What's in a word?

Posted on by Moni Basu

Journalists in newsrooms across the globe have been grappling with the language they use in telling the story of the Libyan uprising.

It’s not Tunisia or Egypt. The unrest there has gone beyond demonstrations and anti-government protests. So what do we call Libyans who are opposing strongman Moammar Gadhafi. Last week, CNN began using the word rebels. So did other news outlets.

Does rebel have a negative connotation? I don’t think so — unless there is Confederate paraphernalia involved. But apparently many people, including those fighting on the streets of Libya, don’t like the word. They didn’t like that we called the opposition fighters rebels.

We also began using sentences that said Libya was inching towards civil war. When does a conflict become civil war?

This was the topic of NPR’s “On the Media” segment Sunday. How do words change the way readers perceive the conflict there?

Here’s how Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines these terms:

Rebel: one who rebels or participates in a rebellion
Civil war: a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country

Susan Chira, foreign editor of the New York Times, said the newspaper began using both terms when it became clear that there was a military conflict in Libya. But she said the paper, just like CNN, has refrained from saying it’s an all-out civil war, though it very well could become one soon.

Yes, words can change everything.

NPR host Brooke Gladstone noted this:

“Several people have told me that the moment they hear the word ‘rebel’ they begin to disconnect. The effect is compounded when combined with the phrase ‘civil war.’ Whether or not people like us on the other side of the world choose to engage or even follow the story is a decision each of us makes every day. We think we make those choices consciously, weighing the expense and time and mental energy with what we stand to gain. But often we decide without deciding. What we choose can hinge on the unrecognized power of a single world.”

There are other words, too, that we journalists use that can influence the opinions of our readers and audiences.

Take for instance, “regime.”

Merriam-Webster defines it as a government in power. But we don’t ever say the Obama regime, do we? We only use it for governments that are deemed less than worthy.

Or “revolution.” Sudden, radical and complete change — that’s revolution. But is that what happened in Egypt? Or were we too hasty to label it so?

Sometimes terms become contagious, used repeatedly by news outlets without a thought as to whether it’s the most appropriate. The fast-changing events in North Africa have made at least this journalist think hard about every word.

New hope for a son of Libya

Posted on by Moni Basu


This is Bashir Al Megaryaf. He’s holding a poster demanding the release of his father, imprisoned in a Libyan jail for two decades. Bashir was only 1 when his father was detained. He has not seen him since.

But he has new hope in his heart that the two may be together again as the Libyan uprising against strongman Moammar Gadhafi gathers steam.

Bashir was among a crowd of Libyans demonstrating in front of CNN Center in Atlanta on Saturday. I had just finished writing a main Libya story for CNN Wires and CNN.com; had watched gruesome videos and listened to the on-air descriptions by witnesses of Gadhafi’s bloody crackdown that was unfolding in Libyan cities and towns.

Writing about the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have been overwhelming — they are such powerful stories of human perseverance and courage. I wished so many times that I might have an opportunity to cover the story from the ground.

Thus far, I have seen it only from the CNN newsroom.

So when I stepped out into the gloriously sunny and warm afternoon Saturday, accosted by thousands of people attending a hair show, a cheerleading convention and a circus, I felt compelled to walk over the waving Libyan flags and the voices that rang out the loudest on Marietta Street.

Meeting Bashir brought Libya home for me. I have been reading a new book of my father’s writings and could not imagine a life without ever knowing him. Suddenly, the idea of freedom in Libya, a nation have never visited, became very personal to me.

I hope to write more about Bashir in the days ahead. Meanwhile, you can read about Libya and the rest of the region on CNN.com

Baba's legacy

Posted on by Moni Basu




A new book of my father’s writings was released last week. “The Selected Works of Debabrata Basu” was compiled by Anirban Dasgupta, one of my father’s former Ph.D students who now teaches at Perdue University.

Dasgupta wrote in the introduction of the book that he took on this task with a great deal of apprehension. My father was the best teacher Dasgupta had ever had, he said. My father, he said, never used any notes or read anything out in class. He explained everything with effortlessness and clarity that Dasgupta said he never again experienced.

I know this to be true because I sat in on many of my father’s classes. I was not learned enough to understand the complexities of what he was teaching but I could see how at ease he felt with his students and why, they, in turn, admired him so. I never had a knack for mathematics, as my brother did, but I always did well in algebra, geometry, arithmetic, trigonometry and calculus only because my father took the time to sit down with me and explain why things were the way they were.

“Never try to memorize formulas,” he said. “They are a recipe for failure.”

In the book, his former students said my father told them the same thing. I suppose that’s why they all turned out to be successful.

My father was known as somewhat of a radical in the field of statistical theory.

In 1955, he published “The Basu Theorem,” a fundamental tool for proving independence of statistics, said his colleague Malay Ghosh. It is often used in statistics as a tool to prove independence of two statistics, by first demonstrating one is complete sufficient and the other is ancillary.

“The theorem itself is beautiful because of its elegance and simplicity, and yet one must acknowledge its underlying depth, as it is built on several fundamental concepts of statistics, such as sufficiency, completeness and ancillarity.”

Later in life, my father became a Bayesian. In other words, he believed it was necessary to incorporate prior knowledge, along with a given set of current observations, in order to make statistical inferences. “You cannot ignore history,” he would say to me as I proofread his essays, trying desperately to understand the formulas that came interspersed in stories about circus elephants and Martians who landed on Earth.

If you roll the dice a thousand times and it comes up six, then on the next roll, the chance of again showing a six are higher than any other combination, even though pure statistics will tell you otherwise — that your chances of getting a six are still one in six. There must be something going on to influence the roll.

I thought I would remember that the next time i hit Vegas, but I never really understood how my father was able to prove those theories mathematically.

As I skimmed the pages of the book posted on the publisher’s website, I felt incredible pride to be my father’s daughter (the first photo is of me with my father in 1969). I loved him deeply in life but I never took the opportunity to sit down and understand the world of numbers that engulfed my his head.

A decade has passed since my father died of Alzheimer’s, a disease that robbed him of all things, the ability to use his brain. Towards the end of his life (second photo), my father could not talk, could not express himself. I realized that the end was near when I asked him: “Baba (the Bengali word for father), what is two plus two?” He stared vacantly ahead, right through me.

I left his room at our flat in Kolkata and closed myself in mine. It was where all my father’s published works sat on a varnished bookshelf. He had led such an incredible life and I knew that day that I was about to lose him.

I thank Anirban Dasgupta for taking on this book on my father’s work. You are living proof of my father’s genius.

Is it a revolution?

Posted on by Moni Basu

I have not posted anything in a while — I’ve been drowning at work with the Egypt story.

But today, it happened. The unthinkable, really. I never thought that sheer people power would bring own Hosni Mubarak. But he was gone, as abruptly an surprisingly as he ascended to power after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.

And now, the world waits and watches as Egypt moves on. After euphoria, after celebration, what will happen? Mubarak is gone but has there really been a regime change? Or will the military rule now with an equally iron hand?

It is too early, I think, to say that Egyptians succeeded in their revolution, which incidentally coincided with the 32nd anniversary of the fall of the shah of Iran. I can still remember the joy in the hearts of all of my Iranian friends and fellow students at Florida State University in 1979. They did not know then that their beloved homeland would soon become a repressive state, an Islamic republic.

So, I will keep writing the main Egypt story for CNN.com and hold my breath to see whether it turns out to be as momentous as everyone said it would be today.

Hannah

Posted on by Moni Basu

On a dark and wintry night, the bar at Fornino looked inviting. Warm. Soft candles on the white marble counter.

We were going to have just one drink, to warm our souls and rest our feet before we headed back down 5th Avenue to visit some friends.

But somehow, one drink turned into many hours of good wine and conversation. Behind the bar was Hannah Norwick, young and eager in a No. 12 green and white Joe Namath jersey that was a Christmas present. Was she even born when Namath played for the Jets? Probably not. She was fresh out of Smith College. Interested in writing — maybe even going to Columbia Journalism School.

Turns out Hannah was only 24 and excited about the life that lay before her. Tonight, that meant rooting for the home team in the AFC game, though everyone knew the Jets didn’t have a chance. But Hannah never gave up, her verve for life matched by her enthusiasm this New York night. She even bought us doubters a round of wine and beer.

Sure enough, Hannah. I took the stunning Jets win to be a sign of all good things to come your way. I’ll be thinking of you during the AFC championship game and wishing I were in Brooklyn.

'Misery adds to misery'

Posted on by Moni Basu


A year ago, I wrote a blog that began like this: “My heart breaks.”

I had just arrived in Haiti after the earthquake and the scale of suffering was shocking.

A year later, my heart is still breaking.

In Port-au-Prince, so many lives are unchanged. Survival was difficult in this nation before the quake. Now it is that much more so.

I met a man named Carlos Jean Charles, who spoke English well and took me around the tent city at Place Toussaint, across from the National Palace. He had a life once as a software engineer, as a husband, as a father. But after a year of homelessness and despair, the will to live was fading.

I wrote about him in an anniversary piece for CNN. Here is an excerpt:

Charles shakes his head, in disbelief that he lives in this reality.

Misery, he says, adds to misery. “It makes people fight,” he says, showing a scar on his face. “Someone tried to kill me for my phone.”

The government, he says, doesn’t care about people like him. “I know Haitian politics. They like it when we are living like this.”

More than a million Haitians displaced from their homes by the earthquake are still eking out lives in tent cities once thought to be strictly temporary.

Charles puts a few drops of chlorine bleach into the water supply at his shack. Now there is another worry: cholera.

He fears that the day when he can leave this place is still far in the future. He hopes that when it comes, he will be able to remember how to live like a human being.

Until then, he walks — from Place Toussaint, uphill to distant neighborhoods like Petionville. He is a man without destination. He walks to forget.

You can read the full story and watch a video here:
http://bit.ly/eul8bX

Suchitra

Posted on by Moni Basu

“If they answer not to your call, walk alone,
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall, open your minds and speak out alone.
If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
trample the thorns under thy tread, and along the blood-lined track, travel alone.
If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm,
with the thunder flame of pain ignite thy own heart
and let it burn alone.”

This is the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore that was set to music and became a favorite of Mahatma Gandhi’s during the struggle for Indian independence. I heard the poetic words of courage first from my mother. She had a big booming voice and loved to sing this song. I also heard this sung by Suchitra Mitra, one of Bengal’s most well-known Rabindrasangeet singers.

There was a time in the late 1970s and early 1980s when my uncle would organize musical sessions at his house. Mitra would come to lend her voice on sultry Saturday evenings.

She died of a heart attack at her Kolkata home on Monday. She was 86, born the same year as my father. My cousin informed me of her death. She knew how much Mitra’s songs meant to me.

She took music lessons at Viswa Bharati University, where my mother had also gone to hone her skills. My mother filled our house with Mitra’s voice.

She loaned her voice to yet another song that came to represent another struggle for independence: “Amar Sonar Bangla” (My Golden Bengal) played on every radio in Kolkata during the Bangladesh war. It later became the national anthem of independent Bangladesh.

I have a Suchitra Mitra CD playing now and think of my beloved Bengal mourning her death.

For all my Bengali friends, here is the news story in Anandabazar Patrika.
http://www.anandabazar.com/

Survival — and love

Posted on by Moni Basu


I first met Falone Maxi when she was lying on a mattress on the dirt. A sheet was her roof. But she liked it that way. Healing from her wounds suffered in Haiti’s massive earthquake, Falone did not want to be within concrete walls. What if there was another “catastrophe?” she said to me.

She was only 23. Quiet. Shy. Yet I admired her strength, her courage to face recuperation in, of all places, Haiti, where her family has little and life offers her even less.

I kept in touch with her over the months, even took her back to stand in front of the rubble of her university. I did not know if I was doing the right thing. What if all her nightmares returned?

She longed to see Mica Joseph, the classmate she had been trapped with for six long days under the rubble. Falone told me she survived because of her faith in God. And because Mica has been there with her. On my last trip to Haiti, earlier this month, I took Falone to see Mica.

I don’t cry often when I am on assignment, but when the two women, closer now than sisters, met, I found myself reaching for a tissue.

Read the story on CNN.com
http://bit.ly/e22flJ

A long and winding road

Posted on by Moni Basu




It’s not that far from Port-au-Prince to Ouanaminthe, a town that borders the Dominican Republic in northern Haiti. I’d say it was about 200 miles at most.

We ventured out Thursday morning after a day and half of intense post-election protests in Haiti, encouraged that the light rain would cast a calm. The main road outside our hotel was clear. The airport was open again. So was the market nearby.

We — I am on a reporting trip with colleague Jim Spellman — were on our way for a story for CNN.com.

We drove by the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, past the big island of La Gonave, and over the Artibonite River, now rampant with cholera. We made our way through Gonaive, a town hit hard by successive hurricanes a few years back and then on a bumpy, winding road through the mountains where sometimes our maximum speed was perhaps less than five miles an hour.

Haiti’s landscape is breathtaking. Mountains accost the sea. Banana trees grow alongside ferns, bougainvillea, oleander. But everywhere in this troubled land, beauty is marred by human misery.

High up on this road, we mingled with the clouds and tasted the dew on our tongues. We came across a small trading post, where oranges and papayas took on neon hues against the black mud and grime of the market.

A woman held up live chickens with one hand; another had partially skinned a freshly slaughtered goat strung up by its legs on a wooden post. Medieval was the word Jim used.

Onward through small towns where people eek out minimal existences. Through Plaisance. Limbe. And Cap Haitien, the nation’s second largest city. We passed the Hao Jin Great Motorcycle Company, the Ebenezer Depot, the Alexis Car Wash, Bar and Restaurant, the Flambeau Hotel and the Thanks God store.

Darkness fell. We had been travelling for more than seven hours. The road was pitch black. And still rife with potholes and tar that had peeled off who knows how long ago.

Then in Romeo, everything changed. Street lights shone brightly and the road turned smooth. I felt as though I had come off a dirt road onto I-75. Even the lanes were clearly demarcated and signs warned of upcoming speed bumps.

“That’s because we are near the border with the Dominical Republic,” said Yardley, the translator. Everyone laughed, but I could not come up with a better reason why things had suddenly changed for the better.

We were only a few miles away from the other nation that shares Hispaniola with Haiti. The two nations are night and day. And the DR, though very much a developing country, seems like paradise to most Haitians.

“It’s a different world there,” Yardley said.

Onto Ouanminthe, our final destination. We were tired. No, exhausted, from the car ride. But we all noticed how things quickly changed back to Haitian standards inside this small town, where cross-border trading is one of the biggest activities.

We checked into a gloomy hotel with no hot water nor much electricity but that charged us $120 a night. Its name was Ideal.

Protests in Haiti

Posted on by Moni Basu



I have been covering the post-election fallout in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where people tell me they are fed up with a government that has failed to deliver.

This year alone, Haiti has endured a massive earthquake, a hurricane and a cholera outbreak. They say they can’t take that their will not be respected now. They say the November 28 presidential election was rigged; that Jude Celestin, the government-backed candidate, did not win a place in the runoff.

Many favor Michel Martelly, a popular and flamboyant Kompa singer known by the monicker of “Tet Kale,” which means bald head in Creole.

The city was tense Wednesday after many hours of protests. People set buildings and tires on fire. They used the concrete rubble from the earthquake to block the streets and torched Celestin’s campaign headquarters.

Here are two pictures of me covering the story for CNN. You can read it on www.cnn.com

Skip to content