Market Journalism

Bombay Bomb Blast & Other Stories

By Manuwant Choudhary

Being a hack myself I usually prefer not to comment on my colleagues in the press and media but one truth is that I stepped aside from mainstream media when I found I couldn't stop the declining standards and the main excuse for all this is TRP and proximity of journalists to politicians and political parties.
If one gets the rating...journalists get cushy jobs, big shiny cars and airconditioned cabins - a big change from the early nineties when I set out to be a reporter.
I became a journalist because I love my country and while a student in Bombay, two incidents rocked this country - communal riots and the Bombay bomb blasts.
As a reporter with Bombay's Afternoon Despatch and Courier I got an opportunity to meet countless people involved in the riots and bomb blasts - ordinary people caught in an unending politics of hatred. Some genuinely involved in acts of terror, others just caught up in the mess indirectly because since they work for daily wages they can carry anything from flowers to RDX.
So when the judgements came I just watched like the rest of India but what the media showed us was not the full story but just Sanjay Dutt...
But todays Times of India was serious for a change when serious columnists who usually write in non-serious ways start writing seriously...like Bachi Karkaria's column "Sorry Sanju....this is not about you" "Instead of bombs and RDX the media reduced this whole thing to an unused gun."
And then Shobha De in Wake up India "China gobbled up Tibet..tomorrow it could gobble up our seven sisters..."
Wake up India...