I had no idea who Jhabra was till he managed to do a hit job against me and my organisation because I had no idea he was that important to be known. Seems I was, so he chased me like a dog, and if a dog chases you long enough, you start to notice. So, this rabid washerman who runs a laundry for news that often ignores its own dirty lingerie (and undergarments stinking with manufactured narrative and fake news), came on to my radar. I named him Jhabra because of my Bihari roots where we call the furry dogs as ‘jhabra kutta’. If you will look at his face, you would see a misplaced garden of curly hair.
The problem with people like Sekhri and his NewsLaundy (‘R’ removed- in English from the name, in Hindi from his body) is the assumption that everyone is answerable to them. He is just like Trichuris trichiura, which resembles a whip but lives in faeces and infests others who live in areas with poor hygiene and sanitation. Well, Sekhri ticks all the metaphorical boxes as he lives submerged in the sewage of unhygienic stories containing lumps of faeces coming from Jhabra himself, ending in a mass infestation of his unsuspecting readers who pay to get sick.
Now that the character is established, let’s get into the shits NewsLaundry CEO revels in. I would go back and forth on his hit job on me, to show how he smoothly transitions from being a person inflated with helium of journalistic ethics (that changes the entire tone of NewsLaundy) to the propaganda peddling popper with suffering from selective retention.
Self-styled ‘fat, insecure, unfunny’ Homo Erectus Kunal Kamra who used to harass female stand-ups in early days, was in the news (and now he is not) for trying to heckle Arnab Goswami onboard an aeroplane. He used words like ‘f*cking’ and ‘sh*t’ and kept going in the face of Arnab, who ignored his advances, and recorded the ‘brave act’. He was banned by several airlines for his Kamraesque behaviour. There was a lot of chatter and Jhabra smelled his friend’s shit from afar.
Jhabra addressed Arnab as ‘news entertainer’ in his ‘opinion’ piece. The choice of words, at best, describe the obloquy as that from a person who is fast losing relevance in a ‘market’ of watchdog that his organisation created, but compromised on every shred of morality that it preached. On the contrary, the ‘entertainer’ holds the rein to the empire of ‘Republic’ that has a market valuation of some ₹1,200 crores ( by last estimation at launch, set to be around ₹2000 crores by year end). To make sense of what that means for the likes of NewsLaundy, if Arnab sips coffee from a cup, and gets it auctioned for charity, it will keep NewsLaundy afloat for a year.
I am not defending Arnab here, because I don’t need to. His works speak for him and while I might not like everything he does, but won’t denounce a person who changed the direction of Journalism in India from his Times Now days, as an ‘entertainer’ because I can use an adjective (and be so poor at that as well!).
On the hitjob on OpIndia, there is a big section of the copy-paste article (reproducing chunks of my own words) letting readers know how obsessed I am with Ravish Kumar. It doesn’t prove anything, rather than just saying that I wrote this, and I wrote that! If you search the keyword ‘Arnab’ on NewsLaundy, you would wonder how come they accuse anyone of being obsessed with anything. It seems as if Arnab ran away with the only pot of hair gel that Sekhri could afford, given his precarious financial condition (and misplaced curls).
He chooses the words ‘ambush monologue’ to describe Kamra’s attention-whore behaviour (no offence to whores). Kamra, Banerjee, Rathi, Sekhri etc are the toilet compartments of the bullshit train that gets noticed only when the lid goes off. They have to stink to get noticed. So, Kamra chose to stink, but Arnab had the mask on. Twitter, largely, celebrated the banning of the boor that Kamra is.
However, that didn’t deter an old friend to let go of a chance of squeezing his own balls to get high. Sekhri squeezed them pretty hard and from the blood rushing to his temples he could come up with three questions, who he announced to structure the whole article on (so that people realise he actually knows to structure an article, which I doubt.): “That he confronted Arnab when the anchor didn’t want to talk to him? That he confronted Arnab on board an aircraft? That his language was impolite?”
The first part of the article explains why journalists need to be questioned. I agree with that. Arnab never said anything about it. As Kamra assumed the persona of a malnourished obnoxious boor, Arnab held on to his dignified one. You can surely question a media person, but he can choose not to reply. Neither did Arnab say anything afterwards. You can force a mic on someone, you can’t make their tongue touch the teeth and produce desired words.
Yet, Sekhri goes on explaining all the journalistic code he never follows. He writes that Arnab and Sudhir Chowdhary spread hate ‘pretty much every day of their lives’. The problem is, coming from a bigot and tartuffian like Sekhri, who champions hate-mongering as an essential mouthwash to start the day, those words make a face which doesn’t have an emoji assigned as yet. If they assign, I call dibs on those curls, albeit misplaced.
Then he goes on to take English people’s names to impress the readers (who donate to read this kind of crap) that he watches documentaries and remembers them too. In next para, he again quotes a British newspaper to sell his credentials. Then he explains how great he was as a 21-year-old forcing people to answer him… blah, blah, blah… I took a nap here.
Then, he gave his seal of approval to stand-up comedians as those who ‘have emerged as the first line of resistance to an oppressive state.’ The jargon was tossed and suddenly a democracy which has, for the second time in a row, with 27 crore votes, gave a majority to a party in centre, which is fulfilling its promises made in the manifesto, becomes an ‘oppressive state’. Why? Because some charlatans have two thumbs to type those letters.
In next part, Sekhri, who just a few paragraphs above accepted the fact that he started his career by heckling people like Sushma Swaraj, Pranab Mukherji and Hema Malini, disapproves of Arnab’s style (sending an army of reporters to heckle people) and even questions if that can be called ‘journalism’.
A guy, who has just quoted that everyone in the position of power needs to be questioned, justifies Kamra’s boorish heckling, started to weep when it came to Arnab’s ‘targets’ like Shashi Tharoor, Jignesh Mevani, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, unsuspecting JNU students… Are these people beyond the scope of questioning?
He is also concerned why Arnab was picking up on JNU students and women of Shaheen Bagh. Well, just because your urban Naxal agenda brings a cosy blanket over these jihadis, that doesn’t mean they are weak and frail. Listen to their chants of ‘azadi’, listen to their kids spewing venom, have a look at the Hinduphobic posters and have listened to the speeches there… These people are Hindu hating bigots who are on the path of jihad and they need to be questioned.
In the next part, the retard Jhabra justifies how the word ‘fucking’, used by Kamra is all acceptable. The logic is ‘bad language’ should not be questioned but we should see what is being said. Here, Kamra not only uses bad language, but he is not getting his message across. If there was a response, it might seem like a conversation. If it is just you, and it is not a private conversation, your ‘bad language’ is just bad language.
Now, I will again quote the great article NewsLaundy did on me, where they questioned why I used words like ‘Ravish’s head should be put in a commode and flushed’. The reporter said it was inappropriate, Sekhri shared the story from his handle, must have read and supervised it too (a usual process when you target someone bigger than you). So, where was that gyaan, Jhabra? Did it get lost in your curls? He uses the same argument that the same article quotes from my side where I said that journalists like Ravish are using contextually far worse words than what mine would mean in the literal sense.
He also uses ‘prissy preppies’, just to let people know he had a dictionary at hand. I am not sure why he used it, but hey… his article, his words!
In the next part, the prissy preppy tries to define harassment and fails miserably. For him, it was not so, as Kamra ‘did not prevent Arnab from moving, or physically intimidate him or threaten him.’ Although I was pretty sure ‘physical’ aspect was not a necessity while describing ‘harassment’, I took a look into several dictionaries. All I could get was, even ‘annoying’, ‘irritating’, ‘badgering’, ‘pestering’ come into the ambit of harassment.
Then he chooses a word which would commit suicide (if it was possible), as it came from Jhabra’s hands: ‘aesthetic’ of ambush. This word just doesn’t suit his face or personality. He is just the opposite of it. As he tries to explain the ‘ambush’, he finds it perfectly legitimate to ‘ambush when the subject is in an empowered and secure personal space’. The only problem here is, Arnab was of course empowered but he was not in personal space, he was pretty much in a public space where the whole plane was experiencing an idiot yelling expletives.
In the next part of his argument, he doesn’t find this heckling as dangerous because, for him, people jostling to get out on a stationary plane is more dangerous. What Sekhri doesn’t understand is, some rules are not defined with a personal perspective of just one person, but they try to encompass all the possibilities that might arise from a situation. Imagine an Arnab fan watches this heckling, he jumps on Kamra and punches him. Will that be dangerous? For Jhabra? No, because aeroplane’s doors are locked, we need not worry till the engine is on fire.
It doesn’t work that way. You can’t say Kamra would do that! Because Kamra is a mentally unstable person who is found running around famous people’s house to get attention. If he doesn’t get it, he asks someone to photograph him doing so, and then he posts it on Twitter. He did the same here.
In the last paragraph of his article, he talks about Arnab’s ‘pathological fixation’ of Lutyen’s gang. Sad words coming from a guy who spells Arnab’s full name if someone wakes him up from his sleep.
The fact is, this is how this gang of thugs with members like Abhinandan Sekhri works. They try to take down everyone who doesn’t agree with their view. These lapdogs of AAP and Congress, ideologically aligned to anyone who is anti-BJP, masquerading as ‘anti-establishment’, are working in cahoots to drum up agenda. Thugs like NewsLaundry CEO Abhinandan Sekhri get wet with the mention of the name ‘Arnab’. He couldn’t have let it pass because Kamra does ‘social commentary’ according to Jhabra! I puked in my mouth when I read that.
Anyway, all aside, given the shit NewsLaundy is in, Sekhri should focus on… well, nothing.
