Rohit’s Weblog

A lazy saturday afternoon. All I have been doing was trying to better my speed at changing channels, just to get away from the news channels which have been showing the same things for no clue how long now. It was Raj Thackerey once and now it is Varun Gandhi. I am sure Varun Gandhi would not have all this stardom of ‘going to jail for his principles’ if not for the media. In some place called Pilihibit( I still don’t know which state it is in) he makes a usual communal statement and thanks to the myriad of news channels he becomes a star overnight.

Is this  NEWS? I guess it is a debate which I have been hearing everywhere but I guess the answer lies with us. None of us would watch the Doordarshan for news. Because it is plain simple news. We need that little extra entertainment. And there is no LIMIT.  Who draws the line? We want something and we dont want the same thing.  It is even worse with the Telugu channels. There are about 15 news channels now to complement the 10 or so political parties. Each channel has a favourite ( the thin line between journalism and advertising is fading). Today’s news was all about the people who haven’t got party tickets to contest in the elections. So many parties and still no opportunity. I am scared to think of it as a good sign where everyone is aspiring to be a politician. I might be speculatively true if I say this is a sign of recession as politics is surely recession proof.

And now for Democracy and its effects. People have got more vocal now. On one side we have movies like Gulaal and sites like bleedindia.com mocking the democratic perversions and on the other hand are initiatives like Lead India and parties like Loksatta trying to re instil the faith in it. But are we really democratic is a very individual question.

But to answer such a question we need to be good citizens first. We crib about the situation. Some genuinely and some just to mask our incompetence. But what can we do? We laugh at our friends who follow the rules. We bribe the corrupted guy down the road and complain about it day in and day out. We justify some of our not so fair actions as ‘human’. We take refuge in the great American Dream to keep us away from this system. We call voting for a genuine candidate a vain cause.  We blame the police for spoiling our parties. We dope and blame the drug peddler for ruining lives. We debate when we are drunk and talk about ideal situations. We cannot find time for social service as we don’t have time to cater to our social needs. We just don’t care enough.

Some people do. I am talking about us not them.