Is the Electronic Media So Desperate?

While a certain Hindutva proponent has a case against South Indians, his nephew has a problem with people from the other extreme, North Indians. Between them they have pretty much covered the entire sub-continent except Maharashtra. So what does this mean? That people from outside Maharashtra have no right to exist in this industrially advanced state ruled by a centrist government, that their contribution to the growth of the state is nil?

Irate youths took to the streets and burned buses. Not that it is something new, but I had to wait for three trains to pass before the panicking crowd got less dense and I could find a foothold inside a train from Kurla to New Bombay. I am angry because it affects a common, job-going, and wage-earning nobody like me. I don’t like to put my life at risk by hanging out of a running train. Yes, half the people inside these trains were hanging out of them, exposing themselves to the killer electric poles that have already killed a lot of train commuters in Bombay.

Enough of that. Now, I have the sneaking feeling that the media is actually fomenting trouble by showing everyday scenes that one sees in long-distance train stations like Kurla. I mean go to any station and you will find people desperate to get inside, and making the last resort of climbing through windows. So, how convenient did CNN/IBN reporter find it (the visual of a woman’s backside being pushed into a train through a window) to report as “an exodus of North Indians from Bombay.” Yes, that’s what they did without giving any statements from the people concerned. I think such unsubstantiated journalism is a blot on the whole tribe of conscientious journalists who work hard on their stories.

As far back as 1992 a riot was fomented in Bombay when the BBC played an archived edition of a riot that had happened long back. The trouble makers thought it was a riot that was happening just then and took to the streets and killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of property. Is the urgency to present a story so desperate as to take such liberties with the truth?