Medium

As soon as you leave our planet’s atmosphere there is no longer a medium to carry sound waves propagating from your vocal chord. Only pristine silence awaits you in the heavens. This is not so in our natural habitat though. Visual and auditory pollution is rising incrementally.  Our infotainment obsessed culture is to blame for inadvertently creating Huxley’s information-overloaded dystopia.

We, the present occupants of Earth are participants in an emancipation of nascent global governance. We can no longer ignore each other. Communication has brought the entire human race coupled with all their prejudices and endowments under a singular planetary umbrella. International tension between India and Italy have been rising ever since two Italian marines providing security for a cargo ship, were jailed in Kerala(South India) for slaughtering hapless fishermen in international waters, mistaking them for pirates. The marines’ actions would have been inconsequential in earlier times.

Information percolation through various media ensured that these marines were held accountable. But staying true to binary tendencies of every component of nature, media carries along with it a potential to easily transform itself between news-carriers and news-makers. This is evident in the recent Zee News scandal involving blackmail of steel industrialist Navin Jindal.  Another instance is Diana Spencer’s car accident brought about by incessant papparazi giving chase to the royal divorcée’s  boyfriend’s limousine. As a civilization, we are being conditioned to feed up on information meted out by celebrity news casters every day of the month, every year.  Huxley was right.

India is known worldwide for its nuanced absurdities and the present situation involving outing of corrupted officials in high governance deserves introspection. Coming across hard-hitting pieces written by leading houses on current affairs, one would begin to wonder what was the intended purpose of journalism while the corruption was going on in the first place, instead of gawking over all of its records. An efficiently functioning media is touted to be the watchdog of able governance. Yet we find a dog inflicted with acute Attention Deficit Disorder waking up at intermittent points and then dozing off again.

The lesson for today, my children is never give in to false representation which news reporting invariably turns out to be. We see what they want us to see. Case in point: Consider any press conference. The camera is positioned such that it hides all gathered press contingent. We are not able to witness a scene in its entirety but a dressed-up visual, amounting to eye-candy.  What else do you feed mute eye-balls anyways…

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Further Reading:

Fears of a witch hunt as BBC sex abuse scandal spreads

All in the family

An earlier post was on societal segregation found in hyper-economic industrial segments. There, we considered a fickle movie industry that prefers to handle creativity, production and distribution in-house and ideally literally inside their family homes so that there is no interference from ordinary folk, who is only required to line up and hand over their money to these segregated industry kingpins. An iniquitous society churns and grumbles as it tries to free itself from this blatant nepotism. We might be witnessing a calculated  assault on the status quo just as pointed out previously, “The process of dismantling these miniature societies will hence be inevitable, conscripted and an absolute necessity”. Recently divulged information shows another facet to societal segregation applied and implemented by political powerhouses.

Catastrophic bombshells were strategically released by Indian political activist, Mr. Arvind Kejriwal shaming and naming India’s Italian godmother’s son-in-law, Mr. Robert Vadra. The first family of Indian politics enjoys a clout of power owing to dynasty worship. This worship arises out of a kind of abstraction employed by these masters who teach their subjects to vote for a noun instead of an idea. The largest democracy in the world, through incessant conditioning has been reduced to an impotent dog very much like Pavlov’s unlucky canine whose only job is to cast a vote in favor of ‘Gandhi’ or ‘Congress’ as soon as the bell is rung. Deplorably regressive societal un-development ensues even if the ‘Congress’ noun is replaced by a ‘BJP’ one or any of the myriad nouns that are abstractions created to facilitate propagation of personal development rather than a wider, national prerogative.

Source: http://bharatmatamandir.in

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BM: Hello, this is Bharat Mata.  Am I speaking to the policy makers of the Indian government? Can you please protect my children from undernourishment and could you for god’s sake stop wasting agriculture produce…

Govt: Err… Bharat Ma’m, kindly have a seat over there. We will get back to you as soon as my grandson launches his movie production studio and owns at least two IPL cricket teams .

:click:

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A recent study¹ notes the sharp rise in extreme wealth after 1990;

“Overall, 43% of the total number of billionaires, accounting for 60% of billionaire wealth in India, had their primary sources of wealth from rent-thick sectors.”

When a billion people hand over control of their land to you, a modern King’s office at your disposal, with a palace of malevolent  ministers, replete with jesters and patrons, the kingdom becomes ripe for your nepotistic dictum. Rabindranath’s India²  has been stripped of her innocence as soon as she came of age in the 1940s-50s and she’s nothing but a former shell of herself. A perpetual prostitute being ravaged decade after decade by thieves and dacoits while her impotent children stand and watch with bated breath for a savior that has never showed up.

Hell, in all probability the messianic was a girl, born with a twinkle in her eye and full of hope for future, only to be jammed down one of those wretched toilets housed in a common commuter train  chugging away on our glorious national railway network.

All hail progress, Jai Hind et al.

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1. Where do India’s Billionaires Get Their Wealth?

2.  Here we assume the nation to have had a reincarnation of sorts after  Imperial British withdrawal.