As reporters, every day we embark on a search for a good story. Good stories are informative, shocking, disturbing, interesting, amusing or uplifting. Since many of these stories are about the travails of the human condition, what often counts as a “good” story for us is a recollection or narration of a bad experience that other people face. Good journalism often means to ask awkward and uncomfortable questions in order to add humanising details to cold facts.
Over the last few weeks, I have written some disturbing stories: on the sexual exploitation of women working in sugarcane fields in western Maharashtra; on the human sacrifice of a nine-year-old tribal boy from Dadra and Nagar Haveli; on the sorry plight of onion farmers in Nashik, which houses Asia’s largest wholesale market; and on the widows of Marathwada who take care of their families after the death of their husbands by suicide due to failing crops or falling crop prices and debt. Everybody had a bad story to tell. For journalists, some of these stories are close to us, in our backyard, and some are hundreds of kilometers away.
For people like these women or farmers to share their stories with us reporters requires courage and vulnerability. When I visited the Beed and Dharashiv (formerly Osmanabad) districts in the drought-hit Marathwada region to write a story on farmer suicides, I had to ask some uncomfortable questions of the wives of these farmers who are now managing the household and repaying debts. What are their memories of their loved ones? What was their husband’s last meal, their last conversation, their dreams? These are sensitive questions which force people to recollect memories that they may not want to remember. The women suddenly started crying. I paused before gently prodding them with other questions.
Renuka Keshav Rathod, a 30-year-old tribal woman from Hardala Tanda in Beed district, cried when she said her husband Keshav went to the nearby market, brought mangoes and asked his wife to prepare aamrass and roti, his favourite meal, just hours before his death. A few kilometres away, Ganesh Asaram Sangle, 20, who takes care of his grandmother, mother and younger brother after his father’s death, said his dream was to become a police constable and prepare for the competitive exam. But his father ended his life after suffering crop losses, and now Sangle was forced to dream smaller.
But the most uncomfortable moments are those of helplessness, when the victims or families plead for help. Everyone I spoke to in Marathwada had the same questions: Can you help us? Can you ask the government to come to our rescue? These were the same questions that I heard from the elderly woman who lost her nine-year-old grandson in a case of human sacrifice, the migrant workers in western Maharashtra, and the the onion farmers of Nashik. These are questions that we journalists struggle to answer. As reporters, our job is to report; we are not in a position to provide help to people in need. I did not promise them anything. I wrote about their struggles.
But the vague guilt that comes with not providing assistance goes away when help does come — sometimes from generous readers and at other times in more structured, systemic ways. When the story on farmers’ suicide was published, for instance, I got messages on Twitter and WhatsApp, emails, and phone calls from strangers, including from someone settled in the U.S. — all offering help to the affected families. I was happy that there are people who read these stories and reach out to help, and I am always glad to connect them to these families. I felt a wave of relief that day, but there is also a lingering sense of despair. Something good did come out of that story, but how many more such stories are out there waiting to be told, how many more voices waiting to be heard?
deshpande.abhinay@thehindu.co.in
