Letters to the Editor

In one of the more humorous of his numerous delightful essays, M. Krishnan states that he held the view, in his younger days, that one who wrote for the correspondence columns of a newspaper had passed the litmus test for incipient senility. For “the fact that he has time for such correspondence (let us take it that one letter in ten gets published) shows that he has reached the age of superannuation”.

Having just typed out, printed and posted a letter complaining about the rat and cockroach menace in trains, I am already beginning to feel a little jobless and worried about the screws in my head. I try to comfort myself that the letter was written to the Deputy Director (Public Grievances), Southern Railway, and not to a newspaper. But I know in my heart of hearts that all said and done, the honourable Deputy Director is still a close proxy to the newspaper editor. For there is a letter, on this very day, in the correspondence columns of The Hindu, written along similar lines.

I have always wondered about the vocation of the people behind the names that regularly appear in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column. For a while, I also used to wonder what they looked like, but have given it up long ago, impeded as I am by my severely limited powers of deduction as well as imagination. So I stop myself after making a mental record of the names that appear repeatedly. (Although it may be truer to say that the names inflict themselves on the mind with their frequent appearance in print.) Thus, the names spill out somewhat easily; I can effortlessly reel out names of some of the more activist readers of The Hindu – Hilda Raja, C. Varadarajan and Kasim Sait from Chennai, Shahabuddin Nadeem and Ved K. Guilani from Bangalore, Amit Arora from Mumbai and Pachu Menon from Margao. Together, they fulminate on anything and everything under the sun, be it the auctioning of cricketers for the Indian Premier League, the ruckus over government-formation in Pakistan, the 60,000 crore-rupee loan waiver in the latest budget or the stepping down of Fidel Castro as ruler of Cuba. Then there is Kangayam Rangaswamy, who until sometime ago, used to write in regularly all the way from the United States of America. Meanwhile, after a longish absence, T. Marx wrote in the other day from Karaikal, commending the Supreme Court for setting up a Special Investigation Team to probe riot-cases in Gujarat. Being a namesake of the father of communism, his letters must surely be heart-warming for the editor of The Hindu, a newspaper with manifest left-wing predilections. Little wonder that his latest letter stands at the head of the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column, with the title ‘Ray of hope’ bestowed upon it (by the indulgent editor, who else?). Closer home, my neighbour two houses away, K. Vellingiri, puts in an appearance now and then every Monday in the ‘Reader’s Mail’ column, which publishes letters exclusively from readers of the Coimbatore edition. Out-writing him to the editor from the same neighbourhood is Sripada Rajan, although neither of them, unfortunately, seem to have anything very substantial to say. (This is an attribute common to several such writers of frequent letters to the editor.) Some letter-writers are distinctly annoying. One such source of constant irritation is someone who I shall choose to call by his initials, KDV, a resident of Coimbatore. KDV seems to be inclined to criticise anything and everything, and at the very least, has an opinion to offer on matters that may be best left to persons more knowledgeable. Thus, his rants have ranged from the closure of the cash counter at the Saibaba Colony Telephone Exchange to the gender, racial and religious prejudices of the American media, even as he has proffered sage counsel to the leaders of the PPP and the PML(N) in Pakistan, asking them to do their best to restore democracy in their country. The frequency of his published letters is so high that I seriously wonder if he writes not one or two, but a dozen letters to the editor every week, each on a different topic to improve the chances of publication.

Interestingly, the count of women among these regular letter-writers, after also including those names that I have not mentioned here, is negligible. Of the ones named above, only one is clearly distinguishable as a woman by her name: Hilda Raja. I suspect Sripada Rajan to be a woman (partly from the name, and from the content of her letters), while Pachu Menon, by the utter ambiguity of the name to me, may also be a candidate. What should one make of this? There are three theories that immediately surface: one, that most writers of letters to the editor of The Hindu are men; two, that most readers of The Hindu are also men, and; three, that most readers of English newspapers in Tamil Nadu, considering that The Hindu is the most widely-circulated of its ilk by a huge margin over its nearest competitor in the state, are again, men. The first theory definitely holds good if one is to take published letters into account; the last two are somewhat tenuous but possibly true.

Can we generalise these theories across the entire English print media spectrum in the country? If we were to use the letters to the editors of the various English-language dailies in India as the basis, the answer would probably be in the negative. To my knowledge, no other daily newspaper in English devotes as much space to reader’s feedback as does The Hindu. Therefore, there is not enough data for the lay person to support such sweeping observations.

Meanwhile, as India’s population ages and reaches superannuation, I have no doubt that letter-writers writing to the editor will flourish and multiply. Even my city compatriot, KDV, will sooner or later begin to face the heat. But I have no doubt that with his boundless zeal and energy he will continue to best the competition for a long time to come. I am sure that even as I am typing this, he and other members of his clan are already planning their next letter to the editor.

However, to grudgingly confess, writing to the newspaper is not a bad thing really. At the end of the day, it is an important way of getting the world to feel your pulse, of registering your grievance and airing your opinion. Fulmination and protest is not only necessary but also integral to a democratic setup. As a matter of fact, such opinion-building and peroration is eminently desirable in order to create a more informed and articulate public discourse. Viewed from this position, it may not be too far-fetched to claim that sensible writers, who complain, criticise, comment and have something substantive to say are, in fact, rendering public service that contributes to the common good.

Indeed, M. Krishnan, with whom we began this post, himself underwent a change of heart in the course of his essay, modifying his unkind position when he discovered that "these selfless people are, in fact, the pillars of our democracy. They risk brawls in public in the interests of equity, and I think their letters, far from disclosing senility, prove their virile community spirit and mature daring."

May their tribe increase!