The following article is based on my own interpretation of the said events. Any material borrowed from published and unpublished sources has been appropriately referenced. I will bear the sole responsibility for anything that is found to have been copied or misappropriated or misrepresented in the following post.
Mousumi Sarkar, EMBA 2020-23, Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur
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The media obsession on the death of the young actor Sushant Singh Rajput has become a gigantic exercise on farce. Corona virus, Amphan cyclone, ceaseless Lockdown, economic hardships because of that and many other social distresses receive a secondary importance in the media vis-a-vis Sushant Singh’s unusual death and the suspect role of her girlfriend Rhea Chakrabarty in it.
Like many other important aspects of life journalism has become diluted under pressure of cheap market demand for information about private lives of celebrities. Students are missing their class-room teachings; the youth is going without employment; hospitals are crowded with surging patients; price hike of essential commodities has become a daily phenomenon; family violence and crime against women have turned out to be routine events in the society. Our media have seldom been in an in-depth engagement with any of these unpleasant aspects of the modern society, particularly in India. In the journals and news papers, in the TV news, and in every form of electronic media we find ourselves being fed every day with trash information which seldom lead to exploration of knowledge, not to speak of wisdom in any form.
In a democracy freedom of speech is a fundamental right which, we are unsure, can be turned into a right to express trash arguments, obscene metaphors, lurid ideas and vulgar photographs and pictures. Where are we heading to? Confined in the dungeon of unrealistic we are bred every day in an unending series of make-believe presentations so much so that we keep on losing unwittingly our basic moorings of life. Can there be an end to it? Can the government intervene and take appropriate measures to stop making life a caricature of its own real self. We have a rich heritage of sober culture in India that dates back to time immemorial. How can we show our allegiance to it?
“A fixation with connecting with ‘friends’ online comes with the risk of disconnection with friends waiting for you to be present in the offline world.”
― Craig Hodges
Let us build up the determination to fight perverse ethos and allow ourselves to breathe the air that still invite us beyond the rim of a grim world.
References:
https://www.sixpixels.com/articles/archives/is_social_media_a_farce/ https://elvismayaka.wordpress.com/2019/11/20/social-media-is-a-farce/
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