Whatever happened to columnists?

Just yesterday Mr Ram Punyani, secretary of All India Secular Forum was droning (in op-ed in HT) about the Sachar committee recommendations. His column talked about how the needs of minorities were being neglected by the proponents of Hindutva for their own menial causes.

Then there was another one a few weeks ago by Harsh Mander (Actionaid India chief and a great human being) who wrote something similar on how the film Parzania should not be banned. But why? That’s because Parzania depicts the lives of Muslims in the state sponsored pogrom and how they have not been able to recover from the trauma.

Both are perfectly sound arguments and need credit. But did it make any difference to your life? It certainly didn’t affect mine. So what am I reading your column for? Is it to prune my literary skills or is to achieve some insight into issues that are way too big for a few thousand words to encapsulate their essence?

Is it that in a bid to be more interactive, newspapers are opening up sacred column space for anybody who wishes to write? Or is it that they have indeed exhausted lateral ways writing about an issue? Columns now sound like political speeches, which sound politically correct or then there are those of like that of the opposition leaders, which are politically incorrect- obviously since they intend to bash the establishment.

In the past few years, I don’t remember reading a single column that has a recall value. There has been none that has stirred my thoughts or incited an argument from within me. What I can’t understand is why is that columnists resort to the same old way of writing and writing and writing more about an issues and not feeling it?

But giving the devil its due, Barkha Dutt (even though I’m not any big fan of hers) more recently has been one of the only few columnists that has been able to help me think and analyse my thoughts.

Yet, there are no columns that emanate from personal experiences of the riots, the Hindu-Muslim divide or anything else that hits the conscience. While they go on and on about how we are morally wrong in doing a particular thing, they don’t mention names of people who have lives through agony. They don’t narrate their stories in a way that moistens the heart. And they don’t even for a second shake a believer’s faith.

Columns now seem like a space filling exercise with every newspaper competing to get a better known name to write for it-immaterial whether he she is merited to do so.
I am a small (read very small) journalist and maybe I have no right to comment on columnists that are visibly more experienced than I am.

But as a reader, columns don’t move me. And if my thoughts are not moving any inch further, the dossier I read needn’t be read.