Deccan Chronicle Apologises - Hussain Doesn

On February 22 the Oscar awards were announced with the British film - Slumdog Millionaire - bagging a majority of them including two for its Indian music director. On February 24, the 'Deccan Chronicle' of Hyderabad had two prominent features: its first lead in large type described the Indian music director as

There is a quaint mix of irony in the features that Deccan Chronicle front-paged on February, 24 and March 8 this year and their sequels. And the contrast couldn’t be as stark. The occasions were, in the first instance, a British film and an Indian music director winning the American Oscars this year and in the second the celebration of the international women’s day. In the sequels the paper apologised to two communities with a degree of variance. The artist who played a prominent role in staging the two features cocked a snook - again - at one of the communities.

The Oscar awards ceremony this year was a grand event for the Indian media. Ever since the count down for the awards began, nothing else mattered for it. That the ‘Indian’ nominee for the awards was actually a British film produced and directed by a Briton escaped everybody’s attention.

That for the Western world if India graduated out of sadhus and snake-charmers it should have slums, drugs, prostitution, sex and sleaze escaped everybody’s attention.

The Western world forgets that many cities around the world have as much poverty, squalor and crime in them as in Mumbai. Just as an example of how the best and the worst coexist anywhere in the world and not necessarily only in India consider this:

“It was a city of contrasts and contradictions, of promises made and promises unfulfilled. New York was the heart of the capitalist society, a symbol of unsurpassed wealth; yet it was also so broke it could barely meet the interest payment on its debts. New York contained the finest medical facilities in the world; yet every day people who couldn’t afford them died from lack of care, and the infant mortality rate in the South Bronx was higher than it was in the bustees of Calcutta.

“New York possessed a city university whose student body was larger than the population of many cities, yet one person in eight in New York couldn’t speak English and her schools produced a regular flow of barely literate young adults.

“As the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Greeks of Antiquity, the Parisians of the Napoleonic era had set the architectural standards of their times, so the New Yorkers of the age of glass and steel had stamped the seal of their architectural genius on the urban skyline of the world. Yet a quarter of all the buildings in the city were sub-standard and beyond the glittering magnificence of Lower Manhattan, Park and Sixth Avenue loomed the wastelands of the South Bronx, Brownsville and Bedford Stuyvesant.

“… … … Yet, in the midst of all material affluence, an eighth of the population of New York lived on welfare. Half the nation’s drug addicts crowded her streets. Her police precincts recorded a theft every three minutes, a hold-up every twelve, four rapes and two murders a day. More prostitutes circulated through her streets than in the avenues of Paris. (Collins, Larry and Lapierre, Dominque, 1981, The Fifth Horseman, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, pp. 136-7)

This description by the authors of The City of Joy could fit any city - Baghdad or Buenos Aires, Dubai or London, New York or Moscow, Riyadh or Tokyo, If themes based on poverty, squalor and crime were the criteria for awarding Oscars, then movies made on poverty, squalor and crime in these cities should qualify as much as Slumdog Millionaire.

All that mattered for the ‘collective Indian psyche’ - steeped in a feeling of inadequacy and incorrigible inferiority complex - was to keep up with the Joneses. If indeed ‘collective Indian psyche’ is represented by the media ballyhoo is a moot point.

Yes we too won an Oscar! Of course if an avant-garde film maker like Satyajit Ray gloated over an Oscar on his death bed, ordinary mortals should be excused for celebrating it.

On February 22 the awards were announced with the British film - Slumdog Millionaire - bagging a majority of them including two for its Indian music director.

On February 24, the Deccan Chronicle of Hyderabad had two prominent features: its first lead in large type described the Indian music director as ‘top dog’.

The phrase, ‘top dog’ is American slang for “One considered to have the dominant position or highest authority, especially as a result of a competitive victory” according to 'The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language' (Fourth Edition 2000, Updated 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company). According to 'The Collins Essential English Dictionary' (2nd Edition 2006, Harper Collins Publishers 2004, 2006) it is a noun, informal, meaning ‘the leader or chief of a group’. In any case the sub-editor who captioned the article must have felt that he had done a clever job by packing a lot of meaning into four words.

The paper must have realized the faux pas of attaching the phrase to the name of a member of a particular community, after the day’s edition hit the stands - and hit the panic button. It needed no warning about the community’s reactions; they are all too known and would have resulted in a serious law and order problem in the city. The paper promptly apologized to the community. The apology was not only instantly displayed on its online edition but local news channels were alerted to it so that they could scroll it on their screens. And they did it throughout the day. The apology was published in the next day’s edition prominently displaying it on the first page.

Nothing exceptionable in any of this. The paper did the right thing for however inadvertently hurting the feelings of the community.

The second feature of the newspaper that day was an exclusive painting the paper commissioned to celebrate the occasion. It was by M. F. Hussain who has not so far done the decent thing the paper did - apologizing for his sacrilegious paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses. In the painting the woman in the ‘Statue of Liberty’ was disrobed but cloaked in a strapless gown. Liberal-minded Americans might not mind it.

The story does not end there. The inveterate feminist in M. F. Hussain - for whom purity and nudity are synonymous - paid tributes to the ‘Indian Woman’ in another set of paintings commissioned by the newspaper to celebrate the international women’s day, March 8.

The paper had a Hussain painting on page 8 to go with the article ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back?’ In it one can see the back of a dancing diva. We need not however, begrudge Hussain his ‘Freudian trip’ with the pretty heroine - for the back of the woman in the painting was sparsely covered (‘piche choli kaisa hai?’) and a small elephant (‘gajagamini’) was seen at the bottom of it.

The painting on page 1 depicts Shakti. In order to remove any doubt about the possibility of the woman in the painting being an urban Indian woman professional by name Shakti she was shown standing astride a tiger. The woman in the painting is Goddess Shakti! However, this time Hussain deigned to clothe the goddess - in a tee-shirt, jeans and shoes.

By now we are inured to Hussain’s misdemeanours with the media blaming any protest against them as originating from a ‘particular ideological perspective’ and the judiciary trying to exhibit its liberal streak or bowing to the left-liberal intellectuals shouting hoarse about freedom of expression being in peril and dismissing them. However there must have been some feeble protests for clothing the goddess Shakti in a tee-shirt, jeans and shoes. The paper did apologise for Hussain’s - not its - faux pas. However the similarity ends there. The apology came several days later, not instantly as on the previous occasion and tucked in an inside page, not prominently displayed on the front page as on the previous occasion.

Deccan Chronicle apologises to Muslims and Hindus with a degree of variance. Hussain cocks a snook at Hindus again!