Spirituality and Journalism: Journalists Need A Loving Detachment  

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Spirituality and Journalism: Journalists Need A Loving Detachment  

There's this story about a writer who drifted into journalism. Sent to a distant island to cover a civil war, he happily lazed around in a beach house, watched spectacular sunrises and breathtaking sunsets, and occasionally heard the distant 'musical' rumble of guns.

He faithfully recorded all this, and was promptly sacked for missing the 'big story'. But while he was an utter failure as a journalist, wasn't he an astute observer of the relative truth of the waking state?

An old Latin saying insists that men want to deceive themselves. And there is no deception more seductive - some would say more necessary - than the quest for 'meaning', both in life and work. We've been conditioned to believe that there are few callings more noble than medicine. And yet, leading neurosurgeon Anup Kohli once observed in a moment of angst, "We doctors can rehabilitate someone below par, not take him above par. We can grade coma, not consciousness. We know about morbidity, not about health."

Doctors may win many battles with the Grim Reaper, but they'll always lose the war. They have their limitations, but recognising this reality would deprive many of motivation, perhaps depress them. So, they are taught to studiously ignore the truth and never let their students stumble upon it.

Journalism, similarly, has its limitations. The realm of philosophy and literature is trends and processes. That of journalism is events and accidents. That straightaway locks journalists into tunnel vision. A newspaper is invariably human- centric in its view of the cosmos; obsessed with the power play of a single nation, and only the inimical actions of its enemies. Like a surgeon's incision gone astray, it slashes and subordinates a 5,000-year civilisation into many nations, each bent on self-aggrandisement to the other's detriment. It ignores the fact that these nations have been around for barely one per cent of the civilisation's span; that individuals increasingly outlive nations (a person born in east Bengal before 1947 would by now have been successively Indian, Pakistani and Bangla-deshi, to cite just one example). But does that mean a media person cannot be emotionally detached from his work?

Politicians would find that hard to believe. They are convinced that the media must necessarily be biased; that publishers always have an ideological bent; that political events and power games cannot ever be a matter of supreme indifference to a pressperson. Tell them there are people who believe in the dharma of detachment, who do not observe events through the blinkers of ideology or even preference, who will treat each issue on its merit - assuming it is worth taking note of - and they will simply goggle in disbelief, then renew their efforts to unilaterally co-opt you into their artificial constructs.

Many associated with media are fully aware that today's all- important story will be tomorrow's nine-day, or 9/11 wonder; that they will inevitably be following up one piece of sensationalism with another. And that eventually, in the cosmic scheme of things, as galaxies are born and snuffed out, none of this is real. They recognise this, but they work on nevertheless. Why? Because a journalist - or for that manner, any human - is, in many ways, like the driver in the midst of spectacular mountain scenery, on a hazardous road with many hairpin bends. Negotiating the drive consumes attention.

But preoccupation with the here and now must not erase the larger picture from one's consciousness. Everyday, reminders are needed that the road is not all there is; that it is just a fragment of the overall scenery - and that's the purpose of columns such as these. Whitehead famously distinguished between two broad forms of perceiving the world. One was the so-called empirical western way, based on 'presentational immediacy'. The other, the so-called intuitive eastern way, based on what he called 'causal efficacy'. Imagine you are in a dark room. The empiricist would grope around, identifying objects through touch, in order to orient himself. The other would simply put on the light and take in everything in a single glance. Most of us journalists are like the empiricist, groping for 'facts' in a dark room.

How can we illuminate our vision and be a seer of the whole situation in a moment of insight? Even if we journalists must condemn our readers to see the world through the prism of destruction, we can do so with a loving detachment - rather than the morbid attachment we seek to instil. An occasional confession in small print like this reveals the perverse nature of our contract with you, dear reader. Perhaps it will also inspire more of us to strive and achieve the ideal outlined by high scriptural tradition: "No vision can grasp him, but his grasp is over all vision."

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See also: Spirituality and Journalism, Faith and Belief, Spiritual Guidance, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul)