A resignation can never be used as a strategy or a ploy and must always maintain its sanctity if it is a protest. For that and other good reasons if I had to give anyone who used it as weapon, I’d make sure the berth was a wide one. To be indelicate, he crapped on his own porch. You just do not do that. And it smacks so much of a trade-off that he would do it again and why would anyone want the headache of a maverick on the staff. Either the threat is for a promotion or a raise and such a person becomes a political evangelist and preaches the gospel to his company.
I see no romance in it, no element of the whistleblower and no redeeming feature except that he finally responded to something he knew was happening all along.
It is bad enough that you are party to the acts of omission and commission over a period of time. Then, you awaken one day with a bleeding conscience and decide to indict your colleagues, your organization and your subordinates by going public. So you engage in rewriting Paradise Lost and exposing internal confidences while still on the payroll.
This is not a resignation. This is just a deliberate exercise to market yourself to the highest bidder by pinning your piety on your sleeve.
One would have been a lot more appreciative of this decision to call it quits if it had been in-house. But to release it to the public and style yourself as the only person with a moral requisite is the height of arrogance. We all make our compromises. We have our stories spiked by special interests. We are taken off a beat. We are often told to stand down. Editors steal our ideas and sell them as their own. We break our own rules of conduct. Off the record was just that. Now that assurance has the sanctity of a hog’s trough. Sting ops were not dipped in malice… now they are part of an agenda. We are so part of the problem that when we choose to become a slippery clever part of the solution we are still engaged in a Faustian deal with our ethics and our souls on sale. Whatever the path chosen for departure it has to be honorable and you have to live with it.
We have all walked away and not looked back. On principle. On being treated badly. On being bypassed. Because the new management did not want us. The trick is in leaving with grace and dignity and not setting your departure to music.
In the fourth estate there was an intrinsic but now obsolete unwritten law called “act of conscience.” It was a convention that had crossed both, de jure and de facto premises, and was used to justify a resignation without any questions being asked.
Pretty much in the same manner Vishwa Deepak “murdered” his organization while breaking his confidentiality clause seeing as how he elected to turn approver after the fact, not during it. There was no protest on the ongoing infringements in which he was a partner and was paid for it. Ergo there is no saving grace in that it isn’t as if he is returning his salary. You don’t like the way things are being done, just go, then write your memoirs.
Fourth Estate ethics have always been a prickly pear but now with TV in India not being accountable for slander, assault, insult or libel the rules have vanished in a puff. Perhaps it is because these rules of our wars do not any longer exist that a Vishwa Deepak gets hosannahs and plaudits for his public performance. This is scary. One would have thought that the media per se would have rolled on the carpet with mirth and seen through the ploy. On the contrary the wide range of support and the encouragement given the public exposure is an indication of how empty are the walls of our hall of fame… we have no heroes, no one to look up to. So we settle for anything we perceive as giving the profession a sliver of dignity.
There are several causes for this slip in grace. Between plagiarism and the desire for instant fame the need to check facts has diluted to a cursory glance and crossed fingers. The introduction of bloggers and experts in various disciplines who are not professional journalists has also loosened the media’s security pin. The NY Times went on record after the Jason Blair scandal broke in 2003. The misdeeds of plagiarism and fabrication were the grist of self-confessional penance. “He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not,” wrote The Times in the hope that by going to the people it could contain the damage.
Zee TV could well have done much the same. Instead it has hunkered down and waits for the storm to pass. In the end the more things change the more they stay the same.
