Its about Arnab Goswami

Love him or Hate him, you can't ignore him. Arnab Goswami has a mastered the art of creating sensation and playing to the gallery.

It is a fact that most people like to take sides to various issues and very few people actually understand nuanced discussions. He understands this fact very well and takes sides in each and every discussion he conducts. He loves to corner his panellists on issues he feels the majority will side with his views and arguments. He does not believe in nuanced and unbiased discussions even though the channel may claim to be so.

Arnab must have taken cue from Fox News, the US based news channel which even though takes up sides and puts up their own biased views on each and every issue, is a very successful and popular channel. This kind of reporting and conducting discussion/talk shows also happens in a lot of Hindi news channels and other vernacular language news channels. The only difference is that the English speaking, urban and 'elitist' Indian people who think of themselves as very intelligent and knowledgeable have not seen such behaviour in the other Indian English news channels.

The impact Arnab has created by his way of reporting can be seen in the way channels like Headlines Today (Rahul Kanwal) and 9X News conducts their prime time shows (telecast during the 9PM to 10PM time slots). They have started emulating Arnab. The only exceptions being NDTV and CNN IBN who have consciously tried to maintain a different or rather their original identities. But even these channels can be seen to telecast such discussion/talk shows with either their Editor-in-chief's (CNN-IBN’s Rajdeep Dardesai) or their top draw reporters/journalists (NDTV’s Barkha Dutt) during the same time slots as Arnab's Newshour.

Apart from that this field (journalism) has become very competitive with new channels coming up every now and then to cover the same news. They have to create their own identities and brands to grab more eyeballs and stay on top of the others. I believe we should at least congratulate Arnab Goswami that has become very successful in creating his own brand (an easy pointer would be one of the Flipkart ads where politicians are shown discussing the topic of online shopping in a talk show the host of which acts, talks and behaves the way Arnab does).

In the world of Media you can know if you are popular or not by the amount of discussion people are having about you. It does not matter whether they are discussing your merits or your demerits. Like they say there is no such thing called bad publicity, all publicity is good.

The DEEWAR effect

Remember the dialogue in the movie Deewar (the old one) said by Amitabh Bachchan when he is asked to sign some papers by his screen brother Shashi Kapoor. ‘Jao pehle us aadmi ka sign lekar aao jisne mere haath pe yeh likh diya tha ... uske baad mere bhai tum jis kagaz pe kahoge main uspe sign kar doonga’. 

Careful Everyone

Now it has become more dangerous in India to hurt someone's sentiment or feelings than hurting someone physically, stealing, killing, raping or looting public money. Hurting someone's feelings or sentiments can land you in jail and various penal codes slapped against you. The people who were hurt by our views may physically hurt us and our families, vandalize our properties and then go scot-free. 

Do not draw cartoons, do not write articles or books, do not comment, share or like anything that may give the slightest hint of opposing and criticizing ANYONE or ANYTHING (person, policy, religion, language, region, community, etc., etc., etc.). Do not express your views publicly or even personally. Never ever do it on social networking sites. Don’t do anything. Just be passive spectators and view the massive degrading spectacle (sic!) that is going on around you and become awed by it. You can become a part of it by actively supporting and participating in it but never ever oppose or criticize it.

Pardon me for being so vague and for not speaking about any recent or past incidents and not taking anyone’s name and stop here before someone feels that I have hurt their sentiments and I get mugged and arrested for it. Like or share this comment at your own risk. Whew…

So what do you think???