our territory and remind the insurgents that
they had no place in it. It was hard work -- outright
threats and go-slows, files full of protest notes and
minutes of meetings, and the halting evolution of a
code that cut across the barriers that traditionally
define a functioning news organism. I think it worked
well at the time -- the guerrillas who did this are
still here.

Our questions were basic -- why can sanitation not be
"sold"? Why can education not be? Labour not be? Health
not be? The elderly not be? That this not only assumes
but reflects the dreadful significance of "sold"
indicates why we still need guerrillas in the newsroom.
These guerrillas, if they still exist and can still be
drafted, will come up against some formidable mantras.
"All things are more or less of equal import: all are
only daily" is one. If you ask one of the system
administrators she will reply: "All data are equal, but
some are more equal than others."

That is why, we are reminded by those who give the
system administrators their wages, the media have
produced their own heroines and myths, which can
compete with the traditional ones and moreover happily
embroider over them. I was once advised that
"journalism asks us to invest in the stock-market of
momentary sensation". After such sexualist reduction,
what forgiveness?

The difficulty lies in the accepted impermanence of our
art, our skill, and the relentless transformation of
today's news feature into tomorrow's newsprint into the
day after tomorrow's wrapping paper for pakodas. The
media that we construct (from the point of view of the
consumer, and the brokers who interpose themselves
between writer and audience) offers titillating
speculations on danger, scandal, death, nightmare, opportunity.

Like a television talk-show host tripping loquaciously
on industrial-strength amphetamines, it rattles noisily
on, uncaring of the quiet interjections about
sanitation, infant mortality, unreported police
atrocities, tribal communities flooded out of their
homes. And that is so both in an India that has
reclaimed 'aparanta' without caring to know the
topography of Goa, as it is in the desolate urban
scapes that seek to define the middle classes who --
reliable sources say -- are the new India that seeks to spend.

The rules of the game have changed and we do need a new
set of guerrillas. Newsroom disobedience is not what it
used to be (is it at all what it was?). Who is will