Bravo Lion
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2016
- Messages
- 291
- Reaction score
- -4
- Country
- Location
Pakistan is a great country; it must be. Otherwise it won't occupy our national mindspace the way it does. Our media won't go on and on about it for months, the government won't appear so desperate to raise it in every international forum and elicit a few words against it and our own people won't be at each other's throat over the way to look at the country. If there's a growing feeling that Pakistan is dividing India in ways certain but as yet not well-defined — the patriotic Indian versus the unpatriotic Indian is one of the fissures visible — it is not unfounded.
As our testosterone-fuelled television studio superheroes go about distributing certificates of patriotism to fellow Indians, political and social outfits of little consequence threaten our own thinking and creative people, neighbourhood thugs with or without an ideology discover a cause to harass others and the venomous troll army in the social media vents fury at Indians with a different view, Pakistan has reason to feel happy. It could not have divided India the way the local 'patriots' have.
That the Pakistan obsession in India has taken the psychopathic edge needs no overstating.
We have made Pakistan our equal, as great as us. One is still not sure what the television news is trying to achieve by 'exposing' Pakistan before the Indian viewers repeatedly.
Or is there something more, say some ulterior motive?
Ever since Pakistan started dominating the television discourse - that was quite long back - almost everything else has gone off the radar. The farmers, the poor, the tribal population, the jobless and all such groups that used to trouble the conscience of the nation have all but vanished from the media. They break into the news space by accident, through tragedies and great losses. It is as if someone wants to keep the country perennially distracted from them and everything uncomfortable by design.
It is curious indeed that the media, a huge section of it at least, and the government would think so much alike on important issues. The convergence of minds could be purely coincidental, but the combination of both has the potential to create artificial reality for all of us, something akin to a smokescreen where we come to accept the smoke as the reality, not what it conceals. This is what, historians would say, Nazis managed in Germany. The result was disastrous for the country. Terror and Kashmir are indeed important matters for us, but are they that important that we forget whatever else matters to the country and its people?
Our Pakistan obsession has started doing exactly that. When we make that country the single-point agenda of the nation.
Read full at: http://www.firstpost.com/india/indi...n-our-equal-by-obsessing-over-it-3059250.html
As our testosterone-fuelled television studio superheroes go about distributing certificates of patriotism to fellow Indians, political and social outfits of little consequence threaten our own thinking and creative people, neighbourhood thugs with or without an ideology discover a cause to harass others and the venomous troll army in the social media vents fury at Indians with a different view, Pakistan has reason to feel happy. It could not have divided India the way the local 'patriots' have.
That the Pakistan obsession in India has taken the psychopathic edge needs no overstating.
We have made Pakistan our equal, as great as us. One is still not sure what the television news is trying to achieve by 'exposing' Pakistan before the Indian viewers repeatedly.
Or is there something more, say some ulterior motive?
Ever since Pakistan started dominating the television discourse - that was quite long back - almost everything else has gone off the radar. The farmers, the poor, the tribal population, the jobless and all such groups that used to trouble the conscience of the nation have all but vanished from the media. They break into the news space by accident, through tragedies and great losses. It is as if someone wants to keep the country perennially distracted from them and everything uncomfortable by design.
It is curious indeed that the media, a huge section of it at least, and the government would think so much alike on important issues. The convergence of minds could be purely coincidental, but the combination of both has the potential to create artificial reality for all of us, something akin to a smokescreen where we come to accept the smoke as the reality, not what it conceals. This is what, historians would say, Nazis managed in Germany. The result was disastrous for the country. Terror and Kashmir are indeed important matters for us, but are they that important that we forget whatever else matters to the country and its people?
Our Pakistan obsession has started doing exactly that. When we make that country the single-point agenda of the nation.
Read full at: http://www.firstpost.com/india/indi...n-our-equal-by-obsessing-over-it-3059250.html
