The Fake Scientist

After initially falling over each other to heap praise and undeserved prizes on Saurabh Singh of Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, the Indian media is now on its next mission of "exposing" Saurabh. Sad thing is that this entire episode really captures, in a stunning, brilliant, snapshot the current state of the Indian media. For years I have read reports of how our journos simply take press releases from organizations and file them as news reports. The Saurabh Singh episode shows that in its current state, the media has no self-correcting mechanism. Self-referential and circularly referential writing has been a hallmark of Indian scholarship. One simply has to look at the Irfan Habib-Satish Chandra scandal where clear evidence of plagiarism was presented by Arun Shourie. This by a person who was the chariman (or wanted to be, I forget now) of the Indian Council for Historical Research. The current Saurabh Singh episode is simply a continuation of the same mindset. One paper reports it. Another journo reads the article and arbitrages it from the vernacular to the English media as a "news report". It is revealing that there is no editorial review of such breathtaking news. In a marketplace where credibility has no value, who will spend time or money protecting it?

Now before you start wondering whether I am simply taking one incident (however big) and using it in a disproportionate way think about this: Ganapati drinking milk, Ramar pillai and petroleum from leaves, Saurabh Singh ... all these huge huge "news reports" within the space of a few years! I have long felt that Indian media is in a tailspin - just take any newspaper and read through the frontpage looking for typos, syntax errors, bad English, etc. etc. Within the space of a few column inches you will run out of red ink in your correction marker.

That said, there are a few quality operations that still exist. But the market is flooded with purveyors of bad news. Unless India as a society can filter out the incredible from the genuine, debate on any topic will continue to be marked by false claims, unattributable quotes, non-existent numbers, plagiarized opinion pieces, etc. etc. etc.

How it all started

So this is how it starts. My first blog. Well .. actually my second blog but I forgot the username and password for my first one. A long time back. If I don't remember it .. did I do it? So perhaps this is my first blog.