Where news itself is a casualty
These are, we are told, exciting times for those in the media.
Not an unsubstantiated, flippant contention one would say if one is abreast of all the investments that have been pouring in, the plethora of newspapers and magazines that are being launched every other day, or for that matter the television channels that are going on air till you stop losing count on your fingers. And if you are aware of all the technological breakthroughs that is driving communications today, you would stand firmly convinced that it is indeed so. The media is in flux, and excitingly so.
But then it is also time for us to take stock of things by going beyond the exciting headlines that have been tingling our fertile imagination. We need to look at the trees, and miss the forest, for once. For the sake of convenience and space constraints, this write-up will look only at the news media and desist from pedantic number-crunching.
Making Cat Calls
Mohammad bin Tughlaq had ruled over vast stretches and tracts of land that today constitute India. He was a great ruler who left behind a legacy. A legacy that is today most identifiable as an adjectival derivative of his name – Tughlaqesque. The word is too complex to have an exact synonym. Tughlaqesque would mean exotic, Quixotic, far-fetched, well-meaning, ill-conceived, arrogant, grandiose, all at the same time. It is also a word that can be routinely associated with India’s later-day rulers. Especially, the ones who have lorded over us since Independence.
There is one Tughlaqesque idea that is doing the rounds these days and the gullible Indian media has fallen flat for it – that of reintroducing the cheetah in India.
Seeing the cheetah in the Indian wild is any Indian wildlifer’s wet dream. It is something that sets our hearts aflutter. But let’s get real and see what this dream is all about.
The minister and his words
Crash, Munich: A tale of two stories
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After every Oscar announcement, there are the perfunctory exchanges between those who think the best picture award ought to have gone to this film, and those who reckon it should not to have gone to that. Splitting cinematic hairs makes for good debate. So, that is what we will do this day out. But, we will take only two films into consideration for this blog post – Crash and Munich. Not because one happened to like one and not the other. But, because cinematically the two films throw up a lot of interesting similarities and dissimilarities.
