s accepted by the Betim-kars.

Mahadeo -- despite his belly a very handsome man with a
tanned visage crowned by a mop of white curls, with a
commanding presence and possessing an enviable facility
with a little skiff barely a foot across -- was only
one of a series of revelations. There were the nearby
family Bhosale, whom I had been warned "were trouble",
the "rowdy boys" of the village who tended to be
destructive, the crooked 'possorkars' from whom I would
be forced to purchase my groceries. The roll-call of
potential villains was long indeed.

All unfounded. The rhythms of 'aparanta', as they found
this 'bhailo' in Betim, ensured harmony. My dilemma
was, how might I convey this to urban-bred news editors
who have little tolerance for a mofussil
correspondent's rural romanticism, as they saw it?
Sometimes, fortune intervenes. In my case, while
reporting for Business Standard, it came in the form of
C P Kuruvilla, to my mind the most super-aware news
editor of the last two decades.

Kuru, as we called him, was (he has voluntarily
withdrawn from the circus that is print media, hence
'was') a maverick before the term found fashion, and
was so within the relatively severe environs of the
Ananda Bazar Patrika. Kuru provided the intellectual
get-up-and-go that impelled a legion of correspondents
to hit the road in search of stories that were to
become memorable ones, and even more remarkable, was
able to do so in the context of a mainstream business newspaper.

Will you find a Kuru nowadays? No, is the likely
answer. Editors, sad to say, tend to be almost
uniformly useless. It is left to the greater community
of journalists to provide the context, the space, the
encouragement, and the means. The encouragement,
context and professional support has perforce now to
come from within. This working alternative has not only
become desirable, it has become imperative for for the
non-sarkari journalists.

The problem is a systemic one today; there should have
been manuals passed on, but system administrators have
deleted them. Where binaries perish, we must turn to
mnemonics. There was a time when some of us in The
Sunday Observer successfully ran a tactical media
counter-insurgency within the framework.

An immediate provocation at the time was a faux
editorial regime presided over by an imposter named
Pritish Nandy. Every Friday (dak edition) and every
Saturday (city edition) we would have to redefine and
re-take