PK Sreenivasan's Midnight Knock is an ode to newsrooms of a bygone era

Indian Express

a day ago

One of the punchiest scenes in PK Sreenivasan's Midnight Knock comes early, when a young political science graduate walks into a newsroom on the advice of his college teacher and asks the editor for a job. The editor is a close friend of the teacher, who writes a column for the newspaper, and encourages the graduate to write stories for young people in Kerala — nobody gets what a real revolution is like, fumes the editor, and young people only romanticise it these days. What he wants from this new employee is real stories about the nitty-gritties of a political movement, all the heady ambition, daily sacrifices and moral conflicts involved. He wants particular attention paid to Communist and Naxalite figures from the past like Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal and Arikkad Varghese.
The romance is real. Newsrooms today struggle to pull strings, enter guarded territories, conduct interviews and publish stories that matter. Reading Sreenivasan's thinly fictionalised account of the 1975-1977 Emergency years, is a breath of fresh air, particularly because of the newsroom's attempts to resist censorship. Indignance is often the first step to revolution.
Sreenivasan draws from his time as a reporter to reflect on the many figures — activists, journalists, academics like Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh — who were assassinated in their pursuit for justice. The book is framed as a letter to a friend and mourns the romantics, revolutionaries and idealists in university classrooms, bureaucratic corridors and, of course, chattering newsrooms, who have been claimed by the system, either due to age-induced complacency or fear-induced sycophancy. The narrator's attempts to challenge that inertia, perhaps in the reader herself, is inspiring, even if it reads propagandist at times. The narrator, his teacher and editor often talk like they're reciting textbooks but if they're the only kind of characters that get the privilege of speech, it can get a bit exhausting.
LK Advani famously said of the Emergency's censorship policies, 'The media was asked to bend, but it chose to crawl,' and Karl Marx supplied, a century earlier, 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' What runs through this book is a cautious hope that this farce will shortly breathe its last.