Articles by Nireekshak

Emerging Estate (Press Institute of India); Orient Longmans,
SEMINARS can just be so much talk, as many people rightly think. Not that we need turn up our noses at talk, when it is either entertaining or enlightening; on the contrary, we ought to sit up and take note of it, especially when it is both. There is nothing, as Chanchal Sar- kar reminds us in his preface to this book, more stimulating than good conversation; and this is what "Emerging Estate" provides. We must be thankful to the Press Institute of India for putting between hard covers, the many papers from seminars held by it and the International Press Institute in recent times.

From Obscenity to Gherao Nireekshak THE GRIMMEST story in recent weeks, recounted in Weekend Review (September 30). is on the press itself. It is as follows: On December 24. 1966, cartoonist Kerala Verma, who draws for Eastern Economist and Thought among other papers, was arrested and put into prison by the Delhi police for allegedly being the author of two 'obscene' posters aimed at the Prime Minister which appeared in August last year. He spent three gruesome days in Tihar Jail, in which (in the words of Weekend Review) "he was slowly stripped of all those attributes of personality and human dig. nity which distinguish one individual from another". The full story of what happened to him has been recounted by Kerala Verma himself. Verma was released on bail on the evening of December 27, 1966, after suffering various indignities. In a footnote to the story. Weekend Review significantly mentions that, on July 4, 1967, the police petitioned the Magistrate to permit them to withdraw their charges. Till then, obviously, the report Was sub judice. Now it has been recounted.

War, Water and Wine Nireekshak AFTER THE STORM, the lull. First we had Chinese troops firing across the barbed wire fence at Nathu La (nobody in official circles has yet answered Ram Manohar Lohia's angry question as to whether the wire fence is still intact); then we had the Nanak Sagar dam disaster, which has been described by the National Herald (and very rightly so) as the greatest disaster in recent times. The cost of that disaster has not yet been computed; one estimate is in the vicinity of Rs 40 crores; it could possibly be more. The cost in terms of human misery surely cannot be calculated; in this country misery is seldom taken into account. It is, like air, water and God, taken for granted. The National Herald has been pressing for an official inquiry; there seems to be some hesitation in government circles. The inquiry, no doubt, will finally be instituted, when much of the evidence has been erased and the people's anger softened.