Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Life n Times...

No, actually, if you were a regular reader of the Life n Times , it's not one of those. It's just a small sum up of how life is going on at this point.

Yesterday, while speaking to K , I suddenly felt a deep desire within myself to do some things I like, I love to do. One amongst them, being penning down my thoughts without pressing the backspace key. Be it fun, amusement, happiness, fear, grief, anger, or just that 'whatever' kind of emotion, I felt it could come across.

For now, I think the emotion would be happiness. I was thinking as to how this word has had different meanings for me all my life. When I was 4, it used to be a cadbary chocolate that my Grand Mom used to bring for me. When I was 9, it used to be that Best Student shield, that I felt I won with so much effort. When I was 17, it meant the admission to my desired Engg College. When I was 25, it meant that job that I so much so much wanted. But then, it struck me.

Probably, it looked so much big, when it was not with me. Same with things I could not get in life. Always thought that life would be just wonderful, if I had them. And then, I thought of the wonderful things I had got, sometimes unexpected, and that moment of happiness which was just so heavenly. Like that email from the Qualcomm HR informing me of my first ever internship. Like the look on Mom's face when she saw me after one and a half years ( in 2004, and in an hour, she was crying and telling me, you have matured now, I am so happy for you). Like that wonderful feeling you get when you remember your old days ( and nights) spent at Leavey library.

A wise person told me once, that Happiness is just a state of mind. I somehow agree to it, but cannot quite follow it with a lot of heart. Maybe, it's time for a change [Obama ishtyle]. But yes, due to a lot of events in my life, I started thinking that I need to live for today. For the moment. Each day. Every night, if I start counting all the things I did today for which I feel happy, ecstatic about, I find that sometimes I don't even find one. And maybe that's where the change needs to come. Hopefully it will :)

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Pakistan media reaction

I believe for a while there has been a discussion about the increasing role of the media in today's society, which came to light a lot more during the 26/11 attacks in Bombay. This article from Greatbong gives a good summary of things, and this is an old post about how the media doesn't seem to find even decent articles.

There could be criticisms for the media to be over-intrusive, using people's emotions to increase their TRP, and compromising security details during the blasts, but still it was just to a level where we could just 'criticize' them. Say that, 'Please don't do such a thing'.

Till, Priyendra sent me these videos yesterday. And you suddenly went, "Hello???" or, more succinctly " What the ....? "

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Watch the videos and you'll know what I am talking about.

I have always had a habit of reading non-fictional stuff, and read up history and try to figure out why and how is it different from the history we were taught. For example , a lot of good things that Mohammad Ali Jinnah did, were conveniently skipped in our textbooks, and so were the actions of Congress in a number of sensitive issues. I think it does make sense up to a certain extent that sometimes the news channels /history books will be a bit biased towards their country or in particular about their beliefs.

However, these videos, which according to me reflect some extremely irresponsible and without any kind of evidence supporting their claim, on National TV came as a big surprise to me. For whatever reason, I don't believe that journalists can't be this biased.