Looking back, the period between 1943, the of Britain engineered food famine in Bengal, and the year 2000 also called Y2K, which unleashed India's digital prowess may indeed be deemed a period of doom and gloom in Indian history.
News of food shortages, starvation-driven deaths, political instability, rising poverty, rampant corruption, and unstable borders arrived daily, which induced despondency and added to the glee of global media reporting on India.
There was indeed genuine bad news the press could not have ignored, but surely there was some good too happening at large?
Asking that question may have helped me pioneer a genre of reporting nothing but the good news.
My justification for this was that there were enough media outlets to front page the bad news, but hardly any featuring what good there indeed was.
I noticed some fewline snippets of good work appeared occasionally at the bottom of the inner pages of the big newspapers. After collecting a few, I took to the road to authenticate my leads.
The instant success of goodnewsindia.com (GNI) convinced me there was a hunger at large for genuine good news. Many readers wrote in suggesting leads I could consider writing on.
Conversely, there was also evidence that readers will intuitively resist reports however well couched in 'fact', if the derived conclusions were preposterous.
Let me explain with an example of what a preposterous story may be like.
I spent my 1960s in the merchant marine. During those times, many shiploads of grains from Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas were transported to India as aid-gift. With barely concealed condescension I have had it whispered to me by cargo loaders in overseas harbours, how their country was happy to feed 'the starving millions of India'. Concealing my humiliation was not easy.
It was also the time when a series of depressing books and articles on the apparent hopelessness of India began to appear- among them, V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness and Nirad Chaudhury's The Continent of Circe.
Famine, 1975! America's Decision: Who Will Survive?, a book by William Paddock and Paul Paddock published in 1967, prophesied the death of India within a decade. The authors argued thus: per the oracle of Malthus, by 1975 world population will have grown beyond maintainability, and all the food that can possibly be grown in the world cannot save the dying millions; therefore, the two most hopeless countries in the authors' list- India and Egypt -should be allowed to perish, so that the rest of the world may live.
And so it was that, into an India enveloped in such dismissive global contempt that GN - Good News India was born, asserting itself in its masthead thus: News from India: of positive action, steely endeavour and quiet triumphs - news that is little known.'
I set for myself a few rules:
1. Reporting good news calls for greater responsibility than posting fake or biased.
2. No coverage of politics, cinema or cricket.
3. All stories should be written consequent upon personal interviews.
4. The real hero doesn't emerge until the interviewer has discovered the 'aha moment' that transformed the hero.
5. Travels to many parts of the country to interview my leads revealed a vastness where a sense of eternity reigned. I began to visualise it in many metaphors.
6. I imagined India as a giant pyramid whose bottom third ensures its stability and permanence. I found the bottom third.
7. There was a comfort in knowing the bottom third has the most people and that they were truly the ones investing in India.
8. I imagined permanence as a perpetual machine akin to a giant flywheel kept in motion by billions of Bharatiyas of yore and of the morrow. I persuaded myself that the perpetual machine is indeed what is commonly known to us as sanatana dharma.
9. All machines are systems that function beneficially only when a set of rules are adhered to.
10. These I believed to be the four laws of human life namely, artha, kama, dharma, and moksha which I took to be representing reward, happiness, discipline, and fulfilment. It follows that any work is good that contributes to the perpetuity and prosperity of the whole.
11. After some years of publishing GNI, I realised reporting or reading good news alone doesn't amount to good work. At best, such stories may inspire one to good work.
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