The Rahul Mahajan Case and Indian TV

P Sainath wrote in the Hindu on the most important small toe in the world because of the media coverage given to it with NDTV, Aaj Tak and other TVs providing reportage by the hour. Guess who it belonged to ! That is media for you. Over the last 24 hours , we have been reading and hearing about Mumbai floods (probably because the journos cant get to work!) when huge tracts of Assam and Bihar and Bengal get flooded and farm land gets eroded without any body giving a damn.

Shantanu:

Perhaps, you can write about that?

Kamla

I sure will

kamla:

My question is why is MSM devoting so much time on this case?

top ten?

10: don't have any other breaking news
9: the investigative journos are all underground
8: ibrahimbhai dawoodbhai chotarajanbhai are on pilgrimage
7: fresh batch of interns need to be occupied
6: the audience needs to be conditioned (a la pavlovioan rats)
5: the maid servant has run off with the kitchen helper's cell phone (hunh? yeah hunh is right!)
4: the start up tv journos showing middle finger to the established print journos
3: it is all a smokescreen for tarun tejpal's 'ball room dancing with vajpaee'
2: waiting for amitabh's retuirn visit to IC ward
1: kamla is bored stiff (ok will also concede maybe it is i who is......)

Its like if I don't cover, will the other guy get mileage while I am not on the scene?. Till next sensation sweeps the spotlight that way.

Shantanu: Looks like you did just that!

T: Great list! Thanks.

Mujhe laagta hai aapke paas bhi bahut time hai and you too are bored :-) With your creative flair you should be a great fit in David Letterman's show :-) Or, maybe SNL. By the way, the desi channels here have something similar on SNL :-) I just watched a spoof on MTV for Dhoom called Ghoom. THey title for the show is also fitting: Faltoo Movies :-)

Kmala

Rigta: Yep, you are soooo right. But, I still think there is room for improvement...why whip yourself in a frenzy?

Kamla

kamla
By the way, the desi channels here have something similar on SNL

thanks;)

which channels?...will try and catch an episode or two...don't have access to them all here

and then there is the M-factor

her definition of quality time means the remote in her hands:)

i do not find anything amiss with the rahul mahajan coverage. you look at it from all the ways and it comes out as a story worth dying for. firstly, it directly throws light on the hypocricy of a so-called moralistic party which dictates so much on what is indian culture and what is not. here was the son of a late party leader (a colorful politician himself with rumors of corruption and sleaze always buzzing around him, and who was after his murder being built up as the greatest modrenist-21st century leader after rajiv gandhi), on the verge of being appointed a general secretary in BJP, caught drinking champagne and snorting cocine (or heroine) in a 500-rupee note. that too on the eve of immersing his freshly dead father's ashes. a story cant get more sizzling than that. you know every political party has such embarassments screaming to come out, but bjp just pretends to be so-holier-than-thou that it becomes quite important to expose that how rotten it really is in its core. the scandal will also throw light on the wheeling-dealong of the late Mr. Pramod Mahajan. actually i do not want to be highly moralistic that why junior mahajn was having party when the senior one had died not many days back. but the thing is that bjp likes to be scream so much farcical bhartiyata when their own leaders are too 'cool', it becomes very important in exposing the difference between their morals and their own personal lives. I see nothing wrong with the excessive media coverage. Again, the combination of cocine, politics, death, conspiracy makes it too intresting a story. what makes me really smile to myself is the sight of rahul mahajan a few days back when he was invited to a lunch with bjp president rajnath singh. the guy was heard saying that though he has no particular intrest in politics, he will 'do his level best to achieve the dreams his father had for this country'. Perhaps the same night he must have had champagne and drugs while laughing over what a fool indian people are. My cheers for Rahul Mahajan coverage.

Mayank,

Why are you associating Rahul Mahajan with BJP. he has a right to do what he wants?

Still he is not appointed with BJP.

Get your facts straight and do not jump to the conclusions to blast BJP out at any given point of time.

Let me remind you something in your own words....

This a secular, free , democratic country. Do not target him like the way Aamir has been.., I mean how long will celebraties be targetted for everything they do. Cannot they be treated like a common man!!!! This is so unfair.

Why are you bothered when Rahul immersed the ashes of his father? This is a hindu tradition and you know nothing about it ..just like...it is unsecular when (quoting you) Narandrabhai starts the narmada project on an auspicious day acc to the hindu calendar , he is called a racist by you.

By the way,when is your next 'figment of imagination" wild post coming up? Do not forget to put a disclamier as always.:)

Mayank
Please do not compare late Prmod Mahajan to rajiv gandhi--who has been a shrude & selfish politician with his entire family , what with a backgound of the most shameful chapter of India ie the emergency - where for the greed of power innocents were subjected to cruelty , and bofors where he duped everyone.

Any gandhi member is nothing but a SADDISTIC human being where they have ruined India with episodes like emergency, bofors and the latest reservations---for the safety of their vote banks.

Spare Promod Mahajan.

I issue here is not Rahul Mahajan's life style , whether he was right to be doing drugs less than a month after his father's death , (should one do drugs any time at all ?) and all that but whether this is a worthy story for media attention. Why not cover the farmer suicides in AP and other places. We keep hearing about it all the time but how many hours has the TV devoted to covering their deaths and the reasons for it so that there cen be a informed discussion on that. Instead contradictory reports of Rahul's urine containe traces of cocaine or it did not eats up all the time.

I totallu agree with you Shantanu.
it is getting a bit toooo much with all the contradictions that some people with vested interests want to see him down.

No one bothers about the other realities, the media is also is very smart.

The truth...the bitter truth....is that our beloved Shining india is in the midst of a orgasmic overhaul. No body want to read about farmers. Their suicides. The communal divide that haunts Gujarat. The burnings of Dali women which is a regular phenomenon in our villages. The caste panchayats in western Uttar Pradesh. That India has been blinked off. Our media groups do cover issues randomly, when some editor gets too embarassed, but otherwise its one happy delightful fun cranival. When Medha Patkar was fasting, no one cared. But the entry of Aamir Khan did wonders. When Arundhati Roy attended a conference of the parents of disappeared people of Kashmir in Delhi last month, the Indian Express newspaper printed a close-focus picture of the beautiful Roy with a caption 'Arundhati Roy in the World Disappeared People Day' (please note: I dont remember the exact name of this day). There was no picture or mention of the parents. Ha ha ha ha. Welcome to our little delightful made-in-amreeka india!

Mr. Rahul Mahajan has full right for his personal life-style not to be confused with the sine theetas and cos theetas of the national politic. It is not our business what he does the night before he is set to immerse his father's ashes. Till he started showing signs of discovering hidden potential and possibilities in himself of 'completing the dreams of his late father' by joining BJP.

Of course, politicians in Congress and other parties too indulge in such wild life orgies, but I have never heard them lecturing us about morals. However BJP claims to be a nationalist political organization and is always in a rigid-pious, huff-and-puff tone regarding just what morals, the Hindu school of morals that is, should we unhappy people of this shining country ought to follow. BJP snugly has taken upon itself, along with its parent organization RSS, the heavy-duty task to determine what exactly constitute the true traditions of Indianism and Hinduism. It wants to have a final word on what defines the true bhartiyata. So its members should set the highest examples of personal living in public life. Happily, they do not. If cocaine-champagne scandal hadn't surfaced, Mr. Rahul Mahajan would have been made the General Secretary of the party this week. My only regret is that he was not made before the scandal. The irony would have been more delicious then.

Mayank Mayank

Why do you always evade the truth??

Tell me a single hindi movie that was banned during the BJP rule? never never.

Da Vinci code is still not opened in many states. Why? Coz congress wants to keep its christan voters happy. (therefore they do not have to lecture)

You say Aamir Khan did wonders ? Medha Patkar does not need an Amir Khan for a cause.
Where was Ammir khan when hindus are killed in Kasmir?
Where was Amir Khan when the Tsunami happened? Where was he when the wars took place and he never came fowrad to help?
Where was he when Sanjay Dutt was arrested & the entire film industry was supporting the Dutt and he was eventually let go from prison only by the help and power of BAL Thackery . Sunil Dutt himself had personally gone to thank BAL Thackery then.
It is no coincidence that Aamir Khan came forward with his so-called help post-RDB and pre-Fanna!!


You and your one-sided unsecular views?

Mayank you said"BJP snugly has taken upon itself, along with its parent organization RSS, the heavy-duty task to determine what exactly constitute the true traditions of Indianism and Hinduism."

Oh really......

Then how come there was never a reservation issue during the BJP power!! It was a truly shining India moment of 5 years.

Is marrying a white woman and passing reservations a true form of secularism and free country? Ha.
Oh we are so much secular that we voted for a white woman to e our PM and till date she runs the show and Singh is a mere puppet. Way to goooo....

Sam, Mayank, Santosh, Shantanu:

Thanks all for your insights, comments and take on this issue. It was very interesting to read the thread and see your train of thoughts on this subject.

The purpose of the post was to simply highlight why are mainstream TV channels devoting so much time to this one story? There are so many more other stories out there that need our attention. Maybe they can focus their time on doing a story about substance abuse and HIV/Aids epidemic in India? Shantanu has a bunch of suggestions.

Thanks all for reading the post.

Kamla

T:

The Indian channels are MTV, V Channel and IBN Live. You can check them online perhaps? I don't recollect the names of the people.

Kamla

Can someone tell me the birthdate of Rahul Mahajan?