What makes Vinod Mehta's 'Lucknow Boy' special is how it narrates as well as traverses the gap between gossip and news. While giving us a routinely cited history of his journalistic journey, he shows us how, for those who are connected to the high and mighty, there is always something newsworthy in sight as they gossip, even though not all of them wish to participate in news, become news themselves. What to make news out of is a choice the editors make, keeping in mind a vague but not entirely intangible notion of public interest which hinges the ethical axis of journalism. It is easy to dismiss the bulk of the book as gossip if you understand news to be cut out of an entirely different cloth.
It is notable that Mehta's most scandalous stories throughout his career are often dismissed in the name of being speculative. It's a remarkable accusation for it sounds far more atrocious than it is. Speculation is an integral component of all creative enterprise, and journalism by all means, sits within that orbit. It is because it deals with allegedly sacred notions of truth, public interest, integrity, and justice that we often compromise its creative pursuit. Mehta's book is fascinating because it tells us how news is made, and how the newness of the news is a deceptive craft that often peels off another layer along rather traditional contours of yet another scandal.
The idea of a scandal, in this sense, predates news, thereby flouting the very claim of it being new. Mehta's finest contribution there is to make light of news as a beginning of the day energy-byte which people don't bother about thereafter. It is brilliant because as he goes about narrating a newsbased personal history that runs parallel to our national history, quoting from news that we should have read, we realize how little of that we actually remember. We scandalise ourselves once again, only to promptly forget about it. That is precisely why and how the juggernaut keeps rolling. The texture of news remains much the same, only the names keep changing. It reveals a lot about the nature of our democracy, how news scandal merely becomes a thing to consume either alongside breakfast in print, or on the dinner table in electronic form. We work out an appetite for it, only to excrete the next morning. It only gives us something or someone to resent for who we are, traversing the slippery pathway between sanity and insanity.
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