How to be a Successful Media Person

‘Techne’ is an old Greek word. If one has techne, that means one has ‘expertise in one’s chosen craft ’. Techne - that was what craftsmen of the past seemed to have aspired to possess.  More than two thousand years later, it is understandable that today standards cannot be what they were. Yet, at least an attempt must be made to slow down our headlong rush to total obliteration of all standards.

For example, to be a successful media person one needs to possess the following qualities:  

1. Verbosity
2. The ability to use faulty grammar
3. Opinionated-ness  
4. The ability to be cocky/ condescending/ flirtatious/ deferential in demeanor
5. Emotional
6. Visibly patriarchal/feminist in attitudes
7. Uninformed
8. The ability to wear glaring costumes
9. Code mixing and code switching
10. Accented speech

The Boy Who Started the Syrian War

 

“Dr Asad, it’s your turn, next,” you wrote on the wall,

And started the Syrian War, they say.

[Bull! All of it, I’d say.

But that’s for another day, not today.]

Now six years and so many bodies later

Burning cities

Shelled out shells of homes

And haunted eyes of the PTSed masses

Flash across, fodder for the world media

And the war mongers of the west –

Are they really two? –

Bodies lie rotting

On the brine swept sands

Vigilled by the fish, gulls, and the dogs

Burkas torn

To titillate the jaded palates of the North

Forearms marked

By many little deaths and short trips to heaven

Sons and daughters of the Sand lie stunned

Seven virgins – not for the girls – each in attendance.

So the Boy who Started the Syrian War, now a man,

When you plunge

Into the honey depth of your chosen

Don’t you hear the whimpers

Of those others

Who lie on their back

In their musty streaked pads up north

And think of you

While some pig grunts atop them?

When you pick up your new-born

Fresh out of his mother’s womb

Don’t you get the stench of that rotting corpse

Of that little boy on the beach?

Your home in some northern clime,

Don’t the very walls drip blood

And your roof scatter sand on your head,

You, the boy who said to have written on the wall

And started the Syrian War?