Passionate About India

I am sure you all must be wondering what’s new or great about this – the entire world already is talking about it! Well, I promise I won’t write about Assange at all. Yet, I hope by the end of this article, you will realize what’s the big deal about this heading. After the overwhelming response to my previous to last editorial on media and lobbying, and combining it with my previous edit on democracy, I thought I should further my views – this time on media and democracy put together. When I had written elaborately on lobbying in my above mentioned editorial, I had only touched upon the perspective of the extent to which nations go to maintain their image. I had taken examples of how the History Channel, akin to slavish propagators of the capitalist dictate, distorted and promoted the image of the biggest global revolutionary icon, Che Guevara, as a global terrorist. I had also quoted how Michael Moore’s film Sicko was edited by an American channel and given a conclusion other than the

Arindam Chaudhuri Analyses Why BJP should not and cannot afford to give up the demand for a JPC Probe Rs. 1,76,000 crores and counting! The scam is the biggest in the country ever – or rather, the sum total of all the other scams (that have been exposed) put together, multiplied by two and more! If not a joint parliamentary committee probe now, then when? A great democracy is one with a thriving opposition. After the last elections, I had raised a question. Is this the end of the road for the BJP for long? It looked so. BJP was stuck on its Hindutva mantra, while the Congress promised youth, which looked progressive and could connect with the masses better! After all, the Hindus themselves are so coexistential that they don’t like any communal stress in their lives. But then, complacency is the mother of all failures. And failure is the mother of all successes! Congress did two big blunders. Firstly, in a haste to promote Rahul Gandhi as its future leader – and in its fear that charism

Last week I was very fortunate to be a part of this wonderful, moving and inspirational seminar on the ‘Power of One’ (coverage of the same is there after my editorial)! The speakers included Tarun Tejpal, who so very inspirationally spoke about the founding fathers of our nation, their vision and saga of sacrifices. Indeed, hearing Tarun speak is always a pleasure, just as much as seeing him – a real life hero of public interest journalism in India – always is! His words had the power of making me forget for a while that the same Nehru, whose birthday is ironically celebrated as Children’s Day in India, founded an India where today, seven times more kids suffer from malnutrition than they do in China – something Tarun himself quoted. He spoke of how we shouldn’t forget where India resides – in the villages. And the onus was on us to fight for the right cause. He spoke of things that at least we never forget at The Sunday Indian. There was Neelem Katara who spoke next in the most movin

Arindam Chaudhuri argues why the Radia tapes prove nothing and why Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi remain two of India’s best journalists When Barack Obama was running for the US presidency, the common joke in America was that win or lose, Obama was sure to get a job with MSNBC! And when he won, the joke was that “all the channels declared Barack Obama as the US President at 11 in the night; MSNBC declared him the winner six months back.” That’s representative of how blatantly MSNBC had lobbied to make Obama the US President. And every media house with an ideology and conviction does so. Yes, that’s the job of media houses and of journalists with character, ideology and convictions. Wake up to reality, my friends! In UK and USA elections, newspapers rally behind individual parties till the very end – openly. And it’s not because the party owns the media house. During the very next elections, the media houses could support the opposition. That’s how it is in all true democracies where media