Friday, November 05, 2010

Fear mongering and excessive quotations

Maybe Siddharth Varadarajan got dumped by a supermodel once, or perhaps dropped on his head as a baby. It might seek to explain his tactless rantings against the US moving towards closer relations with India. The whole article A partnership built on flawed assumptions is written like a movie on self loathing. The principal hero being an up and comer is approached by a out of his league girl and rather than build a relationship with the girl (knowing her motives and furthering his), he would try double guessing the principles of the girl. Not to mention the comic buddy who tries to point at the girl's flaws to make him fall for his ugly sister instead.
The U.S. sees the macro growth data and has a fair idea of where India will be in economic terms two decades from now. It sees the rise and wants to get in at the ground floor. This was the meaning behind the gratuitous promise, made during the presidency of George W. Bush, of helping India emerge as a world power.


Abysmal writing style
Anyone reading Sidd V's writing style knows that he's the master of using unnecessary super grandiloquent invectives akin to using a samurai sword where a butter knife would suffice. Now he adds a new tool to the arsenal, the super quotations. Believing that an article would have more depth if it had the needed sarcasm, almost every punch line has a couple of sarcastic adjectives. For example in this article,

For all its appeals to “shared values” like democracy as a counter to China
...
the development of capitalism in India than in the rest of the “free world”.
...
But India is not in need of that “help”.
...
They are also upset with India's reluctance to sign “foundational” defence
...
One test of the Indo-U.S. “strategic partnership” will be if it is able to survive an Indian refusal
...
While the “unreliability” of the Americans is not in dispute

You would have thought that anyone with a modicum of understanding of journalism would have the sense to temper the theme of the article without dousing it completely in unnecessary demarcated sarcasm where subtlety would've been effective.
So we award Sidd V the "Glorious writer of the week" award here.

3 comments:

Xinhua Ram said...

"Glorious writer of the week" or 'Glorious "writer" of the week'?

Sudhir said...

While we are on the topic of SidV, here's another gem from a conversation 2 days back -

He comes and cracks this -

"Now that Halloween is invading India, how long before the RSS mounts an angry campaign in defence of swadeshi भूत प्रेत ("bhoot-pret")?!"

Then I say this - Ahh, @svaradarajan is back with his "sense of humour" . Welcome back! btw, u still didn't ans why there was no edit on Peace Prize winner.

And here he uses his "sarcasm" :D

@ssudhirkumar I wrote another edit in liu of him! [on why I didn't write anything on the Nobel peace prize winner 2010]

http://twitter.com/svaradarajan/status/29654994016

I ask him back, the question was why there was no editorial, not a personal article, but as always he scoots!!

-Sudhir

Xinhua Ram said...

LiC and the JNU brigade pretend not watching this:

One of China's best-known artists, Ai Weiwei, says he has been under house arrest at his home in Beijing.