randum ore thuval pakshikal..

Many newspapers and TV channels play on people's predictable emotional response and avid curiosity and sensationalize incidents to capture people's attention. We need to educate the young not to buy the ideas that the media sells without due discrimination and discernment.

Recently I heard a voice supposedly of Biju Radhakrishnan tell a TV interviewer that Saritha had stayed in the same hotel at Coimbatore where Minister Ganesh was also put up on the same date. The woman on the TV channel put it as "Ganesh and Saritha stayed together in a hotel at Coimbatore.' If I were Ganesh I would sue that woman and the channel for distorting information with malafide intent. The channels and papers need to be taught a lesson by the public by not subscribing to them.

That, in my opinion, is the responsible response of the viewer. That is how they can be hurt. We owe nothing to Ganesh or Saritha but we, the public, need to be respected as intelligent and normal citizens.

The sanctity of family life is targeted by many malayalam serials and shows some of which tries to sell the idea that an unwed mother is a heroine if she remains ignorant of the fact that her child is alive and marries another man hiding her past to save her father's reputation.

We all know which malayalam daily gives us a breakfast dose of rape or sex scandals every day.

When the State reels under epidemics and people are unable to walk around Thiruvananthapuram with its smelly garbage heaps, the media plays along with the political parties and draw the attention of the gullible public to Saritha's Sari and Shalu's Chalu acts, to dilute focus on basic issues and corruption of the administration that affect our lives.

What with Income Tax, Service Tax, Sales Tax, VAT, Education cess, Road Tax, Tolls, Luxury Tax and so on, 50 % of the income of a salaried person who is a honest tax payer is swallowed by the government which then wastes our hard earned money in paralysed assemblies, destroyed police vans, fake projects and project studies, half finished and abandoned projects, leviathans and white elephants as well as security, foreign tours, and conspicuous consumption. The media is supposed to benefit the people and work for them, but actually it tries to fool them. It is easy to fool people as no one has enough time to read or to think.

Salvation has only one path. Right training of the young, intellectually, spiritually and physically. Creating the right paradigm is important. The young must be trained to question before accepting and to accept only that which they come to know as true. The levels would surely change as one gets wiser, just as the same shoe would not fit you at every age.

Religion should not curtail man's right to think and analyse even before it accepts a mystery as such.

Susan Eapen
Thiruvananthapuram