It’s hard to click with a global audience
Readers in Newport Beach complained years ago because I let a local resident sound off on his town. If memory serves, this may have been one of the observations they didn’t like:
“It’s a city of liars. We’re falsifiers of reality. We falsify the truth, which is how money is made.... We thrive on the lie, we thrive on that which is false. That’s how we accumulate most of the money in Newport Beach.”
In another column, I upset Stanton residents with some chippy remarks, all meant in good fun. Was it a cheap shot to call the city “the Gateway to Garden Grove?” Yes, but we’re all friends here.
The point is, I expected to be ripped in Newport Beach and Stanton. After all, this column runs in Orange County. They’re part of the local audience.
But those were the 1990s, the good ol’ pre-blogosphere days.
What I didn’t expect was to be clobbered last week by readers of a blog known as Sepia Mutiny that focuses on South Asia issues. That is not what I normally think of as my target audience, although I heartily welcome them if Orange County news is to their liking.
What upset some of its readers were two columns highlighted by blogger Naina Ramajayan. I’m going to guess the website is U.S.-based, because its homepage says “We work out of a top-secret bunker in North Dakota with a passel of trained monkeys.”
Ramajayan didn’t like either column -- one about a Cal State Fullerton professor who’s gotten involved in the issue of young Nepali girls sold into sex slavery, and the other quoting my cousin’s e-mails about conditions he recently saw in Mumbai.
Oddly, she applauded the professor’s work but criticized me for writing about him. Why? She thought I was condescending and didn’t properly credit Nepalis who have worked with him, saying they “are not given nearly as much credit. One of the co-founders isn’t even mentioned by name.”
I guess Naina (her blog identity) missed this sentence in the column: “He and Kieran Regmi set up the Medhav Ghimire Foundation, named after Kieran’s father....”
The other column made the point that I shouldn’t complain about my problems, especially after reading my cousin’s e-mails from India in which he described naked people in Mumbai’s streets, a cab driver relieving himself en route to a destination and people falling off the top of overcrowded trains.
The column wasn’t passed off as penetrating insight -- it merely compared our mundane problems with what other people have to deal with -- but Naina and scores of her readers found it insulting. She wrote that I took “sensationalist trash to a whole other level.”
She conveniently forgot to mention to her readers that the same column that featured my cousin’s observations also mentioned a similar pocket of poverty in Riverside County, right next door to us.
Naina is free to spin the columns however she wants, although I appreciate spin much less when it touches a global audience.
She isn’t the first to leave out some relevant details while knocking a column of mine, but on the other hand, I’ll ‘fess up to sometimes unintentionally wounding people’s sensibilities.
But I at least can try to soothe the ruffled feathers of a miffed Stanton city councilman, as opposed to a reader I can’t reach in India.
In the end, whether you’re writing to an Orange County audience or South Asian, the words speak for themselves. And in that vein, some of Naina’s readers put more thought into the columns than she did and cut me some slack.
As one wrote to her: “Why fault someone for their honest observations? Isn’t it true that Mumbai is polluted, dirty, crowded and with people relieving themselves?
“The person is missing the positives of Mumbai, of course, but the excerpts you’ve posted are nothing but the bare unvarnished truth.”
So, sorry for the hurt feelings in India and Nepal.
But I won’t apologize for writing about Cal State professor Jeffrey Kottler’s efforts. In a complete coincidence, he updated me Monday on what’s happened since I wrote about his work with the foundation:
“I was contacted by about two dozen people who contributed mostly small donations, $50 to $100, [for a total of] about $3,000. More importantly, a few people volunteered to host fundraisers in their homes so hopefully that will result in more significant contributions. My son, a new lawyer, registered the foundation as a 501(C)iii in the U.S., so that’s exciting.
“A publisher is interested in a book on the project that would be used to inspire social justice projects among the young.”
From Orange County to Nepal ... spanning the globe in the wonderful and sometimes wacky world of the blogosphere.
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.
