as the River flows- The Origin

I had started my professional career as a journalist. I was freelancing with couple of newspapers in Pune. I still remember the day I decided to give up journalism. I was covering a seminar on some developmental issues. At the middle of the seminar I started getting restless. Everything was moving so very smoothly! What am I going to report that will make it interesting?? I was hoping against hope that something will go wrong so that I get a chance to file an interesting story.

Suddenly I realized what am I thinking? I was ashamed of myself. I decided it is the time to move on.This is not to say that all journalists are like that. I do know a few journalists for whom I have a lot of respect for their strong professional ethics. But this is also true that it is always easier to grab readers’ attention with some juicy stories.and in today’s world, it is mostly demands that decide the supply. but fortunately, not always.

I remember a write-up by our ex president, APJ Abdul Kalam. Before becoming the president, he had gone to Israel on some work. The day he reached Israel, there was fierce fighting reported on the west bank. Next morning, he picked up the local newspaper to read about the same – but was surprised to find the front page headline dominated by a story of an apple farmer who developed an indigenous method of apple farming. He really had to hunt for the report of the west bank firing on some obscure corner of the middle page.

All said and done, it is so much easier to grab the headline with sensational reporting. And also to get the tag of a star reporter by investigating/creating some real or imaginary ‘scoops’. But what is difficult is to accept that what we were doing all this while is wrong.The path we were walking down all this while is not perhaps the path we want to follow – or wanted to follow.what happens when we do gather the courage to admit this to ourselves?

In ‘as the River flows’ the protagonist Abhijit decides to give-up his page 3 reporting & proceeds to Majuli in Assam, in search of his lost friend, Sridhar Ranjan.

Let’s talk about the river…

Even today, as the plane is about to land in Guwahati & I see the vast mass of water flowing below, my heart is surged with emotions that I am unable to assign words to… during my childhood, while growing up in different parts of Assam, I subconsciously started relating Guwahati with that river.

I am talking about the river Brahmaputra here – one of the very few male rivers in the world. From the romantic lover who embraces the golden hue of sun in the lazy winter evening to the angry old man threatening those who dare to disturb his solitude in the monsoon, I have seen him in all his moods. Truly an international river – out of its 2880 km length, 1625 km lies in China, 918 km in India and 337 km in Bangladesh. This river undoubtedly has a million stories which he shares with those who care to take the time off…

I was thinking whether my river shares the same stories with the Chinese girl who sits by the bank of this fast moving mountain river and call him ‘Tsangpo’. Or with the old man, who rows his boat down the lazy waves through the plains of Bangladesh and calls him ‘Jamuna’ or by some other name….

But is it only the river Brahmaputra who insists on telling the stories to the willing listeners? Sitting in the bench on a cold January morning in Frankfurt and looking at the semi-frozen river Main, I was thinking what stories this river might be telling to her willing listeners… what kind of emotions she might give rise to the German boy or girl who looks at her from above, as their plane is about to land in Frankfurt… Can the emotion be any different because they are looking at this calm, semi-frozen river as against the misleading Brahmaputra, who for all his outwardly calm nature has one of the strongest undercurrents in the world???

Quite a stupid question, I presume. It is like comparing the wound of a person to whom tears come easily to the wound of somebody (like me) who almost find it impossible to shade a tear… Does it mean that one is feeling the pain more because the tear is following freely as against somebody whose tears have almost frozen?? The expression may have a very diverse sphere, but the emotions have a universal language…

Then why these divide? Why all of us are hell bent on proving that my country/region/state/city/village is better than yours?? Why it is always have to be me OR you?? How much longer will it take for us to understand that we have but just one planet???

As I shared with you before, I sincerely believe it is just incidental that ‘as the River flows’ happen to be set in Assam…Sridhar Ranjan could have gone missing from any part of the world… For me, Sridhar Ranjan doesn’t stand for a person – it represents something much larger. It represents the hope, the dream each one of us had about the world we live in as we were growing up – but somewhere along the way from ‘our world’ it became ‘my world’…

Bidyut Kotoky

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