July 2, 2008
Deepan Joshi
Do we have a problem with Bach? Sample this scene from the 1997 Ocsar award winning movie ‘The English Patient’.
Hana (Juliette Binoche) explores through a gaping hole in the basement library of a house where the walls have collapsed from shelling—a deserted house where the movie unfolds. Books lie abandoned and there’s a piano tiled up on one side. Everywhere there are signs of brief German occupation. She presses the keys and Kip (Naveen Andrews), the Sikh lieutenant who is a mine-sweeping expert, rushes in from outside.
Kip: The Germans were here. They left mines everywhere. Pianos were their favourite hiding place.
Hana: Then maybe you are safe as long as you only play Bach.
Hana smiles, though, Kip is clueless and asks if there is anything funny. On this she bursts into laughter. The joke is lost on Kip.
Nothing funny when this week a considerable section of our English language press got hoaxed into believing that an 88-year old ex-Nazi war criminal Johann Bach, accused of killing some 12,000 Jews, was caught on the Goa-Karnataka border. Kip could be excused for not knowing who Bach was.
“You would think a press release about a German Nazi war criminal named Johann Bach being caught in the jungles of Goa after trying to sell a stolen 18th-century piano would be worth double-checking,” wrote Jonathan Allen in his Reuters blog that then talked about the mainstream dailies that ran the story on their front pages.
In a blog ‘Tale Of A Fishwife’, run by a former magazine editor in New York who now lives in Berlin, the author takes a dig at the news even before the hoax is exposed saying, “…But I’m evermore convinced that it’s all a big hoax. The guy was supposedly 88-years-old, and he dragged an 18th Century piano with him across the globe these past 50 years. It’s all too rich to believe. If I had the time, I’d try to confirm this for sure, but alas, I’m off to earn my bread. If it is all a big joke, though, I’m looking forward to laughing at it.”
The last word in the debate must go to Allen when he explains he’s not throwing stones at others, especially since no organization is immune to occasional lapses in journalistic perfection. He is right, the other big hoax concerning India occurred on Dec 3, 2004—the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy—when BBC got hoaxed into running an interview with a man posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman and announcing that the firm had agreed to a multi-billion dollar compensation for the Bhopal gas victims. Reuters fell for the initial interview, though it later exposed the hoax.
The news sent the Dow stock down, in Frankfurt Dow’s share price fell 4.24 per cent in 23 minutes resulting in $2 billion being wiped off its market value. The shares recovered after BBC issued an on-air apology and correction. Quite the opposite happened in Bhopal, where the news spread like bushfire causing jubilation among victims but bringing sadness, anger and tears when proved to be a hoax. Some hoaxes have consequences while others are just a good laugh.
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