And the loser takes it all

May the worst man win — this is the cardinal principle of global congresses, reconfirmed last week at the World Editors Conference in Seoul. I sensed it at the very first international jamboree I attended. This was on AIDS in San Francisco, and it crystallized at all the subsequent HIV hives. Then I also began finding it at the International Women's Media Foundation meetings.AIDS and women are both about the permanently aggrieved, so long-faced losing was bound to be at a premium, I surmised. But, several years later, I discovered that this theory held even in the power-wows of the World Editors Forum.
The underdog country is always the top dog in terms of attention, vicarious anguish and photo-ops. In hedonistic Chiang-Mai or historic Istanbul, flamboyant Barcelona or walled Berlin, palm-swayed Manila or pub-soaked Dublin, this axiom was the ultimate take-away from the convention hall. If you are from India, be prepared to skulk at the margins.
In economic forums, emergent IT may give us a standing ovation from Fortune and Tom Friedman. But in the three Roman arenas that I spar in, it's the victimised "Christians" who are thrown to the lionizing. India isn't bl-essed with the world's worst record in AIDS, press censorship or newsroom jocks, so, at these conclaves we are simply ignored. It's di-sgusting, we can't even get our loser act right.
Of the three, only AIDS has any hope of rectifying this humiliating marginalization. If we get the numbers right, we could finally upstage sub-Saharan Africa at the next global conference. Then, our Positive Person will deliver the moving keynote address to a Mexican wave of digital flash, and Indian delegates will be swept up in a tide of TV cameras and anti-retroviral funding. But, as of now, our status is demeaningly second-class. We haven't had the sense to play up our time bomb, so we are forced to seethe on the sidelines, handing over the advantage to the thundering Thais.
The scenario is despairingly similar despite being quite different in the two media forums. Our problem here is that we're too vanilla, whereas other delegates can neon-flash the entire ice-cream mall of mauling.
At the International Women's Media conferences, I always felt like a wimpy impostor as my global peers displayed their battle scars. Some had been imposed by male chauvinism which kept them shackled to lowlier posts and flower-show reporting. With acute embarrassment, I had to confess that we had no equivalent of the storming of the NYT newsroom so dramatically immortalized in The Girls in the Balcony. And we certainly had none of the flesh-and-blood wounds inflicted on our Third World sisters by brutal male dictators. As women journalists, we had twice the opportunity for repression, and yet we had no pains to show for it.
I've returned with the same deja vu from Seoul. At global editors conferences too, we are out-martyred. Our colleagues from Nepal or Nicaragua, Burma or Belarus had gory stories of daily hell and high censor. What did we have? Petty skirmishes with the advertising department, and facing trumped up charges of dumbing down! Give us this day our daily repression. For there lies the conference power and glory.
HHH
Alec Smart said, "Why did Deep Throat confess? He Felt he had to clear it."
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