The world is in a rum state these days. Lots of upheavals and messes and imbroglios that don't show any signs of being sorted out. Many of these are made worse by the media in this vast and wonderful country of ours, with the Indian penchant for melodrama overtaking good reportage and any standards of programming that may have been part of the world of news at any time. The todo they made over the Arushi Talwar murder case was incredibly tacky and insensitive. The fuss they have been making about the badly handled matter of Kenneth Haywood and his exit from India is execrable, the same footage looping endlessly while the commentators talk on with amazing banality at the whole incident. The Niketa Mehta abortion story got its spice from TV audiences and reporters pushing microphones into the faces of the parents-to-be, the doctors involved and - I am sure if it had been at all possible - the fetus long before it was born. And the Amarnath land issue would not, I am firmly convinced, be as nasty as it seems to be if the media had not blown it up beyond actual fact.
But then television in India is like that only, as they say. They present the facts somewhere inside the thick layer of masala that coats them, pushing the proverbial envelope so far that it drops off the horizon of reality and becomes the staged drama of a reality show instead. Is that the fault of the media or the people who give it so much importance? Sometimes I really wonder.
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