Rabindra Mishra, a Nepali journalist associated with BBC World Service, is no new name for the Nepalis around the world. Though many of us may not recognize his face, but we had surely heard him speaking. He has been working in BBC for 10 years now. For many of us, the masters level students of journalism at RR Campus, he is the role model because he was once student at RR. For him too, RR holds an emotional touch and he was our guest at the college today talking about his career, experience and media issues.
The one thing we were very keen to know from him was: do the FM radios in UK broadcast news? “Yes, there is no prohibition as such,” he promptly answered telling us about his interview with minister for information Tanka Dhakal. Dhakal then had told him that no FM radio in the world broadcast news.
I knew when the government has banned FM news, the reason they’ve given for it was nonsense. I have heard some talking, since there is print and television, it wouldn’t matter if radio broadcast news or not. I was not sure about that but I hadn’t had any reason to protest.
I got the reason when I attended a program organized by Listeners’ Club of Nepal. FM related people said after the ban the people in the remote places were left with no means of news because due to lack of roads or delay in transmission (for paper) and expensive (tv), radio was the only mean of information. Alas! they now just have the government-owned Radio Nepal for listen news (or shall we call it propaganda?)
No wonder, Mishra also talked about lack of monitoring of media in Nepal and that most of the times for the sake of political stories, we fail to give priority to the social issues.
A few years back, he was with us. We were probably at the first year of bachelors’ degree and he was the ‘man who speaks on BBC’. Then too, I remember, we talked about his career – how he went to Pakistan for doing masters in journalism, how he started working for Jung there and how he went to BBC’, the work environment of BBC (what happens there, how much does the government intervene and how news priority is determined) and a bit of complaint about ignoring Nepal’s issues. Ditto this year – not much different.
After one hour at the lecture hall, he shared a cup of tea with us at the canteen. He told us he is drinking one probably after some 10-12 years and because ‘we requested’ – thank you.
