As a young freedom loving teenager trying to push the boundaries in a boarding school I was constantly told by tough but very caring nuns, “One's own freedom ends where another person's freedom begins''.
My freedom obsessed teenage brain did not understand the aphorism and only when I became a parent did I finally begin to understand.
I was free to work, express myself, had the power to choose, but I was not free because I was responsible for a little baby who had the freedom to do with me whatever he wanted. To add insult to injury that little lad showed no responsibility on either end.
Simultaneously I fancied myself a free writer and expressed myself with aplomb until I made (in retrospect) the biggest mistake of my life.
I broke the story of a young woman who was murdered in her home while her husband was at work and her son at school.
At the time I exercised my freedom to write very seriously and went after the story to get all the facts…I did get them all…the whole story, front page headline news, a raise, freedom from low pay until I got a telephone call from a young lad.
He was the son of the murdered woman. A polite young man who thanked me for helping to find his mother's killer but…he went on, “Did you have to malign my mother so by stating all the facts…I understand you were doing your job. But don't you see that you are now responsible for damaging me.
“I would have preferred not to know all about my mother. I will always love her but the facts you so freely printed in your newspaper, I didn't need to know.''
Brings me back to yesterday…..the press needs more freedom, it has been said at a two-day media event. My point is: yes we should, but shouldn't that go with responsibility?
Your comments
Come on Nirmala, can’t we see some real hard-breaking news stories? All that you have done has been beaten to death by Evening Post. Ask your guys to pull up their socks and break something better. Don’t give us stale stuff which has been done to death by 7Days and the dead Evening Post. We have had enough of Sunita Menon and Valley of Love and Venu Rajamony. Get us something new.
Sandeep, UAE
Posted: July 16, 2007, 17:57
Painful as it may have been for that young man to learn the truth about his mother, without an open press killers may not be brought to justice. It may be extra hard on a bereaved person to discover that their loved one wasn't a saint. But the living are more important than the dead, and preventing another woman or man from being harmed by the killer is more important than trying to save someone's feelings. You did not 'damage' this man. You just exposed him to truth, and he can make of that what he will. If he truly loved his mother, that love should transcend anything, regardless of any 'facts' of the case.
Anonymous, UAE
Posted: July 16, 2007, 17:57
