An anonymous tipster sent in a news story which has haunted me since I read it. Sick, sick, sick:

A group of television journalists gave a man matches and diesel to help him commit suicide in order to get dramatic footage which was later broadcast on the news, police said on Thursday.

The man died from severe burns to his body in hospital in Gaya town of Bihar on August 15, Independence Day.

These people aren’t journalists, they are criminals.

Footage of the man, screaming and writhing in pain as he ran with his back on fire, was aired on several television channels. Police identified the man as Manoj Mishra.

“We have seized footage clearly showing a group of journalists handing over matches and some inflammable substance — which we later verified to be diesel — to the victim,” acting Gaya police chief P.K. Sinha told Reuters by telephone.

It’s really depressing that people could be this callous, this heartless. Taking advantage of someone troubled, for what? Sensational footage?

Mishra, who worked as a delivery man, was upset over what he said was a large sum of money owed to him by a state-run dairy farm whose milk he transported to customers, police said.

They handed him a flammable substance and matches, filmed this atrocity and then…

The TV crews left the scene without aiding Mishra who suffered burns to over 70 percent of his body, Sinha said.

Why would such cold-blooded bastards do this in the first place?

There has been an explosion of private TV news channels in recent years in India, each competing aggressively for exclusive stories and dramatic footage.

These channels often show graphic footage of victims of bomb blasts and other violence as well as partly blurred pictures of sex acts while exposing scandals as part of sting operations.

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Gautam Malkani, the author of Londonstani, has an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times that contrasts the atmosphere at the recent London Mela — a Brit-desi music festival — with the narrative of British South Asians as disgruntled and uninterested in assimilation. Malkani describes a desi culture that is truly British, and the improvements in understanding and exchange between Brit-desis and non-desi Brits — points that are often made here by members of the Sepia Mutiny UK massive like Jai, Bong Breaker, Red Snapper, Midwestern Eastender, and esteemed visitors like Sunny from Pickled Politics.

You’ll want to read the whole article: it’s short, well-written and chock full of observations and interpretations that I am sure will provoke many reactions. Here are some of the key paragraphs:

… When I was growing up in Hounslow in the 1980Â’s, these festivals used to be parochial, ethnically exclusive events. But in recent years they have become racially diverse. More important, they are no longer really festivals of South Asian culture; they celebrate British South Asian culture.

Those who stayed at home, however, were given a very different view of the state of multicultural Britain. The weekend newspapers were crammed with apocalyptic warnings about Britain’s failure to integrate its South Asian youth into mainstream society — a failure that, in light of the recent foiled terrorist plot, again appears to have left young, British-born South Asian men so disenfranchised that they are prepared to carry out mass murder against their fellow citizens.

Since the London bombings of July 7, 2005, conventional wisdom has held that when it comes to racial integration, Britain has botched it, and that our long-standing policy of promoting multiculturalism has kept us from sustaining a common, over-arching culture and national identity toward which different races and religions can feel loyal. Today it is widely accepted that there has been a trade-off between the promotion of diversity and the nationÂ’s social cohesiveness.

ItÂ’s a pity that so few of these columnists ever attended a summer mela or have any feel for our thriving desi beats scene.

It may seem absurd to focus on British South Asian hip-hop artists in the context of the threat of planes being blown out of the sky, and there are of course differences between the experiences of British Pakistani youth and British Indian youth. But because our policy of multiculturalism sometimes appears to have failed so spectacularly, we need to recognize the underappreciated — and underreported — ways in which it has succeeded.

Again, do read the whole piece. It’s an important perspective to put forward, not least for Americans who are just now tuning into the dynamics of South Asians in Britain and doing so through the lens of “homegrown terrorism” and media reports on extremist imams and alienated youth. I will be curious to read the reactions from our UK contingent to this article, as well as from everyone else. Continue reading →