That's not all. In Yugoslavia, the leaders of the Free World thought it was entirely legitimate to bomb the headquarters of Serbian television -- all in the name of mai-ming the propaganda machine run by that `Butcher of Belgrade' Slob-odan Milosevic. Back home in the subcontinent, Pakistan's Najam Se-thi, an editor with the weekly Friday Times, was picked up from his house in the middle of the night last week without so much as a by your leave, leave alone an arrest warrant.

Ofcourse, journalists have always been unpopular specimens of the human race, condemned to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of us condemn ourselves by our standard level of misreporting; there are others who revel in going against the grain, picking out uncomfortable shades of truth and offering them up for daily judgment.

In India, we learnt not a few of these lessons, from example and imitation at the hands of our Western colleagues. The "new information order", despite its sympathisers, never really took off here because freedom of speech had already been deified to the status of a religion abroad. And didn't we want to be like them, really? How we applauded when John Rettie of the Guardian smuggled in the boot of his car a copy of Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 -- the Congress which denounced Stalin. When the New York Times covered the Sabra-Shatila massacres in Lebanon.... When the "firangi" photographer got bashed up along with his Indian counterparts at thehands of VHP goons in Ayodhya.... Weren't we all part of the same world?

Except that as we reach for the new millennium, turns out the god of free speech actually has feet of clay. Western journalists covering the war in the Balkans are almost exclusively reporting on the plight of the Kosovar refugees (not that it isn't an abominable, gruesome situation). But where's the comment on the systematic bombing of civilian utilities, of bridges, of trains, of neighbourhoods? Don't Serbian victims make news?

To be fair to the European bro-adcasting/journalists associations, they all passed condemnatory resolutions when the Serbian TV offices got hit. NATO's leaders, at least those who had experimented with the forms of rebellion in their youth (inhaling marijuana, protesting against Vietnam, participating in the women's lib movement), seem to have already sacrificed their idealism at the altar of power. They were there, ready for the cameras, ready to go into Yugoslavia again.

Some would say, there's no pointbemoaning the fact, whether in the world of books or in the capitals of power, that strength is the only thing that counts. The otherwise mild-mannered Seth, backed by international awards and rave reviews (of course, the Penguin people would rather accept superlatives in the Times of London than in The Times of India), quietly caved in to the demands of New Delhi's elite that photographers be thrown out at his public book-reading session. It's another story that Seth, well aware that it's these lowly photographers who are responsible for flashing his mugshot nationwide, allowed himself later to be interviewed by any journalist worth the salt.

What remains of the day is unalloyed pragmatism. And Third World journalists, instead of cribbing about good times gone by, better get used to it.