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What Rocky Balboa knew, and Robert Vadra didn't

If Vadra has indeed watched the cult Stallone film, he clearly missed its greatest lesson

N. Sundaresha Subramanian New Delhi
Last Updated : Nov 07 2014 | 8:43 AM IST
Some channel surfing last Sunday landed me on Sony Pix, which was playing Sylvester Stallone’s cult hit Rocky. I knew the storyline, the famous ending etc, I've seen the best scenes here and there, but I’ve never really watched the whole movie. So, I decided to sit through the painful commercial breaks. 
 
As part of his preparations for the boxing bout with world champion Apollo Creed, Rocky goes to his friend's meathouse and practises punching with his bare hands on raw beef. Rocky's friend Paulie, who is always looking for ways to cash in on his friend's new found popularity, one day brings in a TV crew to report. Rocky is taken aback but eventually agrees for a shoot. But before he allows legendary TV presenter Diana Lewis, who plays herself in the movie, to put her boom mic up, he tells her she can't take 'cheap shots' at him. They film after she agrees. 
 
Later, Rocky tells his girlfriend Adrian, who is also Paulie's sister: "Adrian, I ain't mad. It's just that when reporters are around, I get out of joint coz they take cheap shots."
 

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I couldn't help instantly relating it to the previous night's events at New Delhi’s Ashok Hotel. 
 
Rocky knew a good four decades ago – the movie hit screens in 1976 – that reporters, even the legendary Lewis, have to be told 'expressly' not to take cheap shots at their unsuspecting subjects and that the time to do so is just before the camera starts rolling. Once it is on, you are at the mercy of the reporter. 
 
It's a lesson all of us can learn from Rocky. You really never know when a mic can be thrust up your throat and for what. 
 
A certain Robert Rajinder Vadra learnt it the hard way that Saturday. 
 
Though print reporters are no less capable of “cheap shots”, they can never produce anything even remotely close to the spectacular visuals that have been playing on loop a million times across hundreds of news channels over the weekend, and then some. 
 
Wait for the parody sites to compose music and come out with an ‘Are you Serious? Are you nuts?’ album. 
 
Editors are often heard preaching that reporting is neither a guerrilla war nor a hit-and-run job. But sometimes when it is reduced to that, the same people are wary of taking such a position on national television when faced with shouting anchors waging the war of press freedom.
 
While the reporter can always turn back and say he/she has the right to ask the questions in public interest, it is equally the right of the subject to feel betrayed and allege "cheap shots" when the conversation jumps abruptly from smooth sailing, high-end tread mills to the roller coaster of land deals investigation. 
 
But does that give the visibly inarticulate subject the right to shove the inanimate object thrust into his face? 
 
Probably yes – especially if the subject feared that a lack of such a release would have raised anger levels to a point where the English vocabulary goes blank, giving way to expletives in the mother-tongue, or possibly an even worse outcome. 
 
Anger arising out of helplessness can do strange things to people. For example, when my wife threatens me with such unanswerable questions brandishing equally dangerous household objects, I suddenly lose the ability to speak coherently in English or for that matter any language. Believe me, that actually happens. Therefore, I can absolutely empathise with our subject getting struck like a broken record on national TV. 
 
Have such things happened before? 
 
A Bollywood bodybuilder has done it before. One top journalist was drawn into a boxing match in front of Madison square garden recently. Politicians do it all the time. 
 
Did the shoving of the inanimate object by the inarticulate subject threaten press freedom and send us back to the Emergency, which incidentally was imposed by Vadra's mother-in-law's mother-in-law in the same year that, ironically, Rocky was released?
 
The threat caused was only a minuscule fraction of that caused by sweet talking spokespersons, who have the uncanny ability to unleash a Niagara of beautiful English sentences without actually saying anything meaningful and seductively smiling spin doctors, who manipulate the news flow by manipulating the newspersons. Such hyperbole is also a great injustice as it trivialises the efforts of brave people who often risk life and limb – and sometimes even lose them – for a good story. 
 
Finally, to me, of all things under the sun that the iron-pumping, six-pack-flaunting Son-in-Law is accused of, the worst is going to be that he did not watch Rocky. And, if he is going to bring me proof that he did watch it, then it is the fact he missed its greatest lesson: the warning against cheap shots by reporters. 
 
I can see your teeth grinding, eyes glaring, fists clenching.
 
I can hear you shouting, "Are you serious? (three times)
 
Are you nuts?
 
Delete this post. Right now!"
 
Sorry. We are the Press, you know. 
 
The Constitution has given us the right to take cheap shots.
 

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First Published: Nov 05 2014 | 11:25 AM IST

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