Case: A newspaper reader’s plaint — early morning confusion.
Court: Of justice Katju, the press council of India chief.
Complainant: The argumentative Indian.
 
Your Honour,

I’ll begin with a word of praise for the chair. I have become a sincere newspaper reader ever since you took over as the PCI chief. I admit I was a flippant reader earlier and rooted for the demise of likes of Dev Anand to be on page 1. You beat better sense in me and now I value our farmers more. Also, after the Indian cricket squad’s knuckle-hurting crawl Down Under and MCD’s straight ‘no’ to naming a Chandni Chowk road after Sachin Tendulkar, Bharat Ratna, as my lord so emphatically said earlier, seems a far cry.


Moving on to the plaint, your honour, I am not too happy with what I read in the newspapers these days. It is a confusing start of the day. The law minister of the country is issued a notice by the election commission for violating model code of conduct. Now, the law minister not knowing, or following, law is too bad, isn’t it? But pat comes the law minister’s reply — “the manner in which notice is being issued indicates that the election commission lacks basic fundamentals about the polls”. The poll panel not knowing fundamentals about polls is too bad also. What of the two is worse, my lord? I can’t figure out.

Then, there is this statue cover-up thing going on in UP. What’s this? The law minister has also termed the EC’s order of covering the statues of BSP symbol and its supremo as “wrong”. But compliance on the part of the UP chief minister impressed me a lot. The day the order was issued, she was bang on the job. Miles of blue tarpaulin was bought and the jumbo cover-up work got under way. Then the EC objected to the colour blue. The CM followed the directive immediately and changed the colour to ‘pink or yellow’ as directed. What if the statues, gosh so many of them are there, were tied a little too tight so as to keep the shape of the covered elephants obviously intact? The trunk remained the trunk and ears ears. The CM has surely an eye for finery and detail. Who do you blame, your honour, for the tomfoolery — the CM or the EC?

I ask you because you take sides, and defend, and pan, and enlighten us. The other day, you so chivalrously came to the rescue of Sunny Leone. Mary Magdalene and Amrapali and all that stuff. I read that. That was impressive. Secretly, I too like Leone very much, like the millions of countrymen who made her the most googled person (of India) recently. But I couldn’t package my clandestine liking so smartly as you did. Very clever of you!

In the end, I implore my lord to delve on the points I have raised: who of the EC, the law minister and the UP CM is right, more right, wrong or more wrong?            

(The proceeding verbatim, as imagined on the reading table.)