HAPPY BIRTHDAY OPRAH!

SUNNY THOMAS

Americans may have got everything else wrong. But they got one thing right. In America, birth does not script success in life but merit. But in India, birth predetermines your life and career. If you don’t have the right surname or belong to the right OBC quota, your future is bleak. 

Born into poverty to an unwed teenage mother, raped at nine and pregnant at 14, she was sent to live with a man whom she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee. She started reading at the age of three under the influence of her grandmother, and landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional delivery turned a daytime-talk-show rated third in Chicago to the first place, and eventually she became the Queen of Talk-Shows and made a fortune. Today she is rated as one of the 100 most influential persons of the 20th century.   

That in short was the story of Oprah Winfrey, who celebrates her 58th birthday on Jan 29. She redefined the Talk-Show by creating an intimate confessional form that drew instant applause from the audience. She wants her audience to know there is a human heart behind the Talk-Show that resonates with the audience’s own. At her career peak, she had 14 million viewers a day spanning across 140 countries.

Her early childhood is a saga of misery. She was named Orpah named after the Biblical character in the Book of Ruth, but her family and friends could not comfortably pronounce that name, and they changed it to Oprah.

Her mother Vernita Lee was a housemaid. Her biological father, Oprah believed, was Vernon Winfrey, a coal miner-turned-barber-turned city councilman who had been in the Armed Forces when she was born. Decades later, Mississippi farmer and World War II veteran Noah Robinson Sr. claimed he was her biological father. Her grandmother’s greatest ambition was to see her as a maid in a respectable white man’s house!

Nevertheless, Oprah Winfrey became a millionaire at age 32. At 41, she had a net worth of $340 million, replacing Bill Cosby as the only African American on the Forbes 400. In September 2010, she was worth over $2.7 billion and has overtaken former eBay CEO Meg Whitman as the richest self-made woman in America, reports Forbes.

In one of her TV shows, Oprah made a startling confession: she was molested by her cousin, her uncle, and a family friend, starting when she was nine years old. She told her viewers on a 1986 episode when sexual abuse was discussed. At 13, after suffering years of abuse, she ran away from home. When she was 14, she became pregnant, her son dying shortly after birth. It is her candour that endears her to her global audience.

In 1993, Winfrey hosted a rare prime-time interview with Michael Jackson, which became the fourth most watched event in American television history as well as the most watched interview ever, with an audience of 36.5 million.

In 1985, Winfrey co-starred in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple as distraught housewife, Sofia. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. In October 1998, Winfrey produced and starred in the film Beloved, based on Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. 

Winfrey has co-authored five books. In 2005, her undisclosed advance had broken the record for the world's highest book advance fee, previously held by the autobiography of Bill Clinton. 

Her publications include O, The Oprah Magazine and O at Home. 

Oprah considers Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why Caged Bird sings, her mentor and close friend; she calls Angelou her "mother-sister-friend" Winfrey and her boyfriend Stedman Graham have been together since 1986. They were engaged to be married in November 1992, but the ceremony never took place.

Oprah Winfrey was called "arguably the world's most powerful woman'' by CNN and Time.com, and "arguably the most influential woman in the world" by American Spectator. She was the only person to have appeared eight times on Time magazine’s list of one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century and from 2004 to 2011.At the end of the 20th century Life listed Winfrey as both the most influential woman and the most influential black person of her generation, and the cover story profiled her as "America's most powerful woman". 

Columnist Maureen Dowd sums up her personality thus: "She is the top alpha female in this country. She has more credibility than the president.

MAN OF THE YEAR

Steve Jobs – the man who redefined the future of newspapers, the man who redefined the future of music and the man who redefined the future of entertainment – slipped out of Time magazine’s Man of the Year Award.

It’s just the same way, Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight that defined aviation industry escaped Time magazine editors’ attention. To make up for that, Time magazine started Man of the Year award in 1927 with Lindbergh. Uri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut to explore space, did not make it to the Time magazine list.   

The notable misses of Time may read like a list of Nobel laureates: Mother Teresa, whom Princess Diana admired the most; Diana herself; Dalai Lama, who gets global audience. The key players of the 20th century, like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mao Zedong, Marshall Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ho Chi Minh are left out.

Wallis Simpson (1936), the American lady who punctured the British royalty with the abdication of Edward VIII, scored a psychological victory. But Queen Elizabeth II (1952) regained, in some measure, the lost glory of an empire where the sun never sets. Just the glory, not the territory.  

The beaten Chinese hero, Chiang Kai-shek, and his wife Soong May-ling (1937), and Philippine’s Corazon Aquino (1986), who have made little impact on history, are Time’s favourites.

Every American President is honoured, except Calvin Coolidge, Hebert Hoover and Gerald Ford. The placing of John Foster Dulles (1954), the man who rocked the world with atom bomb threat, Richard Nixon (1971), who opened the finest hour of investigative journalism with a third rate burglary called Watergate, Henry Kissinger (1972), the Lone Ranger of American foreign policy, George Bush Sr. (90), who invaded Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction but found none, and Bush Jr. (2000, 2004), who let Osama bin Laden hide in Pakistan for his entire presidency, strengthens one’s suspicion that the goal of American Journalism is politics not truth.      

Among the popular American Presidents rank Franklin Roosevelt (1932, 1934, 1941), the only President elected to a third term and the only one who won three awards, and Dwight D Eisenhower (1944, 1959), the only one who won an award before his Presidency. 

Joseph Stalin (1939, 1942) and Adolf Hitler (1938), Winston Churchill (1949) and  Nikita Khrushchev    (1957), Charles de Gaulle (1958) and  Mikhail Gorbachev (1987, 89), and Deng Xiaoping (1978, 85) and Ayatollah Khomeini (1979) lent a measure of credibility to the award.   

Ted Turner (1991) and the Great Gates, Melinda and Bill, (2005) make the award prestigious, notwithstanding the jury. The naming of Albert Einstein as the Person of the Century in 1999, with Roosevelt and Gandhi as runner-up, is a political coup only Time can come out with, obviously to cover up the goof-up.   Pope John XXIII (1962) and Pope John Paul II (1994) give the final benediction, compelling us to say, Amen. 

Rupert Murdoch saw the future of newspapers in i-pad and called it the game-changer. In ten years from now, you will not find newspapers as we know them today. Instead, you will find them on your cell phone with an expandable screen, updated every hour.

Newspaper houses will buy television channels, or vice-versa, and form media conglomerates broadcasting and disseminating news electronically. Radio, television and online newspapers will become part of the Multimedia Revolution (Convergence) about to take over the media scenario. In ten years from now, you will be scrolling i-Newspad, when your niece or nephew will ask you, `What are these newspapers?  

`It was Steve Jobs who killed them. They were alive and kicking till i-pad,’ you might say – perhaps with nostalgia for the good old days! 

WHO ROBBED THE FARMERS?

SUNNY THOMAS

They were shocked when the surveyor told them they have been land-robbed in so many words. Who could have done it? The government, the politicians, the bureaucrats, or the sand mafia? They are ever the victims: the government makes policies that drive them to suicide, the bureaucrat drives them away like flies on candy when they approach for help, the sand mafia in collision with the politician who comes to beg for their votes, slowly but stealthily, encroach on their only means of subsistence. They can’t afford the legal means, and they have nowhere to go …  

Funny people inhabit part of this planet, not because they were born funny but looked incongruous to the beholders. Villagers, when they come to the twilight of civilization, acted like comical characters in an urban ambience: Unnimon and Kunjikali have never seen a lift in their lifetime. Entering it for the first time, they were wondering why people were standing so still behind the closed door. Before they realized, they reached the twentieth floor. 

There a non-descript fellow announced: ‘This is your living room… the bedroom… the kitchen  ...’ In wonderment, Unnimon stood lost before the first full-length mirror he had ever chanced upon: ‘This is truly wonderful. No wonder the people of Aathi are dying to sell their belonging and flock here in droves.’   

   

Reading Sara Joseph’s latest novel, Gift in Green, one wonders whether it is reportage on disappearing villages or a book of fiction. There is so much of portrayal of reality that the willing suspension of disbelief which is the key to enjoying a work of art gets suspended! It is reality and more reality in the garb of fiction. 

Behind every great translation is a creative spark at work, be it Tagore’s Gitanjali, translated with a glowing tribute by W B Yeats, or Gift in Green by Sara Joseph, translated by Rev Valson Thampu of St Stephen’s College fame. The English version of the novel is a trans-creation rather than a translation, where the translator enjoys the creative freedom to interpret the author’s world of symbolism, placing it in the global context without which it would have lost its significance.

The novel is theme-driven, portraying the calamities of a village swamped by a demon called civilization. In focus is the brutal portrayal of life in Aathi, a far-flung village, which was once the paradigm of happiness, but now turned into a living hell. The villagers are queuing in to sell their land to settle down for an urban life, which they mistake as the epitome of civilization. But not Dinakaran the protagonist, to whom the land is sacred: 

‘‘For us, Aathi is not a pageant of fleeting sensations or a mere means of survival. It is an invaluable heritage, an incomparable experience … something that deserves to be treasured for all time to come. .. Our children and grandchildren should live life the Aathi way: sowing and reaping, caring for the land and water, and not merely being nourished by them.  ’’   

‘‘Thirty, forty lakhs of rupees is not a small thing for people like me,’’ his friend chipped in. Taking the cue from Judas Iscariot, the villagers are selling their ancestral heritage to people in the tent, symbolizing the multinationals who have precious little loyalty to the land.

Village Aathi echoes Arunthati Roy’s Aymanam, or R K Narayan’s Malgudi, frozen in time despite progress in the outside world.

The novel has its lighter moments to give comic relief. Once upon a time, there was a fox that was seized by the craving to eat a lion. One day, he chanced upon a young lion sunning himself in the grass in carefree abandon. The fox’s mouth began to water on seeing the lion’s thigh and the back of his neck, rich in fat and abounding in succulent flesh – all oozing deliciousness. Under the spell of his craving, the fox began to advance stealthily towards the lion, parting the grass even so quietly. Now a stupid fly had been droning and circling around the lion’s nose for quite some time. Exasperated, the lion let out a loud roar. Mother of mine, what a thunderous blast it was! It shook the forest. Without stopping to think, the fox fled for dear life.   

       

After Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962) which saw the birth of environment movement and An Inconvenient Truth (2006) by Al Gore which educated the world of the ticking time-bomb called environment disaster, this home-spun book Gift in Green rings the alarm bells on environment barbarians. 

Indeed, the perfect punctuation of the book adds to the reading delight.   

FROM  HARVARD  TO  NDA!

SUNNY THOMAS

An academic of dubious repute travelled in time from the 21^st century to the 13^th century, and found such immense delight in its primitive mores that he decided to adapt its virtues for the rest of his life. Guess, who? As they say, no prize for guessing.  

Academic is the pursuit of excellence, excellence in the field of knowledge. Politics, the barbaric pursuit of power; it is impossible for the sane to survive in an insane world. Psychiatric researches have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is impossible for normal healthy persons to join politics; it is only the ideologically insane who join politics.    

A streak of megalomania is common for all successful politicians, while some suffer from illusions of grandeur. Some politicians want to defeat Babur while some Genghis Khan and reclaim the land conquered, treasure robbed, and make them accountable. They believe it is possible and are bent on doing it.  

India is a land of women chief ministers: no country in the world has produced so many successful one. The success of one chief minister lies in the acquisition of exquisitely designed footwear, a world of them in superb craftsmanship. Another successful chief minister’s obsession with building statues is much written about.  

Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Lohia form such idols of veneration that some politicians think they are their re-incarnation! Without a royal family and blue blood, there can be no fairytale nationalism, and hence some politicians uphold family values above ideological values. New Stone Age politicians of the Valley believes in cleansing the country of corruption by eliminating lives – lives of innocent children and women who have done them no wrong!     

Into such a world our Harvard professor has decided to embark himself on. When politics enters the academic mind, it turns it topsy-turvy; and that precious commodity called truth becomes the casualty. A highly politicized university is a sure recipe for academic disaster. (For monumental proof, visit the once-prestigious Delhi University).    

Politicians seldom think of the good of the nation, and are obsessed with their own. They are instant historians who would manufacture evidence to prove their theory and make the work of historians redundant. They are instant economists who have the panacea for all economic problems, provided they are voted to power – not just in power but in absolute power because in coalition politics, you can’t do a thing. They are also instant nuclear scientists who can make all our renowned scientists dinosaurs. They can measure the potential nuclear radiation leaks of a plant under construction, without even stirring out of their palace.

Such specimens of wisdom, you will never find in history. Into such a world, our Harvard professor is entering, to make a difference. Good luck professor!        

    

A TALE OF TWO NURSES

SUNNY THOMAS

Ever heard of Super Specialty Murder? Murder just a week before the centenary of shifting the Indian capital from the cultural capital of India! Hospitals across India are in a shambles – where new-born are roasted in incubators, babies are mauled by dogs, girls exchanged for boys, the marginally ill become terminally ill, water tanks degenerating into sources of contamination and even the doctors fall sick, blood transfusion causes AIDS or even death, and worse still, the poor are kidney-robbed! 

That a minor fire that broke out in the basement, which could have been extinguished in a matter of ten minutes by the fire brigade, was not even reported for full one hour and a half but was played around by four watchmen shows the abysmal state of management of AMRI Hospital in Kolkata. The pertinent point is it was only a minor fire that could have caused no casualty at all. Yet the hospital with no semblance of administration allowed it to turn it into an inferno taking a toll of over 90 lives! Obviously, fear psychosis ruled the hospital staff and the watchmen were mortally scared of the hospital authorities that they tried to hush up the fire and even attempted to do what they were not qualified to do.

What happened in Kolkata is not an exception. Medical practitioners across the country have become notorious businessmen, with an eye to the purse rather than an eye to the patient’s health. Any doctor who sends a patient to an MRI scan centre in Delhi earns a 50% commission, which comes to Rs 10,000 per case, or just a lakh for 10 patients every month. Many private practitioners are on the pay roll of MNCs and prescribe steroids that once taken will make patients life-long dependents. The MNCs profit, the doctors profit, but the health of the poor patient who may be the sole bread-winner of the family is ruined for life.     

In one of the most expensive and advertised of hospitals in Delhi, the parents of a youth who fell into a coma after a road accident were appalled that the doctors were persuading them to sell their son’s kidney to reduce the hospital bill rather than trying to save his life! 

Doing a reporting assignment during the heydays of the Nithari killings, a student stumbled upon the most scandalous revelation: the doctor, whom media nicknamed ‘Dr Kidney Kumar’ was spotted very often with the controversial nurse parking his van in front of the notorious house into which young girls were enticed and later raped and murdered, in Noida, East Delhi. The source of the story was the press-wallah’s wife, who stayed right opposite. The story could not be published anywhere else, except in the lab newspaper of Times School of Journalism, because the entire story hinges on the statement of one person, who could re-track her version in a court of law for whatever reason; and the media house that publishes the story could end up paying damages to the tune of Rs 50 crore, which it can do without. (So Kumar Sambhav, the TSJ student, now a prized correspondent with Down to Earth, learned early in his career that it is not enough to discover the truth to report!).   

             

Robin Cook’s medical thrillers expose the games doctors play in a world of unethical networking disguised in the fame and reputation of hospitals. His novel Coma that shot him into fame describes one such incident:  

Four medical students enter the freighting world of medicine in February 1976. Three of the medical students are male and one is female. During this time it was very hard for a female to succeed as a doctor. It is even harder for Dr. Susan Wheeler to succeed when she uncovers a horrifying deception. The deception she uncovers is that a select group of senior doctors at Memorial Hospital are taking patients into minor surgery and making sure they do not ever wake up. The patients are not dead; they are in a comatose state. Susan discovers they are harvesting the patients' body parts.

To come back to the AMRI story: Driven by greed and avarice, the management flouted all safety norms; they turned the car-parking into a store house where not only inflammable drugs but even gas cylinders were dumped; all emergency exits meant for the safety of patience in case of fire were blocked. Only the previous day was there a minor fire mishap, which should have alerted the authorities but the trigger-happy management would learn no such lessons. Instead, they suspended the watchman who called the fire brigade and averted a mishap of similar magnitude, warning anyone who ventures to act in public interest. So the inevitable happened!      

In this sordid drama of greed and avarice, emerges the story of supreme sacrifice: two tender nurses from God’s own country could not save the life of a ninth one because they themselves were consumed in the inferno. While doctors and paramedical staff and the watchmen who could have saved some lives took to their heels, the lesser privileged slum-dwellers and a man with no limbs, Debasis Chatterjee (37) along with P K Vineetha and Remya Rajappan, the two nurses, scripted the saga of exemplary courage. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee indeed stood by the relatives of the victims and earned their gratitude.  

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dicken expounds the meaning of true love in the noble deed of  

Sydney Carton in exchanging the prison cell (and guillotine) of Charles Darnay, whom his heart-throb Lucie Manette loves. Dickens demonstrates how love transforms the most worthless man into a precious gem of literary characters. The immortal beauty of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet lies in the fact that the spring of love comes up amidst an ocean of hatred. There is hope for human civilization as long as there exist the rarest of gems like Vineetha, Remya and Debasis.     

A memorial in honour of these martyrs at the very site to inspire the youth of the country is the most fitting thing for a government to do, while the nation salutes these immortal souls!