The Times of India Lives In La-La Land! Or Is It Cloud Cuckoo?

The Times of India reporter was clearly struggling for a lead to yet another story on hundred days of Modi Sarkar. After all, there are only that many lead paragraphs which can be spun out for the same story, shaken and stirred to make it look different. So the reporter kicked off the story with what was presumed to be a smart line: “For years, the BJP was dismissed as the ‘Hindi Medium Types’ (HMT) with little knowledge of technology…”

Or maybe it was Smart Alec on the desk who thought the lead needed to be rewritten and went home smirking over such clever play of words. But this is not a whodunit and really it’s immaterial whether the reporter or the copy editor did it. So we shall not dwell upon that, though I do think the news editor would be frightfully amiss not to find out whose handiwork it was.

For India’s largest circulated English language newspaper, the report reflects appalling ignorance, both at the institutional and individual level. I could offhand cite several reasons to validate this contention. The BJP had a website long before most journalists knew what “www” stood for. The party’s online outreach began not in 2014 but in 1996. LK Advani was reading books on a Kindle when no editor had heard of e-books. Computers at 11 Ashoka Road were networked when newspaper unions were blocking photo typesetting.

That’s how Narendra Modi discovered the wondrous world of the Information Highway in the late-1990s. And a quintessential HMT, whose childhood was spent as a chaiwallah on Vadnagar railway station platforms, went on to become Prime Minister of India – to the horror and disbelief of the EMT.

But this is not about the BJP whose earlier avatar, the BJS, made a fetish of Hindi – nor is this about the Congress, founded by the English Medium Types and currently headed by an Italian Medium Type, or, for that matter, politics and politicians. This is about the quaint expression “Hindi Medium Types”, HMT in short (as opposed to “English Medium Types”, EMT in short). I thought it had gone out of fashion long, long ago. Around the time when it ceased to be fashionable to wear chequered stretchlon bell-bottoms with 42-inch flares and dog-collared floral print terylene shirts knotted at the waist

The EMT came in different shades of purple. There were the arriviste EMT who danced to ABBA. Then there were the wannabe potheads who tripped with Jimi Hendrix long after he had crossed over to the other side. The intellectual EMT were into Grateful Dead and Fleetwood Mac. The HMT hummed along with Kishore Kumar and religiously tuned into Binaca Geetmala.

The EMT subscribed to Junior Statesman – some for the centrespreads, others to track gigs by desi bands with names like Great Bear, and the rest simply because buying the “JS” was the ultimate declaration of being EMT. The HMT read Dharmyug cover to cover and made SP Singh a household name, giving birth to his slogan “Ek Ravivar, Sara Parivar”.

The EMT were the elite in pink champagne socialist India. The HMT were the underclass, the unwashed masses. The EMT, of course, went to English medium schools and then entered the portals of colleges like St Stephen’s. The HMT, needless to say, went to Hindi medium schools and then to the local college and enrolled for part-time courses in stenography and typing.

When the revolutionary tide of Sorbonne 1969 hit India’s shores, the EMT were naturally radicalised. “Reactionary teachers, we will have your skin for shoes for the poor,” one of them scrawled on a blackboard at St Stephen’s. The HMT knew better than to believe the People’s Liberation Army would come marching in and liberate them from their drudgery or that they would indeed get to wear shoes handcrafted from the skin of “reactionary teachers”. The EMT went on to join the IFS, IAS and IPS. The HMT were happy to get clerical jobs.

It was a settled social order. It was a predetermined pecking order. The EMT were the twice born and got to sit at the high table. The HMT were the lot who lived in Seva Nagar, Aya Nagar and other such places. True-blue EMT would scoff at anything less than bootlegged Vat 69; the less fortunate among them would make do with Peter Scot. The HMT would stick to nimbu pani and kanji. Thank you ji.

And then things changed forever. The decline of boxwallah companies, the rediscovery of faith via Ramayan and Mahabharat on Doordarshan, and then Ayodhya, the rise of the Mandal generation and finally the arrival of the IT revolution had a cascading effect. The underclass surged ahead, the HMT were the new elite and the EMT, or what remained of the vanishing tribe, readjusted to the new milieu, cribbing in private, grinning in public.

Any traces that may have remained of the past, when the EMT loutishly lorded over (or snobbishly patronised) the HMT, have been irrevocably erased by social media, the great leveller of social disparities of our time that has pushed mainstream media from the centre to the margins. What was the fringe is now the mainstream. This explains why the number of viewers of English television channels is an immeasurably small fraction of those who watch Hindi television channels.

And this is where The Times of India comes in: The readership of the largest circulated English language newspaper lags way behind the readership of Hindi language newspapers. So, for The Times of India to crack a smart one-liner to pull rank over the HMT is at one level absurd, at another ironical, and at a third stupendously hilarious. Not least because “knowledge of technology”, as we understand it in the 21st century, was never the preserve of the EMT.

In fact, the HMT (in a generic sense) were in the vanguard of India’s Information Technology Revolution and they still continue to drive it to new frontiers. If further evidence of how utterly mistaken The Times of India is were needed, just ask around. Those who still flaunt the EMT label wouldn’t know http from https. The HMT would.