MR NICE GUY Who was the most written-about man in the Southern Hemisphere for a couple of weeks in May 1990? Why, Atal Bihari Vaj- payee, of course. All Asian and international newsmag- azines (Asia editions, mind you—for it cannot be imagined that a Time reader in the American Midwest would follow the shenanigans in the Lok Sabha with great interest) carried stories on Atalji. And before you knew it, he was gone. But the incongruousness of it all came through in the write-ups: Mr Vajpayee is a nice man, they all said. It is just that he is in the wrong party.
RIAZ HUSAIN Khokhar vs Indian media. Who wins? Mr Khokhar, the Pakistani High Commissioner to New Delhi since 1992, who has the knack for "needling India on Indian soil" as one columnist put it. Just before the general elections, the irrepressible/irresponsible (depending on your geopolitical perspective) diplomat told the India Abroad News Service that the poll exercise in Kashmir was bound to be rigged. The media backlash was deafening, but a preoccupied Rao Government did not respond with expulsion, and a light rap on the knuckles by South Block foreman Salman Haider seemed to be enough. The extremes of the Indo-Pak pendulum now seem more moderate, which means that a Subcontinental nuclear war is not as near as we thought. And Mr Khokhar provides the key.
AT LEAST UNTIL the elections in mid-June, trust Bangladeshi newspapers to provide equal column inches to ladies Zia and Hasina as they go about their pre-poll whistle-stops. So, if you have a picture of Sheikh Hasina with newcomers to Awami League at her residence, next to it you will find another one of the same dimensions of Begum Khaleda receiving bouquets from former MPs. And if Hasina wants tornado-hit people saved, then the headline on Khaleda appealing for help for victims cannot be far away—in fact, next door.
A DART WHICH strikes deep and hurts bad to the editors of The Kathmandu Post for printing a closeup of the decomposed body of a rape victim, with accompanying text that describes in meticulous detail the position of the victim´s legs and the stage of putrefaction of the body parts. This brings up once again the lack of photo-editing sensibilities in the subcontinent, where the editor-sahebs themselves jump to print the most gruesome picture they can find, be it the decapitated head of a bomb blast victim being carried around by the hair in New Delhi, or a cleanly sliced body part on a street surface in Colombo. Not to mention the alacrity with which we have been printing pictures of the gruesome street scenes from Monroville in Liberia, showing Krahn fighters being killed in various imaginative ways.