All unfounded. The rhythms of 'aparanta', as they found this 'bhailo' in Betim, ensured harmony. My dilemma was, how might I convey this to urban-bred news editors who have little tolerance for a mofussil correspondent's rural romanticism, as they saw it? Sometimes, fortune intervenes. In my case, while reporting for Business Standard, it came in the form of C P Kuruvilla, to my mind the most super-aware news editor of the last two decades. Kuru, as we called him, was (he has voluntarily withdrawn from the circus that is print media, hence 'was') a maverick before the term found fashion, and was so within the relatively severe environs of the Ananda Bazar Patrika. Kuru provided the intellectual get-up-and-go that impelled a legion of correspondents to hit the road in search of stories that were to become memorable ones, and even more remarkable, was able to do so in the context of a mainstream business newspaper. Will you find a Kuru nowadays? No, is the likely answer. Editors, sad to say, tend to be almost uniformly useless. It is left to the greater community of journalists to provide the context, the space, the encouragement, and the means. The encouragement, context and professional support has perforce now to come from within. This working alternative has not only become desirable, it has become imperative for for the non-sarkari journalists. The problem is a systemic one today; there should have been manuals passed on, but system administrators have deleted them. Where binaries perish, we must turn to mnemonics. There was a time when some of us in The Sunday Observer successfully ran a tactical media counter-insurgency within the framework. An immediate provocation at the time was a faux editorial regime presided over by an imposter named Pritish Nandy. Every Friday (dak edition) and every Saturday (city edition) we would have to redefine and re-take our territory and remind the insurgents that they had no place in it. It was hard work -- outright threats and go-slows, files full of protest notes and minutes of meetings, and the halting evolution of a code that cut across the barriers that traditionally define a functioning news organism. I think it worked well at the time -- the guerrillas who did this are still here. Our questions were basic -- why can sanitation not be "sold"? Why can education not be? Labour not be? Health not be? The elderly not be? That this not only assumes but reflects the dreadful significance of "sold" indicates why we still need guerrillas in the newsroom. These guerrillas, if they still exist and can still be drafted, will come up against some formidable mantras. "All things are more or less of equal import: all are only daily" is one. If you ask one of the system administrators she will reply: "All data are equal, but some are more equal than others."