Mindless Mind©

I really don’t know when will the Indian Media become socially responsible.

I cite media as one of the biggest reasons for continuation of Casteism and call for Reservations in the country. I think India is the only country in the world that takes pride in being called backward and people agitating to include themselves in the backward class. What a Shame!

Take the latest incident here, e-Paper from Times of India, May 29^th, 2008, Bangalore Edition or directly this item.

I don’t really understand what is the need of the media to dig into such issues. If the categorization is done on the basis of region, gender, age, educational qualification, economic background etc demographics, probably it makes sense. And they are measurable. What’s cast, btw?
Caste! What a ridicule. And unless media gets responsible, I think we will continue to lose lives and property. What do we gain - I am yet to take a note. Some recent incidents:

• Delhi braces of Gujjar Protest
• City’s borders under siege on Thursday
• Rajasthan seals borders with Haryana, MP
• And probably, the most meaningful of them all - Who’ll pay for damage to public property? We, the taxpayers. Who else. Those agitators anyway don’t pay anything.
• And the most worrysome - Food scarcity looms as no one budges.

Hope there’s some saviour who takes off Caste from the political agenda and from the front page in newspaper, and more importantly, does not call for unnecessary articles like the one I mentioned earlier.

Let’s aim towards making an equal India. Classify, but not divide. Segregate but not exclude.

Is anybody listening out there?

There is one thing that Indian media has done to the cricket. They have removed it from the “list of sports”. I think there would be no channel that does not say “Criket News” followed by “Sports News”. Guddie!

But what has worried me is the partiality in coverage.

When Zee Sports announced Indian Cricket League (ICL) with Kapil Dev, one of the greatest captains of the Indian cricket team and the only one to get the World Cup home, it got a very little coverage in any form of media.

Even in the leading daily, The Times of India, I would find only a couple of paragraphs lying in some corner of the page.

Now come Indian Premier League (IPL), and all forms of media cover it.

Why is that the cricket promoted by Kapil Dev is not worth coverage while the one that resulted in “sale of crickets” is for everything.

In fact, I say, “Wow! Human beings auctioned”. I thought that till now only antiques, animals, buildings etc were auctioned.

So, do these cricketers fall in any of these categories? Or they are just cricketers, playing cricket which, by the standards of India media does not fall in the category of sports.

Whatever be it, I am truly enjoying the fun. I’m enjoying the cricket - I enjoyed ICL and now am enjoying IPL. And then, I enjoy tennis and the recent controveries in it. I enjoy Premier Hockey League (PHL) and the recent controversies in Indian National Hockey. I enjoyed recent interest in Football.

Thanks to Zee Sports for reviving several sports. And thanks to Zee Sports to put up a face against BCCI, which simply fails to be answerable because it considers itself a private authority controlling Indian Cricket. And thanks to Zee Sports’ ICL - because it was only because of ICL that IPL became a reality where human beings were auctioned!

Who does not love controveries? Mirch Masala, eh!