India specific rant

Hindustan Times, India's National Daily has yet again shown where it wants to be in shaping of Modern India - in a direction which leads westwards.

I am not a fascist or even a luddite. I give my humble consent to adoption of policies, practises from societies and cultures when they may infact be unavailable in our own society or be more efficient than already existing systems.

But our very own Hindustan Times has blind foldedly taken to comparing everything that does exist in India and comparing it to the west. Repeatedly you'd find news in Indian papers such as Yoga is applauded in the west, Western Scientists say that Ayurveda is good for your skin, oh ho ho, Jesus visited India and oh, lookey! even Newton got inspiration from us! Aren't we cool?

To me, India's biggest newspaper comes across as a 15-year old who is seeking validation at every step of the way whilst pretending that he has got his own opinions but in fact, he is nearly always shooting off somebody else's shoulder.

Media shapes a society. And conversely, a society consumes media. That's to say if the whole world wants to learn about Amy Winehouse's antics, Evening Standard would oblige, as would Guardian if only in the G2 section.
So there is a consumer demand for knowing our standing in the west. May be several people can't visit the west to make their own decision and perhaps in fact, they don't even want to research themselves to find out. But it's the fundamental belief in all things western are good is what Nestle's advertisement of Breast Milk Substitutes work so good that it works so well.

And instead of questioning and possibly even disproving these to our society's benefit, the Indian Media has taken the easier way to consumerism which is rife in every part of the country.

Just to site a few examples, only recently they were talking about Indian Rupees in Millions, Billions and Trillions! I don't exactly understand why because we have an equivalent of lacs (10 to the 5), crores (10 to the 7), arabs (10 to 9) and kharabs (10 to the 11). Do they fail to understand that this is in fact disadvantaging our own people by losing the basis of all human communication and even civilization - language. Is that infact their whole point?

One may argue that since they are Indian Newspapers written in English, it shoudn't be so surprising to learn their market consists of people who are infact eager to learn English. But we all know, that when vernacular press came into India it was started in English as there wasn't a common language that bound the 18 states of the country and not because they wanted to disadvantage the poor which is what the aim of these newspapers seems to be.

It's not just this example, the yearly awards for High Achieving Non-Resident Indians is another malarkey - out of the six contenders for this year's awards three of them have given up their Indian citizenship. Wouldn't it be wise to think again that these people left India a long time ago with the intention of never coming back.

Why honour them instead of somebody who is using UN money to teach people in Chennai slums? Or how about the efforts being made by some Individuals, volunteers who have gone out of their way to bring life back to people who wouldn't have dreamt it otherwise.

Is applauding an NRI another evidence to their badly formed theory that everything western is good?

One can never be sure if they even have an ulterior motive but they are not going the way they had started 60 years ago when Mahatma Gandhi heralded their first copy. So shame be upon them!

There, rant over.