Two million people in the next two years...
Thousands dead. Thousands infected.
Say hello to the next Kala bandar.
Be afraid; be very very afraid.
Everyday, you wake up, and get the feeling that if you want to live a happier life, you probably should not read the newspapers. Fears, both imagined and real are treated with the same excitement, that the idea of news gets cluttered. Is it a fear-porn which makes us feel safer with the troubles faced by our fellow humans? By knowing that seven died in a different city, are we consoling that our own city has had just one victim? Yes, my dissenters are already compiling their response speech. I will be called as a suffocator of free speech and a violator of the fourth estate. Maybe, but I do not care much for their opinions. So, what am I trying to say? That the media is creating un-truths as news? No; but I am convinced that the prioritization of news is aimed at creating a mass hysteria, keeping the people in a constant state of fear and making sure that there is only one direction towards salvation. Think of the past three years, and tell me, if one world-threatening situation was not replaced by the next... Taliban, SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Chicken Flu, Anthony Bordain Flu, Will Smith Flu... The list is rather impressive. We are not told the how of the disease. We are not informed about the do's and the don'ts. What we are reminded of constantly, are the reassurances of safety from the Central and the State governments, the allegations of negligence from the opposing parties, the sting operations from TV news channels which expose our incapacity to handle the situation. Oh, come on! Of course we are incapable of handling the situation. We have an irresponsible media which keeps a bodycount much similar to the way sporting-event scores are updated. Ultimately, only the urban population which watches an English TV news channel, gets half an idea of what they are up against. Suddenly the politics of who went to which country and the route of infection is more important than the message of PREVENTION, CURE and VACCINATION.
No, we do not need that. The more people die, the better TRP ratings.
I am not trying to slight the seriousness of the scenario. Many have fallen prey to this virus and we are told that unfortunately, many more will. But that does not mean we should be afraid to live our lives. In times of great adversity, has risen our greatest epics. A war is always followed by better human perspective. The Great War showed us our infinite capacity for hope, that we even started another. The plague of Black Death was followed by the Renaissance. The polio vaccine was invented years before the last child suffered from it. It does not matter. What matters is how you get up and keep going. The toughest of life's lessons has been expounded by Sylvester Stallone in an often made fun of movie, Rocky Balboa (yes, the sixth part!) where he tells his son, It does not matter how hard you can hit... It is about how hard you can get hit and still keep going forward. Never backing down, but getting up back on your feet and pushing the line. Stallone is right. Give us a while. We will push ourselves back on our feet and do that in style. If not for this attitude, we would not have survived a good forty thousand years, despite our hardier skinned cousins, the neandrathals and the brainier bunch of cousins, whose name I do not seem to remember. We are survivors. We are not the fastest, strongest or the highest... We are the fittest.
If you do not believe in this, shut yourself in your house and wait for doomsday. The others, hoot a cheers to life. Do not give up your inner strength, just because somebody has a statistic saying that there is a fifty seven percent chance that such a thing called inner strength is improbable. Keep walking. The dawn is near. A new day is around the corner.
No comments:
Post a Comment