" I can e-speak awn-ly Englis! "

The Indian media never fails to astound me.

A country of over a billion people should certainly be up to the task of providing the newsman with his daily bread; he, however, prefers to dig his nose and claw into some obscure corner, to come up with a piece of what can loosely be referred to as information, and thrusts it in front of the nose of the populace.


I was surfing channels at my leisure yesterday, when i came across a news channel of sufficient repute broadcasting a most interesting programme. The topic of active discussion was a fourteen year old human male specimen who answered to the name of Rajesh Mishra and hailed from the small town of Bilaspur. This young prodigy(or so they claimed) had apparently started speaking farratedaar English(an oft-repeated term that probably means a combination of fluent and fast) all of a sudden, despite having no previous knowledge of the language. And what is more, the gentleman had a distinct amreekan twang to his tongue. It did not take me more than a word out of the kid's mouth to understand that he was either a fraud, or mentally challenged, but definitely not a prodigy. That word happened to be "exactly"(pronounced "egg-jact-ly). What he spoke was grammatically incorrect, incoherent and mostly devoid of any real meaning. However, the news channel kept banging on about how this was a miracle of nature, and how this child should be supported and how fortunate all of us were that this miracle took place in India. The director of ISRO called in and specifically said that he was proud of this young man, and that he would get whatever support required.

Come today afternoon, and the interrogators were singing a different tune. It transpired that this young prodigy gained his amreekan accented English from the movies Total Recall, The Matrix and the like. Hence, the discussion moved to his mental stability, and so on and so forth. In between, our protagonist alluded to certain "profits" he was receiving for coming on the show, owing to which (obviously) the presenter changed the topic immediately.

This exercise took up almost twenty-four hours of valuable air time that could have been devoted to something a lot more useful, or of greater consequence. A lot of people who genuinely require support never get even one hundredth of the kind of air time that Rajesh got. Ten thousand people murdered everyday, thousands of women raped every day, millions of robberies, tonnes of scams... all these are neatly swept under the carpet while people like Rajesh sit comfortably on armchairs on top of them. Stories that need to see the light of day are buried deep underneath the ground, and probably always will be.

Because the public enjoys seeing the unnecessary romanticisation of Rajesh-like people. And the media gives them what they want. A murder or a new scam is just not interesting enough anymore! It has become far too commonplace to generate the same kind of interest as Rajesh! So the people do not protest, hence authorising the media to, in effect, show whatever pieces of refined crap they want to show. A sad state of affairs indeed.

The Rajesh story is probably receiving the undivided attention of "experts" on the news channel as i write... they will probably bake him for breakfast and have the leftovers as hors d'oeuvre before lunch.

Best of luck to them.