Meglomaniacs

It's 2:37 am and I am thinking what the hell I am doing editing a story on money laundering. Do I care how much hot money is being laundered around the world? Do I care that that the success of the US's financial systen is based on money laundering? And just when I find myself disillusioned by illegal activities happening with such impunity around the world, lo comes the voice of a Swiss banker who says, "you know, it's not such a bad thing, after all...If in the 1970s taxes in India were 70 per cent can you really blame (industrialists) for sending their money to Switzerland?... black money actually gets it into the legal economy and invested in stocks and bonds, which is much better than having the money stay in the black economy and get invested in dubious enterprises". Now, I don't know but I think our sense of right and wrong is f***** up.

And then, dealing with a bunch of meglomaniacs, who think they know best and write best is another professional hazard. Why do journalists think they are an end in themselves? And these days, it's more about "oh don't remove that quote, it's exclusive... don't change the word, it will backfire... no, no boss doesn't like the use of articles in headlines... boss wants to change the storyline..." So how many stories are broken in the process? How many stories have rattled the country? How many stories have become a subject of debate and discussions countrywide? Result: zero. Ego: max. Perhaps, there should be a Pulitzer prize for the snobbish, hobnobbing, names dropping Indian journalist, who would rather die to be in Page 3 than for his job?

Indian journalists come nowhere near their American counterparts. So we do not have a Bob Woodward, so we do not have stories on time, so we have lazy, google-de-gooks, for whom knowledge and stories are not persuasion but numbers to stack up at the time of appraisals. Disgruntled is the word.