Here is a link to an article by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Bearak. A report on the massacre of 35 Sikh villagers in Chittisinghpora on the eve of Bill Clinton’s first visit to India, it appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine under the title “A Kashmiri Mystery.” It is an article that treats a puzzling massacre as a metaphor about politics and also as a whodunit.

I’ll be using this piece as my primary text in a workshop I’m conducting on Saturday as part of the SAJA Convention that started at Columbia University today. In his piece, Bearak comes across as a stumbling, sceptical inquirer–uncertain and perhaps also ambivalent about what he is encountering. What makes such an attitude particularly resonant is that the events he is writing about have many layers, and the world that he is describing is complicated, its realities more than a little odd and even bewildering. Consider this characteristic passage from Bearak’s brilliant report:

What followed was a very odd interview, with several men trying to agree on—and then dictate—appropriate words for my notebook, politely alerting me as to which ones were true and which were not, though everything was expected to be published. In either case, they demanded that their names be spared except when the topic turned to money, which it often did, and then they wanted to stand personally behind their deep umbrage. Donors, public and private, had given more than USD 20,000 to each family that lost men in the massacre. But the villagers said everyone had suffered and so everyone deserved cash. They reminded me that if Bill Clinton hadn’t come to India, the killings would never have occurred—and that Americans had some obligation to mitigate their suffering.

But what I’d like the workshop participants to address–using Bearak but also slipping like a pocketmaar through the pages of several writers who have doubled as reporters–are issues of voice, scene, character, and summary, issues that lie behind Truman Capote’s statement that only a writer “completely in control of fictional techniques” can elevate non-fiction to the status of art. “Journalism,” Capote wrote, “always moves along on a horizontal place, telling a story, while fiction–good fiction–moves vertically, taking you deeper and deeper into character and events.”

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My friend and colleague Lisa Brawley, Professor of Urban Studies, writes in a note to me this morning:

The New York Times reports today that the Mumbai bombings targeted “habitual first-class passengers.” The Independent (UK) elaborates: “All along the tracks, it was the poorest of Mumbai’s citizens, Hindu and Muslim, who were first to rush to the aid of the injured on the trains, the migrant slum-dwellers whose shanty towns lie alongside the tracks. On the trains, India’s rich and successful are brought face to face with the Dickensian squalor in which the poor live, sometimes in tenements that hang over the tracks, more often in corrugated aluminium shacks nailed against the railings at the side of the line.”

Here is Vikram Doctor’s piece “The Myth of Water Bottles” in today’s Economic Times. (Thanks, NF.)

Our first halt was at a large hospital where a barrage of broadcasting vans was encamped, with little pools of bright light highlighting the young anchors each filing ‘live and exclusive’ reports back to the studio.

Evading our chance to become another sound bite on the spirit of Mumbai, we moved on to encounter a group of young men who moved towards us menacingly.

Rioters? Vigilantes? No, they wanted to give us water. We said no (we’d just finished a long coffee fuelled evening at work so the last thing we needed was water) and moved on, only to meet another water bearing crowd, and then another.

(Photo: Adeel Halim, Reuters)

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