Friday, September 24, 2004

Conditioned to accept sleaze

The great Times Of India is successful in making the urban population accept sleaze as a part of daily lives. The aptly names editions " Bangalore Times", " Hyderabad Times" etc are nothing less than any tabloids. They already have mags like "Filmfare" " Femina" etc from the same publishing house which are dedicated to sleaze and soft porn. But, this great publishing house is in the hunt for more by making people believe that it is actually not sleaze.
It came to such levels that people dont like TOI yet they dont have any other option.
The Hindu which can be called a Newspaper is Chennai centric and you dont find it covering the news around your localities.Again, many other bignames in the paper industry lack something or the else. This helped the TOI to penetrate its roots into the urban life. On a personal level I stopped looking at this paper for the past 2 months. There is hardly any news.

The Central govt presents budget and this paper comes out with Bollywood parodies to analyse the budget. They come up with brillaint ideas like " Do you think it is time for Saching Tendulkar to retire from Cricket?" " Do you think Bipashabasu and Mallika Sherawath should be awarded Bharath Ratna for their generosity of showing skin?"

As one of the communist leaders has put it " Media is supposed voice the concerns of people reg various social issues". We have media such as this on one side and a Congress govt on the other side . Added to it is the " I am cool " generation which only knows about Bryan Adams , LOTR, Harry Potter etc... You talk about social issues to any urban youngster and he would say " Hey Chill man, why do you bother about those f***ing issues. Chill and enjoy your life "

I think India deserves something better than this.


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