Been thinking, a lot, also about Epicretold – suppose, just suppose, there were newspapers then, the equivalents of The Times of India and The Sun and The New York Times and the BBC. How would they have narrated the Kurukshetra war and the events that led to it?

I guess my interest in such a narrative is driven in the main by my fascination with ‘war journalism’. It is not difficult to see war coverage as serialised storytelling: episode after episode of drama, over weeks and months and years, with conflict, escalation and resolution, the same major characters weaving in and out accompanied by the same minor actors – all coming together to form an overarching narrative, which, I dare say, pretty well follows the shape of Freytag’s pyramid.

Interesting to think, then, of how the Mahabharata can be told as news. Can the story be strung together as a series of media reports? Would such storytelling make sense to a reader, particularly one not familiar with the storyline? Would it help him/her create own narrative of that ‘reality’?

Solely in the spirit of experiment, here’s a take. I see this as appearing in an ‘international’ newspaper – call it what you will (and drop me a line if you come up with an interesting name):

Pandu family returns
King welcomes Kunti, sons with ‘open arms’

By Our Royal Correspondent

HASTINAPUR:  The family of King Pandu, the renunciant royal who died in the Shatashringa forests in a mysterious accident last week, returned yesterday to a grand ceremony that spilled out on to the streets of the capital city.

The royal widow Kunti and her sons – Yudhishtira (7), Bhima (6), Arjuna (5) and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva (4) – were met at the city gates by Bhishma, the patron of the royal clan, and driven through the high street in a chariot drawn by seven horses at the head of a ceremonial procession.

Accompanied by a select group of palace officials and personal maids, Queen Gandhari welcomed Kunti at the palace gates.

“It is good to be in Hastinapur again,” Kunti said, wiping away tears. “My sons are finally back where they belong.”

At the palace, the family were taken straight to King Dhritarashtra for a private meeting. A palace official present on the occasion said the king was overcome with “tears of joy”.

“I welcome my brother’s family with open arms,” the king said in a statement released later. “This is their kingdom and I am glad they have returned. Now I have five more sons.”

While reports about the cause of Pandu’s death remain sketchy, palace sources confirmed that Madri, his second wife, had opted for the practice of Sati, stepping into his funeral pyre, as “befitting a princess and loving spouse”.

Pandu, though second in line to the Hastinapur kingdom, had ascended the throne 11 years ago, superseding his elder brother Dhritarashtra, who, owing to his blindness, had been deemed unfit by his elders. However, seven years ago, for reasons not yet clear, Pandu had renunciated the kingdom while on a hunting trip to the Shatashringa forests.

He had lived there since, fathering five sons – Yudhishtira, Bhima and Arjuna with Kunti, and Nakula and Sahadeva with the younger Madri.

The Kuru Kingdom, which lies north of the Vindhyas bordering Panchala, is one of the largest in the region, and has been traditionally ruled from Hastinapur, ‘the city of elephants’. Though under King Dhritarashtra the kingdom has seen relative stability and peace, his ability to rule has always been questioned. The king, born blind, is seen as ‘unfit to rule’ by many, including Bhishma, his grandfather. Queen Gandhari’s self-imposed blindness – since the day she found out her betrothed was blind, the former princess of Gandhara has chosen to wear a black blindfold – has not helped his case.

The death of King Pandu and the unexpected return of his family have brought a feeling of unrest in the palace. A highly-placed source, who did not want to be identified, said the king had to be persuaded by Bhishma to invite Kunti and sons to Hastinapur.

“The royal politics is likely to be murkier in the coming years,” the source said.

Treat this as the equivalent of an ‘establishing’ shot, the beginning of this narrative. The next take could be from a Hastinapur-based newspaper – a human interest story perhaps, on the five little boys, the Pandavas. And, yes, there could a political commentary or a news analysis, which would expand on the last quote of the report above.

Guess I will be back with more.

ALSO SEE: The End of Childhood

Image courtesy http://bit.ly/9azpHi

How about dog bites cat?

Is big news, I just learnt by way of Daily Echo, the leading – and only – newspaper in my little town in south England.

Hogging its front page today was a remarkable piece of journalism. Crux of story: three dogs kill a cat.

Or rather, Dogs savage cat to death. The strapline read: ‘It could be a child next time’ [sic] says mum.

In the last 12 months a child was killed, another two severely mauled by dogs in England, so this is newsworthy. But a Page 1 splash?

I better save a copy of this edition.

PS: I am not a fussy man, so I won’t pick on the missing comma in the strapline, nor the passive photograph, nor its caption that features a man identified simply as ‘Barry Richardson’ (he doesn’t figure anywhere in the story). Hell, I won’t even pick on the fact the strapline parrots the same direct quote as the intro – nor that one of the quotes has been doctored.

PPS: Not entirely in passing, here is some all-round biting for you: Man bites dog (and policeman)

The subject was always the same. Childishly simple, the kind you would expect to write an essay on in school: your hobby. Difference was, you needed to produce a feature article, a piece of creative non-fiction, informative and interesting, capable of carrying the reader through to the last word.

Result? Some very pleasant surprises (also some quite, um, unconventional use of punctuation and grammar, but more on that in another post), to prove, yet again, that there’s nothing called a boring topic. It’s how you tackle it that makes it boring — or not.

Naturally, how you begin is crucial. So here’s a sample of beginnings I found interesting…

Helen Smale’s hobby is not reading, nor dancing, nor singing. It’s mentoring school kids. She begins thus:

I have just helped someone change his life. How? I went back to school.

Crisp. Dramatic. Now I want to know why, and how. She’s got me all right.

Mike Goodeve wrote about driving tests — to be precise, how he routinely fails driving tests. That’s not really what you would call a hobby, but, hey, he got away with it. This is his reworked lead:

I have a hobby, a rather unusual one: I fail driving tests routinely.   

I don’t know how long I will be able to carry on with it. But at the moment, I am giving it all I have got….

Point is, you can pull off darn near anything as a hobby (I remember a piece in Esquire magazine in which the writer decided to bargain for everything he bought, including hotdogs, then wrote this absolutely riveting piece on his haggling experience), provided you peg it up.

Leonie Wilson did something similar:

I have this hobby I love to talk about. In fact, I’ve made talking about it a hobby in itself. This is why I jumped at the opportunity when a stranger contacted me and asked me to talk to her about my experience last summer.

Enough suspense in there to get us reading. More about how she keeps us hooked, and what her hobby is, in the next post. Now for another interesting beginning, clever pegging, from Sophie Pascal, who didn’t think she had a hobby –- till she looked the word up…

This made me wonder what a hobby is. So I looked it up. The Oxford Dictionary describes a hobby as ‘a leisure time activity pursued for pleasure’.   

In that case maybe I have a hobby. It’s not your average sporting hobby, but a highly developed fondness for cats. In my leisure time I enjoy cats and collect cat-related objects for pleasure … this must technically mean my immense love for cats is a hobby.

And now for another, from Katrin Kerber. Katrin’s hobby is video games, quite conventional compared to the ones we have discussed till now. She gets us with a saucy summary sentence:

In the last couple of days I slept with at least four guys, married a girl, stopped a restaurant from going bankrupt, helped a musician get into the charts, and became vice-president of a big company.

Gemma Gilbert works along the same lines. Here’s how she teases us in (lightly edited):

We’ve all done it, many of us more than once. Some of us do it in the bedroom. Some in front of mirrors. Some like to do it in clubs, with their mates watching.

Curious to know what she’s been up to? I was.

What makes these work? They grab my attention, one way or other, through surprise, shock, sheer sauce. You can also get me with information, description, action, conversation… anything really. Fact is, I am available. Up to you, how you hook me.