of the book 'The Nautanki Diaries'. It is a smallish book that packs a lot of content. The author is a medical doctor who graduated from Bangalore Medical College and then moved into a career in Sports Journalism which is his passion. The 'Nautanki' in his book refers to his cycle which he named thus, an ordinary cycle the type of which is used by the local milkman in different parts of India. Franks has a quirky sense of humour and is always smiling. He read excerpts of the book and the example and the illustrations he described very very evocative, almost poetic. 

He showed a film that shows his discussion with a 15 year old boy who has already given up on his dreams because he is poor. Franks says that when he was 15, he was dreaming of making this 22 day 2200 Kilometer cycling adventure from Bangalore to Delhi, a a dream that he realized in 2010when he was 27 years old. At the age when an individual starts dreaming, the dreams of that 15 year old boy has already ended !

It was very emotional. I felt like crying. 

After the session, I went to buy the book 'Nautanki Diaries'. While Franks was signing it, I asked him how he handled negativity in his writings. I wanted to know how to criticize the key stakeholders in your life, whether to have a goat it or paper over with general comments or simply ignore. I did not get a satisfactory reply. May be he did not have many critics in his life who made his life miserable.

I don't know.

Whose lie is it anyway: #FakeNews:Chitra Subramaniam, Francois Gautier, Naresh Fernandes, Mukund Padmanabhan, Pratik Sinha and Sreenivasan Jain with Nitin Pai. 

This was the final session of the Litfest and it was very smartly and competently moderated by Nitin Pai. The panel consisted of Who is who of Indian journalism and one of the few persons in Social Media that I respect, Pratik Sinha, founder of Altnews, the Fakenews busting site.

Even though the issue is topical, the panel passionate with binary views, the session was very cordial. Gautier made some wrong statements about HAL and Tejas and his 'Fakenews' was easily busted by an alert member of the audience. Gautier claimed that HAL was never able to manufacture an aircraft that could fly. He said, reading from Social Media of course, that HAL spent 30 years on Tejas and it failed to take off the ground. A member of audience pointed out that Vajpayeeji gave it the name Tejas after seeing it fly for the eleventh time!

Gautier also kept talking about how he, a French Catholic, loves India. This irked Naresh Fernandes, himself a catholic, who pointed out that Gautier had earlier indulged in Fakenews through his Nostradamus predictions about Narendra Modi and BJP. In his response Gautier became emotional and tried to play Kashmir card and tried to polarize the crowd but it did not succeed.

Sreenivasan Jain minced no words. 'Let us not beat around the bush', he said, 'the biggest culprit spreading fake news is BJP'. He gave example of how Amit Shah encouraged the creation of fake news by his 'wink and nod' approach. 

While the panelists were trying to blame TV, print media and journalists for creating the fake news phenomenon, Pratik Sinha pointed out that more than 30 people have been killed in India through rumours floated in Facebook and Whatsapp. He also gave some guidelines on how to identify if a news is fake or not.

Chitra Subramaniam urged the panel not to take people for granted. People are smart , she said and can easily see through a genuine mistake and a deliberate fake news.  

Nitin Pai handled the session with dexterity an a lot of humour. He mentioned the 'Red ball, blue ball' theory to illustrate how people follow the crowd. Simply put when two people pick up a red ball from a box and calls it the 'Red Ball Box', the third person, even when he picks up a blue ball from the same box will call it a 'red ball box', even when he does not know the colour of the balls picked previously by the other two people. This is how it is easy to fool people. A similar example exists in a TED talk where the presenter convinces the audience to agree that two obviously identical circles were not in fact identical. The audience members even argued among themselves as to which circle was bigger. It is that easy to fool people and make them believe in Fake News.

During the QA session, an audience member ranted that the media is ignoring Sabarimala issue where, as per him, more than 5000 people were in jail. Sreenivasan Jain countered this by asking him as to how he got the info if it were not taken up by the media.

Due to the smart interventions by Nitin Pai, many audience members were able to ask questions or make observations. One lady, a senior Kannada journalist, observed that the Fakenews phenomenon was rampant in Vernacular media. 

However the observation of the day, in fact of the Litfest, was made by a lady. 'Do you notice that all the fake news is created by men', she said, 'when women fake, it doesn't kill people'

And with that, the Bangalore Litfest 2018 was over.