Sex, Drugs and Bad Journalism

I just came across an article [1] in Mail Today, a joint venture between Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) and the India Today Group, [2] which begins by saying:

"The next time a cocaine addict in Delhi orders for a fix, it’s unlikely that an African man will be standing at the door. Instead, it’ll probably be a young, trendy Northeast Indian girl. And for a few extra thousands, she’ll put sex on offer as well."

The paper may be associated with downmarket journalism but I think that this redefines the term 'dowmarket'. Not to mention that it left me furious: many Indian men seem to associate 'chinky eyes' -- a term which is hardly complimentary in itself -- with the willingness to sleep with anyone, anytime, anywhere, and an article like this does nothing to change that perception.
I could be completely off track but considering that I have quite simply lost count of the number of times I've been approached by men making gestures that are beyond lewd, gestures which friends who look like (and are) propah South Indian Brahmins never have to deal with, there's a part of me that has always suspected that thinking of women from North-East India as sluts has something to do with the fact that a large percentage of women in red light districts are women who've been trafficked into India from Nepal and to the average idiot, if you have chinky eyes, you're available for sex -- it doesn't matter if you've been kidnapped from your home, it doesn't matter if you were lured into a prostitution with the promise of a 'real' job, and it certainly doesn't matter if you have nothing whatsoever to do with the flesh trade.
What really annoys me about this article though is that the way the reporter has told his story is superbly distasteful. I can appreciate the fact that an editor might find a story about how some women from the North East -- and, I have little doubt, women from other places too -- may be being used by drug peddlars newsworthy. But to write the whole story focussing on the superficial, without any credible sources apart from quotes from one officer, and with the abundant use of cheap, sleazy and ill-informed phrases:

• if the customer is willing and has the money, the girl throws in sex as an added offer.


• a few hours of intoxication and intercourse

simply isn't acceptable. Even the one person the author quotes seems to be biased: he asserts that the girls 'are open to the idea of earning extra money' while the pedlars are not only merely 'suspected pedlars' but they also exist 'to lend a helping hand' to North-Eastern women to help them make money. Yeah, right!

Links:
[1] http://mailtoday.in/epapermain.aspx?queryed=9&querypage=4&boxid=275671144&parentid=2129&eddate=01/28/08
[2] http://www.visualeditors.com/tksajeev/2007/11/india-gets-its-own-version-of-the-daily-mail-in-new-joint-venture/

Other bloggers:
[1] http://gauravshrivastava.wordpress.com/2008/02/04/a-generalized-ethnic-perception-poor-ethics/
[2] http://mizohican.blogspot.com/2008/02/chp-163-sex-drugs-and-north-east-girls.html
[3] http://joytonsing.blogspot.com/2008/01/biased-report-on-mail-today.html