Agreed!! Journalism is literature & history written in a great hurry.

 Notes of a footnote :

 

 

 Agreed!! Journalism is literature & history written in a great hurry.

   

English poet-cum-critic Matthew Arnold (1822 - 1888) came up with a quotable quote: "Journalism is literature in a hurry" nearly one and a half century ago. But we – wordsmiths in journalism world over -- have improved upon the quote to involve history as well. Given the journalists' contribution to the documentation of world history during the last two centuries, it is now a generally accepted fact that `journalism is history written in great hurry'.  

Literature and history apart, I am mainly concerned with journalism. And that too—UNI – of which I have been a part for the last about three decades. And my objectivity over UNI shall always remain a suspect as after 'reinventing ' myself with it I have started calling it my first love with my spouse unwillingly acknowledging it and close friends know it well what I mean when I try to sing Faiz's  poems with a blunt modification.

MUJH SE MERI PEHLI MOHHABAT

MERE MEHMOOB  NAA MAANG .................

and

GAR BAAZI UNI KI BAAZZI HAI ,  

JO CHAAHO LAGA TO DAR KAISA ,

GAR JEET GAYE TO KYA KEHNA

HAARE BHI TO BAAZI MAAT NAHIN..............

Though there had been speculation in the organisational circles for some time that media baron Subhash Chandra had been eyeing for stakes in UNI, a journalist friend of mine from Delhi who had happened to meet the then Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav came up with a shocker on that early but lazy morning of September 7, 2006.

I knew for sure that the information handed to me by my friend was authentic. And I had to act in some way. As is the essence of journalism in general and a news agency in particular that stresses on the need for disseminating information (read news) as quickly as possible, I stuck to basics. I lost no time in sending the following SMS to nearly 100 UNI employees, including its General Manager Mr M K Laul and other journalists all over the country at 1033 hrs the same day from my mobile phone number 9892016228: "Essel group of Subhash Chandra acquires 60 % stakes of UNI. Lalu Yadav, whose party has Company Affairs Ministry confirmed to us today. cpjha  

Even I had not realised at that point of  time as to what would befall us in the months to come, I started getting feedbacks by the trickle. One of the early comments was:" CP is in great hurry ", made by a person, not close to me, during the usual ' drinks hours ' , the same evening  of September 7, 2006, at the UNI Head Office at 9, Rafi Marg in New Delhi.

A fact I realized only later, my SMS created ripples both within the organisation and among those who either acquired or failed in acquiring stakes in UNI. To my comfort, the very next morning Subhash Chandra himself went on record in DNA, a Mumbai-based daily newspaper in which he has financial stakes, that he had indeed acquired stakes in UNI. Several other papers also reported news about the acquisition of stakes by Subhash Chandra in UNI.

Suddenly, the dynamics of those in the existing management of UNI changed, with them working to the dictates of Chandra. Some of us like my comrades in arms for many years, the then Working President of the UNI Employees Federation Sardar Jaspal Singh Sidhu, the then General Secretary (Head Office) Rajesh Kumar and fellow journalist Anil Chamaria took stock of the situation and realised that acquisition of UNI was not in the interest of employees nor would it help the cause for which the organisation came to be established way back in March 1961. Fortunately for us, most of the other employees' unions, including those in Delhi, Mumbai, Kerala, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chandigarh also joined hands with us. United then we were, we built up resistance to the `all-set' acquisition of UNI. We took no time in forming a Joint Action Committee (JAC) at our Head Office in New Delhi and held public meetings simultaneously in political capital, Delhi and financial capital, Mumbai on September 15, 2006 to chart out our future course of actions.

As was the need of the hour, we knocked all doors – be it that of different ministries of the Government, leaders of various political parties, trade union leaders, social activists, media persons, artists, teachers & students, judicial activists and conscientious citizens from different walks of life – seeking their involvement in our struggle against efforts by vested interests to take over UNI and nullify for good the objective that it came to be set up and the provisions of section 25 of the Company  Act  that it falls under.      

What most of us within the organisation realise – some of those close to the ruling classes may not agree– that UNI had never witnessed the kind of agitation that it is witnessing now, in its 45-year-long history. Uniqueness of this agitation was that we could not only forge the maximum possible unity among us forgetting all of our past petty differences but also made a firm resolve not to hamper the usual work. Even the management had to concede this fact, in its Board meeting held on November 9, 2006 that " Despite the continuing agitation , we have moved stories in good time and there have been no misses during the period September-October, 2006”.

The experiences we had undergone over a couple of years – that saw us set up our own ‘blog’ , perhaps the first trade union blog , to inform employees and friends of UNI of the happenings within the organization and the nature of efforts made by the interested ones to acquire stakes in it. Retrospectively speaking, the setting up of a blog became extremely useful in taking our struggle against anti-Chandra's  acquisition efforts to a level which, I am confident, history will applaud as a much-needed exercise to prevent somebody from robbing the objective for which UNI came to be set up.   

I may have contributed my bit in my capacity as the then general secretary of the UNI Employees Federation and the UNI Employees Union, Mumbai as well, by running blog which had become essential for a situation we were in, and also being a part and parcel of the decision-making body in joint action committee set up to take decisions to handle the Subhash Chandra unleashed crisis. But, my colleagues in the employees' union in Delhi played even a bigger part by mobilising support of almost all political parties from the extreme left to the extreme right.

We firmly believed  that information is power and the faster we could act on it chances of winning get better and so we devised all possible means to make optimum  use of recent tools of information technology to our advantage. The blog was top of them, as it cost us nothing but served as an effective medium of interaction among the members of the JAC and employees spread all over the country. We ensured that all employees expressed themselves freely. So much so that we even carried "voices of dissent" on our blog.    

That was not all. We also compiled an all India list of e-mail Ids of the UNI employees and the concerned citizens, by segregating them into four distinct categories to share as much information as possible with employees and others concerned. At the same time, we held back certain information as to the future moves and strategy so as not to send out signals to our enemies inside and outside the organisation.  Till date, the UNI management has not compiled such a master representative list of e-mail Ids and even Mr Subhash Chandra had to use the list of same recipients, beginning from me and ending with the email ID of top leaders of the political parties, including the then  CPM General Secretary Prakash Karart. When the first and so far the last email sent to the UNI employees by Mr Subhash Chandra from the UNI Head Office on October 3, 2006 reached to the personal Computer of UNI Regional Manager (Mumbai) Mr Surinder Arora, he thought it was a communication sent to the employees only through managers and therefore not only ordered it to be put up on the office notice boards but also engaged into 'copy and paste' work to transmit it on our internal tele-printer lines. It was only when I told him that the email has been sent to all those figuring in my list -- comprising more than one hundred staff members of the UNI and even those who are not the employees of UNI, including Mr Karat-- that the manager in Mumbai could sense the situation and control his joy to have a ride with 'his' supreme master.

Trying to be more loyal to king than king himself, Mr Arora surreptitiously took away the hard disk of the PC in the office, almost reserved for me, to Delhi so as to enable the management to find out there my 'secrets’. I do not know how many pages were printed in Delhi from that hard disc but I can bet they could not get any clue about my secrets as I had started working on PC and Internet almost immediately after it was introduced in India and therefore can say with all the command that shared computers are never personal computers. I have heard about interesting episodes of corporate war and allied espionage and feel sorry for not giving chance to the management to know my secrets.

Talking about the technology, I must thank the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, which had started charging calls between Delhi and Mumbai at local rates. It further enabled me to talk to my leaders in Delhi in details at nominal rates and review the unfolding developments and set out our agenda for the day. Increasingly cheaper mobile telephony and SMSing also added to our repertoire of tools of communication.

We also improvised our forms of agitation and blended Gandhian tools of agitation like `satyagraha' and fast-unto-death with militant forms of agitation. While my colleagues in Delhi went on `satyagraha' from mid September and making Gandhi Cap as their headgear, I went on fast-unto-death in the first week of November. When Com. Karat visited at UNI, Bandra, where I was on fast, I explained to him the efficacy of going on fast. On his part, Com Karat asked to take care of my health and advised me to resort to other forms of agitations.

Now I can tell the world that this 6-day fast with only bottled water and lemon gave me and my family member’s tremendous moral strength. So much so that when I went to home on the night of November 6, 2006 to bring certain papers to file complaint in the Industrial Court, Mumbai, against my transfer , my wife refused to give me food despite my son's insistence to share freshly made kheer with me. "Papa, they are cheating you. But you are not eating even in the confines of home" , my son said and I hurriedly left home to be back on fast without even a cup of tea which was offered to me by my wife.

Like I said before, in between September 7, 2006 and now, so many things have happened. The events concern all of us in UNI and those who believe in democracy in the country. As I make an effort to recount UNI's history now, it is essential  to make aware of the situation currently faced by my organiasation to just not the nation but a world that believes in democracy.        

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With the nomenclature, UNI, comes journalism and history as well. To justify my earlier point, I quote the recorded history about UNI as reported by the Indian Express in its New Delhi edition of March 22, 1961.

 "New Delhi, March 21: The United News of India, the new news agency, has started its service from today. This agency, which has been sponsored by leading newspapers of India in accordance with accepted news agency principles, is intended to fill the void in the news agency field by the closure of the United Press of India by the end of 1958.The agency has acquired the right to issue the world service of Associated Press, the oldest and the largest among international news agencies. Dr. Keskar, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting in the course of a message sent on the occasion of the inauguration of the news agency's service, says:" There is need in this country for competent news agencies which will furnish news in an objective and authentic manner to all its subscribing newspapers". He has expressed the hope that the agency will keep to the high traditions of journalism and earn a name for itself.

Given that I have been a part of journalism in general and UNI since 1986, I have long considered it is my duty to put down my thoughts on paper. The idea to write 'History of UNI " came to me in Lucknow in 1996 when I was entrusted the task to hold 7th All India Congress of UNI   Employees Federation. I did discuss the idea briefly with the than General Manager of UNI, Mr Virender Mohan who disclosed to me: "The Board has authorised me to write the History of UNI".   In a way, the then UNI GM had subtly told me that I better not attempt writing an "official history" of UNI. 

So I decided then that if ever I write History of UNI it would not be 'official ' one. As many of us know, Dan Brown has put it aptly in his fictionalized' history  `The Da Vinci Code' that hitherto written histories have largely been the story of the rulers and not the ruled ones. Knowing full well where UNI stood at that point in time, I had pre-decided then the title of my book – whenever it would get printed – would be: " History of UNI ,Back to Future", which would dwell on the aims and objectives of the news agency. And it did not take long for me to grasp the mantra to march ahead seriously with my professional work in UNI, even while plunging headlong into the trade union movement within the organization.

Unlike another celebrated American author Thomas L Friedman, best known for his book , The World Is Flat that is considered by many Indians as an Americanized perception of globalisation, I didn't utter to my sleeping wife "Honey! The World is flat!! Yet I  discovered my mantra and along with comrades in arms , realised  that the mantra was conceived at the time of  birth of the UNI and we have to just co-relate it to the new situations with tactical repositioning and a long-term  strategy to realise our old slogan , " UNI is ours, we shall fight we shall win" . A larger consensus evolved among the employees of the UNI and those in the political and civil society domain of the country that UNI is essential to save freedom of the press and democracy in the country. 

  After the UNI surged back to pre-Subhash Chandra rule, many of us were of the firm view that we may go ahead on the basis of what we had in UNI at its birth amid the Nehruvian era of socialistic pattern of economy marked with thrust on public sector and due encouragement to cooperative movements. The UNI too, was born basically as a multi-state cooperative. But the captains of ' new economy' in India do not have much faith in  the cooperative movements despite the great success of the fertiliser giant IFFCO and  Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. (GCMMF), better known as makers of Amul - the taste of India.

When I first attempted to write the history of UNI the canvass was very small as the UNI, for me then was `you and I' that primarily meant the employees of the organization and I, and in a larger context meant `Journalism and I'.

Though I wrote quite a bit, it was not enough. We released first draft of the "History of UNI" in Chandigarh in January 2002 and again in Mumbai on June 4, 2006, the opening day of the 9th All India Conference of the UNI Employees Federation that elected me the General Secretary with a mandate to lock horns with the management on the problems of the employees and the company itself. So much was happening along side. And I was unable to keep pace with developments relating to UNI.  By being in UNI employees' union in various states and in the UNI Employees Federation since my joining the company in 1986 never meant that I worked only for the welfare of the employees. My concern has always been for the UNI as an organization that has taken care of me , my colleagues and the society. 

If the book became my passion to bring facts of the historic movement of about one thousand employees of the UNI along with wider issues of  media in Indian society and the need to evolve a holistic perspective of Peoples Media to the fore, it is because of the troubled times that UNI is undergoing and our  'dream' to takeover its management in our own  hands so as to enable us to  prepare a viable business model for such a company which is all set to be born again, second time after the emergency era of Indira Gandhi, like a proverbial phoenix from the ashes to address the need of its employees and democratic urge on the part of the civil society as well to ensure free flow of information's to one and all. You will agree, it is history of UNI written in hurry by a journalist.