People come and go, talking about Michelangelo

After reading a friend's status message, "While everyone is going crazy for Talwars' reputation, what about the dignity of those three servants who never got justice in the first place, and the last?" i was wondering does she actually care about Krishna, Rajkumar and Vijay Mandal or is it another self-righteous rant that we, the Indian middle class, are so good at.

Was busy inflicting my haughty opinion in the comments section when i realised that it is getting too big to fit in, so re-routed the rant on my almost dead blog. So here you go:

The fact is media has robbed "those three servants" of their identity, here also she mentions their generic occupation (servants), not names! Almost everyone who has followed the case knows about Aarushi, Nupur & Rajesh Talwar (heck, few people might even know names of extended Talwar family as well) but how many remember about these three who do not even have names! They are 'accused' inside the court, and 'servants' outside it.
Our fiercely "independent" media shouts the names aloud, people repeat after them.

TS Eliot wrote a long time back,
"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!" -- that's what bharat ki janta is, group of scarecrows standing in a queue, waiting for their respective turns in front of the telly as the Barkhas, Rajdeeps & Goswamis of the world tell them what it is to be an Indian, and a patriot at the same time.

Rant over.

Blissfully Ignorant Media

Indian society has always been regarded as a heady concoction of “cocktails of contradictions”. Our cities are abuzz with talk regarding our booming economy and the viability of an 8%-10% growth rate of our economy, but are our country cousins as fortunate as we are, perhaps not. Farmers are still committing suicide in the face of mounting debt and failing crops, the agrarian sector is still growing at a mere 2%.

The national press, following the footsteps of our ‘revered’ politicians, seems to have turned its back towards the real India. At a time when the socio-economic equations are increasingly favouring the middle-class this attitude of apathy towards the poor and pandering to the needs of the bourgeoisie translates into good business, but not good journalism. It seems that somewhere down the line the media has forgotten about its responsibility of ‘nation building’, which is unfortunate.

The profession of journalism is different from others as a huge social responsibility accompanies it. Journalists earlier were driven by a sense of duty and were always accountable for the content they published but in the era of globalization and free market it has become just another business driven occupation with profit being its sole mantra. In a scenario where information is the most powerful tool to succeed in this world, the newspapers and media organisations have a bigger responsibility to inform and empower the youth of India.

To do this they need to get as sensitive towards the issues of the marginalised section of the society as it already is towards the “Shining India” living-it-up in the cities. It needs to understand that it is more important to highlight the plight of the farmer drinking pesticides in Vidharbha than the traffic woes of an average delhiite! Maintaining a state of equilibrium should be the key.

All the eye ball grabbing headlines can also be used to sensitise the DU dude about the rampant illiteracy in the Indian heartland. It can help expose government’s populist measures by informing the quota fearing middle class about absence of even primary education for the kids unfortunate enough to be born to ‘lower caste’ parent in Bihar or Jharkhand.