RAPE, SCAM & CAMERA!

SUNNY THOMAS

Mercifully, Om Prakash Chautala the former king of Haryana, did not suggest female feticide as a solution to gang rape. The pure logic that rape exists because women exist does not cross his mind!

In India, we have three classes of politicians: the anachronistic school, the professional school, and the die-hard ideologue school. Narendra Modi and L K Advani, for whom means are less important than the goals for which they are admired or hated, belong to the ideologue school.

Prime ministerial material Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, or Architect material P Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal belong to the professional class, who are qualified to lead a meritorious Cabinet of professionals to give India a new vision.    

Baba Ramdev, Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, who want to eliminate corruption from one party but maintains a dignified silence over corruption in other parties, represent the 19^th century blinkered vision of blatant partisanship. The newspapers of this period blacked out news about their political rivals but found themselves isolated in the end, the phase which Anna Hazare team found themselves in. Politicians of UP, Haryana and Bihar en masse belong to this group.    

A television anchor reporting scam has three options: treat scam as scam, treat scam as news, treat scam as truth (TRP). Most television channels gleefully treat scam as truth and turn the whole news hour into a scam mongering session. Scam is news but treated with circumspection (like reporting sex and crime) remains scam shorn of the respectability of news. Once the canons of professional Journalism are violated, broadcasting becomes voyeurism. 

  

For a scam-shy television viewer, much relief came from CNN-IBN’s anchor Sagarika Ghosh, whose cerebral approach turned a panel discussion into a lesson in contemporary history – the (de facto) first family has to learn to live with prying eyes and intrusion into their private lives.  Srinivasan Jain of NDTV (Profit) anchored a remarkable panel discussion with a unique sense of direction. Most panel discussions end up in a mayhem, which some anchors believe is the ultimate in debate, though the truth signals to the contrary.  

Both Sagarika Ghose  and Sreenivasan Jain started with the print media, which teaches the basics of Journalism, namely what is news. Some of the anchors who start straight on television master histrionics but know nothing about the fundamentals. Except that they are seen, they sound like announcers at airports and railway stations!  

Capitalism would have been history but for Barack Obama’s historic ($85 billion) bail out of the beleaguered American economy. State subsidy is the antithesis of capitalism and state intervention is the biggest sin against capitalism. Yet President Obama had to resort to it to prevent America becoming another Soviet Union. Bush the father and Bush the son could not catch the trophy of Osama bin Laden’s head, the symbolic enemy of America who symbolically chose to destroy the Twin Trade Tower.

Yet there is a conspiracy by the super rich to defeat Obama, who will not grant them tax concessions that Mit Romney will. If robbing the poor to help the rich is unethical, that suits the selfish interests of the super rich who are withholding investments that can generate jobs which will help Obama win. The whole world knows how Ronald Reagan won against President Jimmy Carter by having a secret deal with Iran to hold on to the American prisoners till the election is over to embarrass the incumbent. Capitalism breeds unmitigated self-interest, the same self-interest with which some greedy Realtor and unethical bankers in America created a global meltdown in which millions across the globe lost their jobs.  

Up for auction is capitalism in the November election, and at stake is the future of America as a Super Power. Another global meltdown, and you can write America off!