Monday, May 02, 2011

Tere Bin Laden

I have wasted many idle evenings in surfing HBO, Star movies and the likes. Thankfully, I have finally discovered news channels are a lot more entertaining than the movie channels and reruns of Friends.

As the news hit the airwaves, at prime time almost all the English media channels in this country had an anchor who was yelling at the top of his voice at some unfortunate Pakistani journalist or researcher who had agreed to be on their show. The jingoist rhetorics without even a pretense of a question was fun to watch. For example, 'should Pakistan be declared as a terror state?' - was one question. The anchor had no interest in really hearing the answer unless it was a yes. His guests didn't oblige him and he didn't bother giving them airtime more than a minute. The cheers in NY or the 'We will hunt you down' posturing from American establishment wasn't particularly intellectual either. But then who really is expecting anything intellectual?

I missed the days when I had discovered the power of internet - my morning dose of newspaper in those days included the headlines from 'Dawn'. Interestingly today when I tried connecting to 'Dawn' it gave me a funny error and made me wait for some security check whatever that is.

The Gotcha blog restored my faith that there are still some people left who can look at a problem with balance and intelligence despite the overwhelming screams of the rest of the country in a different direction.

Another couple of hours spent in reading print media - likes of Guardian, Mother Jones etc. would be a good preemptive strike against any possible invasion to the mind.