Our Funarena!

It’s a case of wholesome insensitivity, amounting to zombie-like behavior on which subject we dwelt over much earlier, of nearly all of the so-called digitally conscious citizens of the country, but also nearly all the stakeholders including the national media irrespective of how you’d like to describe them. Apart from this looming post-modern characteristic, the other equally portentous factor of hypocrisy has also been rampant across, primarily, the television news channels and other stakeholders. For the last few years at least the insensitivity factor has been colossal: any kind of tragic incident happening in public places is always ravenously video-graphed along with the selfies of the ‘proud’ beholders and circulated instantly in their digital spaces, instead of trying to help the poor victims many of whom stay alive during such digital orgy. The news channels then get hold of those clips, in direct or indirect ways, and start building ‘stories’ around those while putting the c

You can call it ‘much ado about reading a newspaper’! Yes, indeed! This piece simply materializes out of my reading a local newspaper this morning. Since the experience was quite amusing, I find no harm sharing this with you. Well, as a backgrounder to the first item of amusement in regard to the ambiguities emanating from reading or misreading or misinterpreting English words and expressions I have to mention the new initiative taken by the West Bengal Government to ban the use of thin plastic from the 1 st of July 2022. As I roamed over the front page of the newspaper a small piece of news on the sidebar attracted my attention. Its heading says, ‘Plastic fine’! It intrigued me to no less extent. ‘What the heck! They want to ban it and now say the plastic is fine!’ I wondered to myself. I had to go through the full content of the item to make things clearer to myself. Whoa! I then discovered one more beauty of the English language where ‘fine’ also means ‘penalties’!   For the la

Notwithstanding the complications and the stakes involved in the Ukraine crisis it is just incredible that in an ultra-modern age where the globe becomes one community, international diplomacy should fail so miserably to prevent a war that could have grave multidimensional impact. Again and again, the lust for the superpower status and strategic presence cum military bases has been driving the US and Russia with or without China launch military assaults, occupations, invasions and wars since the era of the cold war ended. With the same aggressive intent and lust Russia has invaded Ukraine just hours ago. President Vladimir Putin calls it a military intervention or operation that has become inevitable after the nationalist ambitions of the Ukrainians and Ukraine’s drive to integrate itself with the European Union and the NATO have threatened Russia’s national security. Putin’s justification has extended to his chilling warning that should any other country interfere in its ‘necessary’ w

As the title suggests this piece on the raging Ukraine crisis can only be at a perceptive level, because the issue is too complicated with debatable cum controversial angles, and this writer is not much used to write on international politics and cannot authenticate fully the information available on the public domain. Why I have still chosen to write on this is that as a writer with a journalistic bent of mind I cannot escape from this crisis that knocks the doors of my country too. And those ‘perceptions’ I’ve developed are based on the media reports, an international media that is not united objectively, but visibly divided and biased over the crisis. There are primarily two points of view (POV): one is obviously the pro-US mainstream Western Media that has been blaming Russia squarely as the imperialist invader and spreading the idea of an imminent war across the globe; the second is the neutral or the alternative media that is trying to present the real scenario (as per their view

  Why should I go on writing? This question has been haunting me for quite some time, and this led to an unintentional break in the first week of this month when, in a very unprofessional way, I left the phrase ‘Budget Tomorrow!’ in my last post in January unexplored and unwritten! Well, I am a humble being and never daydreamed about becoming a great writer what they call ‘bestselling’ and all that. Indeed, I had written quite a few ‘solicited’ articles/papers in both English and Assamese newspapers/periodicals over the decades. However, I discovered that in such ‘ventures’ the merit part gets thrown out of the window and only influences/contacts/references matter. Therefore, I had not been a great success in that line. As a writer you send something to a publication in high spirit and hope, thinking that your item had some merit thanks to opinions of a few of your learned friends, for at least a response, but eventually when it sinks in a bottomless well with not even a rejection lett

Honestly, I knew absolutely nothing about an App called the ‘Sulli Deals’ which reportedly appeared in around middle of  the year 2021 and created, as I came know now, quite some thrills around our haplessly vulnerable country. My ignorance, blissfully, is perhaps because of my healthy contempt for most of the Apps, thanks to the simple reason that once you fall prey to an app the latter keeps on disturbing you with endless reminders for updates and messages about how to spread the ‘appeal’ of the app to your friends. For the last week almost all the news channels of the same country have been crying hoarse and shedding crocodile tears about another App called, very captivatingly, the Bulli Bai. Such was the din created by the channels with daily news headlines, visuals, debates and updates that I was forced to search for what it actually meant. And I found that what the concerned Apps, Bulli or Sulli, tried to do was heinous, targeting the prominent women of a minority community.  

Media-persons, including this writer, have the habit of prioritizing news stories/reports on the basis of how many people have died or are adversely affected, which is actually necessary to structure a news bulletin, always a tough job doing justice to the stories, selecting them and giving the prominence a story deserves. When a reporter comes in to the newsroom stating that an accident or any kind of such tragic happenings has occurred in which 2-4 people have died the news editor would just grimace it away and most often would ask it to be included in the scroll. If the fatalities are around 10 it normally gets into the bulletin as an important story, and when the toll is more than 15/20 then it becomes a headline news story. Well, this is unfortunate indeed; but in a hyperactive newsroom it becomes unavoidable. However, such stories are never taken as a good news story.   Deaths are always unfortunate whatever be the number, because for the person who succumbs in an accident or

A bombshell dropped by a tweet of the former India captain Mohammed Azharuddin that indicated a possible rift between Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma over the issue of split-captaincy which was lapped up fondly by a juicily speculative news and social media, aiming inevitably for a crescendoing climax at the most eagerly looked for press conference by the India Test captain Virat Kohli today in Mumbai finally ended with a cool and composed Kohli answering the questions candidly and bravely. To my knowledge he is the first captain of the Indian cricket team to have publicly questioned the functioning style of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) by implying clearly a lack of communication between the board and him or other players.   Virat said that the Chief Selector contacted him only one and half hours before informing him about their decision to sack him as the ODI (50-over one day international) captain in favor of Rohit Sharma to which Virat, as he had disclosed, resp

It seems, reasonably enough, that the outrage was waiting to happen. The growth of the Over-the-top media services platforms (OTT) that distribute video streaming over the internet, has been tremendous in the last eight years in India; in 2018 its market worth was more than INR 21.5 billion which has grown to INR 35 billion in 2019 and it is around INR 40 billion now. The market worth is expected to grow at the exponential rate of 45% to reach around INR 138 billion in 2023 and over 158 billion in 2024. The platforms enjoy a viewership of more than 1.7 billion subscribers currently which is likely to rise to a whopping 5 billion this year, making it the second-biggest OTT market after the US. Except for Reliance Entertainment’s launch of BigFix in 2008, the biggest of the 40-odd OTT platforms like SonyLIV, Disney-Hotstar, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Voot, JioCinema and Zee5 started operations in India during 2013-18.   Initially, the OTT platforms were streaming released feature films,

  The technical committee of BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council) has today suspended TRP (Television Rating Point) ratings for all English, Hindi and Regional news channels of India for 12 weeks or three months during which weekly ratings for individual news channels will not be published while the weekly ratings by language and state would continue. The period of suspension, as reports say, would be fully utilized by BARC to completely review and re-haul its sets of rules for calculating the TRP numbers, and thus would try to make the statistics of the biggest television rating agency of the world credible and trustworthy. Up to this point the rules were based on the viewing patterns of a sample of 40 thousand households or 180,000 viewers across the country through installation of people’s meter device in their TV sets, to determine the standards and patterns of nearly 200 million television viewing households or around 836 million viewers in India. President of the News Bro