BIRTH OF SANITY

I was shocked, like many others to know about the shooting rampage that took place in Virginia tech on 16th April'07 which has left 33 people, including a gunman, dead . What shocked me even more was the sequence of events telecasted on many Indian "news" channels.

This is exactly how it goes. First, was obviously(?) the news about the incident in Virginia. The news that followed that was about Richard Gere kissing Shilpa Shetty on her cheeck on the stage during an AIDS prevention programme and how the actor's conduct didn't go down well with the Shiv Sainiks who demonstrated in Mumbai on Monday where Shilpa was shooting for her film Metro.

After 15 minutes of interviewing Shilpa Shetty and playing the "video" a hundred million times, the news reporter decided to go to the next important news which is undoubtedly an even which decides the future of our nation- Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachan's wedding. What about the wedding, one might ask. It is not about how pointless this news or for that matter, this wedding is, it is not about how Indians give importance to the lousiest of events. It is about the place from where the ladoos for their wedding is going to come from. Shocked? Better be. And it is not like this news lasted for two or three minutes. 20 whole frikking minutes! It was carefully broken down into a series of sub-"news" scenes.

Firstly, the history about choosing this ladoo shop in Kanpur was highlighted after which the owner was interviewed. He says in Hindi, pretty shamelessly actually, about how, even if he is not allowed to remotely participate in the ceremony, he would send in 51 kilos of ladoo. Then, some random people expressed their happiness about the ceremony. Next, a few people spoke about how heart-broken and chronically depressed they were because the ceremony is being made an extremely private affair.

Wow! And we think about the "development" of our nation. It doesn't really take a rocket scientist to realize that our nation is going down the drain at a rapid rate with such indifferent and callous attitude of its citizens.