Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Hail the Fourth Estate









One headline in Outlook caught my eyes ‘Dhoni’s honeymoon with media is over’. Wow!!! Our super cool captain is going to be at the receiving end of media. The mighty fourth estate has decided to go on war because he refused to speak with media. So the media notched up all absurd sounding news and one billion eagerly lapped it up (well, at least they were supposed to). Analyst after analyst came into the television to evaluate the unity of team. During our usual chit chat my friend was wondering if these former players turned cricketing experts had played the way they are suggesting now, India would have won a couple of world cups more.

Please don’t think I am going to attack media for all the morale eroding reports that came out. Hey, after all Dhoni & Co. enjoyed stupendous appreciation, fan following, endorsement, money thanks to the benevolent media competing with each other to project them up. In that case I would say media has all the right to bring these guys down too.
Let me be simple and direct ‘Who rules us, the one billion Indians?’ Let me put it in a different way ‘Who controls our thought process?’. It is not the government anyways. Is it any ideology? Come on we forsook it long ago (if we had any). To be frank we Indians no longer have any control our thought process. It is dictated by what we see in TV, what we read in paper (if we read at all), etc.
Media has successfully eroded and is still eroding the part of brain we used for reasoning. Do we reason with ourselves when we read or hear anything? Visual and print media does the functions that should have been done by our brains. Do we spend a moment with ourselves to retrospect our beliefs?
Indians got too much engrossed in making a living and lost the important characteristics of prioritizing. Just like the way we started preferring junk food over healthy ones we started preferring junk news over the healthy ones. 90 out of 100 newspapers and TV fill our mind with information we do not need. So the real issues get ignored and we wait eagerly to know who is having affair with whom, who is wearing what… As a result crooks and inefficient people gets elected, in the name of development the country gets looted. Because they know we fools will elect them again if they have a good media image. Money can give them that.
As Dhoni becomes favorite punching boy for our media, we have a contrasting character who is now hailed as the new messiah. It is none other than Rahul Gandhi. Until the election results came out every one of his actions was treated with sarcasm. He was the favorite joke in town. When his controversial Eaton certificate came out he was labeled as a dumbo (as if all the others in parliament used to get better grades) . His strategies where ridiculed.
Now look where he is now. Just after the results are out he is anointed as the king in waiting. Manmohan as a makeshift solution. His tactics were hailed. His team praised. He is the new visionary leader of India.
Only thing that is left for me to know is when our hallowed media will reverse their fortunes. Until India starts winning the next tournament? Until Congress performs badly in UP?
Let’s wait and watch……

1 comment:

Praveen said...

After watching Dhoni being virtually torn apart by the media, I was thinking on the same lines regarding Rahul Gandhi...Dumbo in 2008...Master strategist in 2009....
The reverse in Dhoni's case..
Media is doing a mass hypnotisation and people are easily falling for it :(

About Me

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Shakespeare,Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Lincoln never saw a movie,heard a radio or looked at TV. They had loneliness and knew what to do with it. Thay were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.