NIGHT RAMBLINGS

The Times of India’s Crest Edition on Saturday promised to deliver a lot – in-depth articles about the current socio political situation, articles that stimulates your mind, articles that provides questions and provokes answers. It would be so exclusive that if you do not book it you may risk the chance of missing it.

The daily edition of Times of India has become no more than an entertainment daily. It has got less and less of news (even if there is news they are all politically biased) and more of who’s wedding whom and how many times. I firmly believe the breed of investigating journalism, like in the movie,” The State of Play” is extinct. The featured articles on Sundays were also in a state of apathy till M J Akbar saved the day for them and Mr. Swaminathan Iyer returned sane from the lunatic asylum (you should read his articles two years back).

The Crest edition was not only a disappointment, but it showed how TOI lacks perspective. Or on the second count it may be that their research has found that today’s metro centric people want such articles.
I still miss “The Statesman” of the eighties (Mr. Sunanda K Dutta Roy – please come back, all is forgiven) and the promising start of “The Telegraph”.
Commercialism or pure lure for money has destroyed great institutions like “Indian Express”, “Jugantar” to name a few. The Hindu is struggling to keep its head up. While most newspapers struggle to get one full page advertisement, today’s TOI has six four color full page advertisements. One of my friend’s wife jokingly said that TOI is a great monthly earner – she earns more by selling the newspapers than she buys them for.

To commemorate the tragic events of 26/11/2008 there were lot of support shows/functions/rallies.
As usual there was a candle light walk to the Gate Way of India (which caused a lot of disturbance to the new inhabitants of the old monument – jawans from the Indian Army), release of a book by Mrs. Karkare (no offence, but if the book was released before hand then I think we could have shown some sensitivity to the issue at hand – I squarely blame the greedy, sympathy seeking publishers), chat shows on all television channels (TRP ratings were based on the decibel level).
Photograph of one such rally by a group of school going children was posted on Facebook. All boys were within twelve years, dressed in a specially made outfit of blue T shirt with red sleeves and a matching red shorts. They skated on the old Mumbai Pune highway. The parents, organizing committee followed them on bikes, cars etc.
The best part was the comments on the photographs complimenting how good the kids were onto skating and should be properly trained etc. (I cannot publish the photograph, maybe it will be against privacy policy.)
I think that I have the right to be cynical with this hypocritical, metro based selfish middle class society.

I always wonder why people living in the Gulf countries wish “Eid Mubarak” on the Facebook. Are they more secular than us or is it a feeling of insecurity? Whatever it is, hope they had a Happy Eid.