I used to hate news. Or rather, The News. I wasn’t exactly proud about this apathy, but there wasn’t much I could do either. At home, they were just channels to get past, while stabbing madly at the Program+ remote button and quickly, cursing under my breath all those members of the family who chose to include just about every news channel in the Top20 list, before I reached my zone. Movies, music, television, and that included everything except “events from around the globe”!
But Man!, how things change! Now, five time zones west of India, I can claim to know more about what’s happening in the country than most guys or girls my age.
Dirty politics (almost everyday). Neat politics (a couple of days). Corrupt godmen. Angry crowds. A cricket-desperate country. Kabul Express. Dadagiri. Tainted ministries. An even more tainted opposition. Agrarian crises. Heroes being born. Heroes being convicted. Market corrections. Reservation shit. Goan Al-Qaeda. Orkut in trouble. Golden globe nominations. Tata factor. Responsible media (almost everday). Irresponsible media (a couple of days). Navjot Sidhu. Mamta Banerji. Laloo Yadav. Manmohan Singh. General Musharaff. John Abraham. Saurav Ganguly. Sania Mirza. Barkha Dutt. Srinivasan Jain. Monideepa Banerji. Arunachalam Vaidyanathan. Sunethra Chaudary. Vikram Chandra. Rahul Srivastav. Vir Sanghvi. Prannoy Roy.
So I happened to mention this to one of my friends a week ago. It’s been a while since I’d talked to him. About how news channels were making my life seem “complete and occupied”. He listened patiently. Too patiently, actually. Five minutes of my blah-blah later, he spoke for the first time:
“So, you living alone, huh?”
“Yup! Hey, how did you guess?”
“Oh, I was just asking.”
Two minutes after we hung up, I could swear I heard him say “Gotcha, sucker!”
Damn, I should get a life.
2 comments:
hey, chands. real dark horse you.didnt know u blog.
enjoyed them.
by the way, reservation is no shit.the wheel must turn. that's the law of nature, and lesson from history
@ammai: thanks! :)my first blog post was in 2005 actually... but i've been pretty infrequent since then and only now has it picked up pace again... and that doesn't compare to your pace! ;)
anyway, i don't know whether this is the right place for me to comment on the "reservation shit", as i call it, but it's shit to me, and a whole lotta others out there. it's a time when u realize that you're unfortunate not be an OBC! i admit realize there reservation is a requirement and the "wheel must turn" is an undeniable statement, but there is a requirement first of two things:
1. start better primary education provision so that reservation does not become so full-fledged at the points in a person's education where he has to do-or-die for it (such as admissions into IITs or IIMs which are the toughest and the biggest strain on the intelligentia!)
2. modify the definitions of the SC/ST/OBC categories so that it does not entail someone with an income of over 5 lakhs p.a. (random figure) to be included in it!
maybe as a continuation of this u can read this as well: http://www.i-newswire.com/pr78904.html
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