Eminent Liars

“Living is easy with eyes closed… Misunderstanding all you see”: John Lennon (Strawberry Fields Forever).

That is normal for folks like us, isn’t it? We aren’t smart enough so we live easy and misunderstand all we see. But what about those who are charged with fact-checking and bringing the truth home? They don’t misunderstand they are ‘Eminent Liars’, to borrow the phrase from Arun Shourie. “Love has this nasty habit of disappearing overnight” that’s another Lennon line I like singing for NDTV; the masters at lying and deception. Their website pages disappear overnight.

Arun Nehru of the Nehru clan died at 69. He was the one who broke away from Rajiv Gandhi to join VP Singh back around 1989. So Gandhi-clan doormat NDTV in their eagerness to lick another boot produced a story claiming Priyanka Vadra’s son Rehan lit his funeral pyre. (Remember she is still a Vadra and will become PriyankaG once elections are announced). The page now shows this:

Oops! NDTV did it again! The problem is not screwing up. The problem is lying big and retracting small. No wait, NDTV never retracts and apologises. Their love just disappears. Here’s what they first reported:

Someone tells me bad financial performance forces NDTV to get rid of people and produces haste and a lack of fact-check. They can seek comfort in the fact that Times of India wasn’t far behind. They too reported PriyankaV’s son did the final rites. What will they not do to glorify the generosity of the Gandhis? After other papers correctly reported that Arun Nehru’s grandson Akhil did the final rites, some deleted their pages and some remained. But no one retracted or apologised. But that is TOI’s criminal nature after all. Put the “Rambo Act” on the front page with screaming headlines and retract 21 days later in a small corner in page 8 or 9.

Is that all for the week? No, not at all, we just got lucky. There’s this Eminent Politician allegedly called Amartya Sen who seems not too happy with Narendra Modi and seems to have made some uncharitable remarks about him. Why the surprise? When the others got tired and needed a break, they just sent in an old clown. Matter not! So it seems in retaliation Chandan Mitra of the BJP not only asked for Sen’s Bharat Ratna to be withdrawn but his party branch in Gujarat came up with something more. Some alleged Gujarat BJP Facebook page allegedly put up a nude pic of one alleged Nandana Sen who is allegedly the daughter of alleged economist Amartya Sen. That is bad, eh? That is hitting below Sagarika’s brains.

Delighted as they were some media morons jumped in joy to again find something to beat the BJP with. Among the “eminent” ones who latched on to this was S. Varadarajan, alleged editor of The Hindu. You all know I fondly call him Varadabhai. You and I misunderstanding is normal, we are made like that. But what does it say about a paid editor who tweets like a moron to slam the BJP citing a fake pic of Amartya’s daughter. What is Varadabhai paid for? To misread and misunderstand? Oh you see, when it comes to BJP fact-checking is not part of their job. They are licensed to LIE. The site that put up Nandana’s pic was a fake site and probably the property of the dirty-tricks department of eNREGA. And moron’s like Varadabhai gleefully fell for it. Varadabhai didn’t bother to cross check with any BJP office, which is part of his job. The BJP IT cell then put out this letter:

But Varadabhai wasn’t the only fool. We had another ‘Eminent historian’ (this time a direct quote from Shourie) allegedly called S. Irfan Habib. Indian History’s lies and inaccuracies owe a small debt to the likes of Habibs. So another Habib joins the battle too and slams the BJP and “Modi Bhakts”. If I were you I would take anything this bimbo says with a truck-load of salt. (I was corrected and told this Habib is different from that Habib). Now another Irfan Habib has been recorded to have introduced a plagiarised work of history by a writer in Arun Shourie’s book “Eminent Historians”. So to say that guy is a “history-sheeter” would be apt considering he’s a historian. Not just that, this Habib is also one of the gangs of “eminent historians”. There are those who provided testimonies in the Ramjanmabhoomi case where all just quoted each other with no first-hand research and with no supporting evidence. The Allahabad High Court trashed them too. Says a lot for this Habib’s sense of fact-checking and history, doesn’t it?

All is not lost and all is not bad. If Habib can spread untruths there is someone who is always there to beat the whole lot hands, legs and feet down. There’s our Category 5 moron who unfailingly wades into anything that can help her hate BJP or hate Hindus or hate Hindutva. Oh she doesn’t have to fact-check either because she is allegedly the Deputy Editor of CNN-IBN which has a reputation of hating anything or anyone connected to Hinduism. So there! It wasn’t a bad week after all. There was the Rs.12 and Rs.5 meal nonsense. There was the “Tanch Maal” by Digvijaya Singh which our media concluded was a “tribute to a woman”. There were toilet-cleaner-liquid bottles thrown outside Manish Tewari’s residence in Chandigarh. And everyone slammed the Planning Commission for its definition of poverty. But the winners this week were clearly the eminent liars, who lie big and don’t retract.