In Defence of the Indian Family of Journalists. With special refernce to a certain breed of professionals.

My editor is the world's best. I've always believed that conversations are some of the best learning experiences, and talks with Mike Flannery are the creme de la creme of the kind. The latest pearl of wisdom that came my way from his was that journalism is the world's second oldest profession- that's how history itself is constructed, through recording of facts and images, and stories kings and knaves have had to tell. It's reason for celebration that the storytelling element in the journalist's job hasn't evaporated yet, but the fact that most stories our breed have to tell the world are ugly invites plenty of unwanted censure, chastizement, and plain meanness from people who hav no idea how a journalist, and journalism, works.
Militants, lawyers and lately doctors have too much to vent- their firm belief is that journalists persent them in a negative light without fail, and phrase their stories such that they, and their professions, become objects of aspersion to the populace. They beleive too, that representatives of the media will go to any length for a neat "scoop" and distort facts to expose them to ridicule, denigration and attack.
In India, or in a narrower cointext, Bengal, doctors are rounded up by protesters every now and then. A sick man has to die, and an angry mob appears out of nowhere and proceeds to damage health center property, its staff and its administrative body. Doctors hold they never let people die; they strive till the end, upon oath, although they might be geographically removed from their patient by miles. This is from personal experience. A certain RMO I met at a small, not-very-expensive private hospital, joted down the time of admission as 2.10 P.M, when the night sky was picth dark, and the streets of Kolkata resonant only with the sounds of barking dogs. Moving to nurses, at the hospital I just mentioned, they have arangements for sleeping by turns through the night, right in the ICU, when the law holds that each patient must be under surveilance, and individually.
Doctors have all, without exception, this notion that they are some of the most brilliant people in the country, to have gotten through, and survived, medical school. Some don't wait to attach the title to their name before they're awarded their Bachelor's Degrees. Given that in India, popular notions put down students of humanities as nitwits and doctors and engineers as unfailingly intelligent, some doctors will go to the extent of labelling us journalists "barely literate", "unsympathetic", and "ruthless". As if they themselves devote over five minutes to each patient on hospital rounds, or refuse to accept charges in cases of medical failure. As if doctors are by some natural law free from humane frailty and partisanship. As if they are never driven to pursue their profession with economic motives. As if they take any personal interest in the people who have come to them to buy time. And as if some of them aren't idiots who became what they are by dint of the ability to learn by rote.
In the wake of the recent assailment on four junior doctors attending someone who free fell through three storeys, doctors have been complaining of exploitation. They choose to completely ignore the fact that the media in fact details assaults on doctors in print and broadcast, and that in reportage of kinds like this, it is unethical to take sides. What has the media to gain by tarnishing doctors? How does it benefit them? Is there a single doctor who can vouch for the fact that they have never been guilty of oversight? Rhetorical questions all, and I'm all geared to do a story on that class of professionals often described as the noblest, but displaying more often than nobility traits of insensitivity, pompousness, supreme over-confidence and egotism, and sky-high levels of callousness.