I was born in 1985, yes Im not that old but I'm old enough to have been born in an era where the cusp divided the semi-tech age from the full blown tech age that was to follow. Seeing television in those days as a kid reminded me that we weren't very fussy about the programs. Doordarshan had a charm to it and we had no choice but to watch what they showed. News was shown for an hour or so per day - plain crisp news as it happened and nothing more, no analysis, dissection, heated debates, and exaggeration. Even the newspaper was something special - an hour a day devoted to reading articles written by ordinary people, citizen contributors and local news - again without any exaggeration and without an opinion of its own unlike the trash news of today written by overly creative editors who make so many typos their attempts fall flat in the face. This is the way I see it - the media/press of today is a combined effort to manipulate the public into believing their point of view is true. News must be told without opinion, only leaving the opinion to each person. Whenever I switch on the TV just to relax for a mere half hour and unwind all I see are either adverts that span 15 minutes out of every half hour, or the news where people can be seen barking over the stupidest of issues and just as a pretend skit. Im not interested in seeing adverts for such a long time, there was a time when ads spanned hardly 10 mins for every hour and again they have manipulated the public into accepting whatever is being shown.
There is an article I read about our human thought process, it can be easily made to believe anything subconsciously provided the message is constant and creative. For eg. a company makes this terrible product and posts an ad on the net with 3 pretty women and a tall man around it, this causes the first impression. Then their own employees pretend to be customers and pose as satsified customers in blogs/tv/press adverts. I know of an example where a tv ad was shot of a jolly Punjabi family expressing their satisfaction of a car (their surname was shown# but actually the mom in the ad used to be a neighbour and she wasn't even Punjabi and an unmarried independent woman known in showbiz. This ad was portrayed as a real life satisfied customer opinon. This forms the 2nd impact where the product futher percolates into our imagination and slowly but steadily we tend to believe anything on the tv/paper where I can give you many examples that it is nothing but largely rigged. A family friend of mine is a hot shot correspondent in a news channel today and I have heard how it works.
I could go on and on about this but I'll come to why I'm keeping off t.v and newspapers and net to a large extent today - I want my peace of mind. I dont want to flip a newspaper and read about properties helter skelter available at a great deal, or how automobiles are available at x% rate and y% downpayment. Even if people want to believe in such news they must read the fine print with a magnifying glass or else they will soon post a seething review in MS and lose a lot of their valuable time they could spend with family. Arguing on politics of a day to day nature hardly affects anyone but the public- they grow tense and stop focussing on what really matters while the rulers of this country along with their press cartel buddies laugh it up. There was a nice article in a magazine once written by freelance hippies that said the day we are born we are named, given a birth certificate, an identity, a passport, income tax number, a pension number etc. This signifies nothing but the system "owning" us, the system's method of flocking the sheep. Yes law & order, medical health, benefits are given and is vital to survive in modern society but we needn't listen to the day to day goings-on at all. We aren't in charge, they are and they give us an identity merely to map average income or distribute national debt among us and that is FINE so no amount of press squabbling should matter. They merely pinch our nerves. A Sanskrit term says Sa Vidyaye Vimuktaye #Its knowledge that liberates#. It never mentioned that knowledge is outside. It only refers to the knowledge within- much as this blog is my own personal opinion. I didn't like Steve Jobs or Apple either but I will mention one thing he said - Stay hungry #to learn# and stay foolish #to not follow that beaten path#.
