Where has all the grace gone?

BY Darius Nakhoonwala| IN Opinion | 13/08/2007
Does every line of a condemnatory edit have to contain at least two adjectives and one epithet?

You don¿t say!

Darius Nakhoonwala

No one who saw the TV pictures of the physical attack on Taslima Nasreen -- the Bangladeshi author who has had to take refuge in India because her views on Islam are not acceptable to fundamentalists in her own country -- could fail to be shocked. It was a fit matter for edit writers to pounce on, and pounce they did.

Naturally everyone condemned the thugs who beat up the organisers of the meeting which was being held to release the Telugu version of Ms Nasreen`s book. Adjectives flowed like the Bramhaputra in spate.

Let me give some examples of how space is filled with anger-filled words and loaded adjectives.

The Telegraph: Ugliest, outrage, fear, grotesquely, distorted, bigoted, autonomy, critical freedom, absurd, naked, brutal, curious, creative, dangerous, fundamentalism, hypersensitive, and bigotry.

The Hindu:  Fundamentalist, cowardly, aggressive, frenzy, cowed down, secular-feminist.

The Pioneer: Alarming, ferocity, blasphemous, outrage, heresy, mutilation, bigots, rabble, lethal, appalling, crazed, extremists, obsessions, emboldened, eye-opener

Indian Express: Shameful, sordid, blatant affront, amazingly, communal pandering, senseless cravenly, gravely, and creative

The Asian Age: Condemned, fascist, intolerance and violence, extremely strange, cursorily, fanatics, secular, threatening.

I can go on but this is comprehensive enough to make the point. The one adjective tht was missing was `reprehensible`.

So I have a few questions. Does every line of condemnatory a edit have to contain at least two adjectives and one epithet? Isn`t that, in its own way as bad as the violence that is being condemned? What are the editors doing?

I will tell you what they are doing: being lazy, and wanting not to be outdone in their outrage.

Darius.Nakhoonwala@gmail.com