In the anniversary issue of Outlook, Vinod Mehta has written a piece about insensitivity of our media towards the issues of the underprivileged Indian. On one side the greedy middle-class riding high on high-paying jobs that have arisen out of the changes in economy in the last decade and on the other side the Amma, whose house was razed by Delhi Municipal Corporation and no paper writes about it.
Read the piece and you feel that Mehta, despite all his biases, is a concerned journalist and when he writes that the pink papers (financial papers like ET, FE) never write about this India (poor, rural) but keep going ga ga over the 8.9% growth rate, he has voiced the harsh truth about the Indian media scene.
Madhu Gurung in The Hindu writes about the discriminatory rules that does not put restrictions on the number of cars a person can purchase, but makes it damn difficult for a poor guy to buy a rickshaw. On 'congested' road, the municipal corporation simply decides to ban rickshaws without a second thought to anyone. Kya 'rozi roti' kamaana gunaah hai?
The Tehelka has done an excellent story 'Capital's Sealing Drive: Whose Delhi is it anyway? I congratulate Gautam Bhan, the reporter, for writing about MCD bbulldozers crushing houses and shanties at Yamuna Pushta but IT (information technology) park on the same riverbank is regularised WITH RETROSPECTIVE effect.
Kudos to the paper to expose the double standards. People are made homeless in the national capital and electronic/mainstream print media is blind to all. Yes the slum populace doesn't look good on television. They are not Page 3 people, smart enough to talk and argue in discussions and surely they don't give ads. But journalism is about truth. Else let us put an end to this farce and stop saying that you are practising journalism.
