REFORM IN A TEACUP

Alina Alam's MITTI Café employs only people with disabilities, and it has been endorsed by no less than the president of India

- BY SUSAMMA JOY KURIAN

What do Roman emperor Nero, veteran journalist P. Sainath and social entrepreneur Alina Alam have in common? Little to nothing in reality, but they are connected in ways only stories can.

A BURNING QUESTION

In July 64 CE, Rome went up in flames. Nero is often accused of starting the fire and playing the fiddle as the city burned. Fiddlesticks! There is no evidence backing that claim, neither was the fiddle invented by then. An account of the burning of Rome can be found in historian Tacitus's Annals.

“He [Nero] did not start the fire but he was very, very scared, and therefore he had to distract the masses,” Sainath tells a group of college students in the opening scene of Nero's Guests (2009), Deepa Bhatia’s hard-hitting documentary on Sainath’s relentless and extensive coverage of the farmer suicides in Maharashtra. “Nero held the greatest party ever seen in the ancient world. In the beautiful prose of Tacitus, the emperor offered his gardens for the spectacle. Everybody who was anybody in Rome was at this party. They had a problem. The problem was one of lighting. In that huge garden, how did you create the illumination necessary for such a gigantic party? Nero solved that—he brought many criminals and prisoners and burnt them at stake.... For me, the issue was never Nero; the issue was Nero's guests. Who were Nero's guests? What sort of a mindset would it require for you to pop one more fig into your mouth as another human being burst into flames?”