By Justice Katju
Indian Express is one of the leading English newspapers of India.
@IndianExpress tweeted this morning :
” Kareena Kapoor has dinner by 6.30 pm. Nutritionist discloses why the last meal time matters ”
To which I responded :
” @mkatju : Shame on Indian Express for posting such rubbish. Why don’t they publish that 57% Indian women are anaemic, which means they don’t get sufficient nutritious food for producing enough healthy red blood cells or hemoglobin to carry oxygen to the body’s tissues ”.
Anaemia is a condition in which the number of red blood cells or the haemoglobin within them is lower than normal. Haemoglobin is needed to carry oxygen and if one has too few or abnormal red blood cells, or not enough haemoglobin, there will be a decreased capacity of the blood to carry oxygen to the body’s tissues. This results in symptoms such as fatigue, weakness, dizziness and shortness of breath, among others. ”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S187758452400011X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemia
What Indian Express posted is typical of the Indian media, and not exceptional.
Why does the Indian media not focus on the real problems of India– massive poverty, massive unemployment, appalling level of child malnutrition, almost total lack of proper healthcare and good education for the masses, etc ? Evidently because the media owners have given instructions, at the instance of the political leaders who are in power, that the attention of the people must be diverted from the real issues.
So the whole game is to keep the people’s attention away from the real issues, and kept engrossed in non issues or trivialities like petty politics, lives of filmstars, cricket, fashion parades, astrology, etc, in accordance with the maxim of the Roman Emperors ” If you cannot give the people bread, give them circuses “
The Indian media deliberately diverts the attention of the people from the real issues to non issues or trivialities. The real issues in India are socio-economic, the terrible poverty in which 75% or more of our people are living, massive unemployment, skyrocketing rise in prices of food and other essential commodities, lack of proper healthcare and good education, appalling level of child malnutrition (every second child in India is malnourished, according to Global Hunger Index, and the situation has deteriorated as is evident from the fact that India has slipped from position number 101 to 107 in the last few years out of 125 countries surveyed ), backward social practices like oppression and discrimination against women, dalits, and minorities, honour killing, caste oppression, religious polarisation, etc.
Instead of devoting most of its coverage to these real issues, the media focuses on non issues or trivialities like petty politics, film stars and their lives, self-styled spiritual babas, fashion parades, pop music, disco dancing, astrology, cricket, reality shows, etc.
There can be no objection to the media providing entertainment to the people, provided this is not overdone. But if 90% of its coverage is related to entertainment, and only 10% to the real issues facing the nation, then there is something seriously wrong with the media. The question is of proportion.
In the Indian media, the sense of proportion is skewed. Entertainment gets 10 times the coverage that poverty, unemployment, healthcare, malnutrition, education , labor, agriculture and environment together get.
Does a hungry or unemployed man want entertainment, or food and a job?
Some time back The Lakmé Fashion week in Mumbai was covered by 512 accredited journalists. In that fashion week, models were displaying cotton garments, while the men and women who grew that cotton were killing themselves an hour’s flight from Mumbai in the Vidarbha region. Nobody told that story except one or two journalists locally.
If we switch on TV news, what do we see? Communal propaganda and petty politics which has sunk to a very low order, jingoism, war mongering, cricket, film stars, astrology, babas, etc. What has all this to do with the massive problems facing the people? Is this not really anti-people?
Many channels show cricket day in and day out. Cricket is really an opium of the Indian masses. The Roman Emperors used to say, “If you cannot give the people bread give them circuses”. This is precisely the approach of the Indian establishment, duly supported by our media. Keep the people involved in cricket so that they forget their social and economic plight.
For the Indian media, what is important is not poverty or unemployment or price rise or farmers suicides or lack of housing or healthcare or education. What is important to them is whether India will win the World Cup, or whether Virat Kohli or Rohit Sharma will score a century.
The Indian media hypes some cricket matches to such an extent (for example, the India-Pakistan match) that they become a veritable Mahabharat war!
Enormous space is given by our media to petty politics, film stars, babas, petty crimes, stock market, cricket, astrology, etc and very little to social sectors like poverty, child malnutrition, unemployment, price rise, health and education.
Most media correspondents attend political meetings, functions showing film stars, fashion parades, pop music, etc. and very few attend to the lives and problems of workers, farmers, teachers, students, small businessmen, sex workers, etc
So my message to Indian Express journalists is this : keep it up, you are justifying your salt ( i.e. your huge salaries ), and doing a great job for your masters. Kareena Kapoor’s eating schedule is obviously more important to you than the plight of thehundreds of millions of hungry Indian women. Shaabaash !
