By Kulamarva Balakrishna
Vienna,Sunday,December 16,2007:Prof.Sree Sreenivasan,is looking
for an answer if odd stories of odd people appearing in the media in
the Western media a verdict is involved.I do not think so.Here the
definition of news =man biting a dog is news=is the key for
selection.Recently a German wife threw her =hisbend= out of
the king size bed to replace him by her pet dog!Miss Mayo´s
Mother India had a political role.But these odd stories appear
funny.Readers want also read things funny to make up the
monotony of drab readings of routine stories.Besides,large
countries like India,claiming on the basis of sheer numbers
without in real content are full of stories of superstitious
traditions like Aishvarya allegedly marrying a tree,a snake
etc,or an Uttar Pradesh State male Inspector General of Police
falling love with Puri gawd lord Jagannath to wear bangles
and sari on duty as in latest case in Karnataka village nuts,
throwing down one year to five year old children three meter
down from a temple top.These are absurdities of superstitious
human gullibilities.They make good copies.Nothing more to
it.But locally,media get a fever to pick up or cook up such
stories to further corrupt the half educated readership.
The tendency has no other significance.The Times of India
has a permanent head line:=The mad mad world!=
for such stories.In the classic press these are meat for
the =tit bit= magazine.
Prof.Sree Sreenivasan
From SAJAforum, the newsy SAJA blog - new desi stuff daily:
http://www.sajaforum.org
Here's a posting on SAJAforum by ARTHUR DUDNEY, a South
Asia scholar at Columbia. He examines a recent BBC story in
which a man in India was symbolically married to a dog and
asks a provocative question: "...when a Western media
organization reports on the odd happenings in parts of the
developing world, is there an implicit moral judgment?"
Read his piece below and post your comments at
http://www.sajaforum.org/2007
MEDIA: "Man Marries Dog" and
other strange tales from India
By Arthur Dudney
Serious news organizations often run stories that have no impact on world
affairs but merely showcase some of the zany things happening in far-flung
corners of the earth. It's fun to read about the man who was forced to marry a
goat in Sudan - a somewhat tragic story since his goat-wife apparently died
soon after when she choked on a piece of plastic - but when a Western media
organization reports on the odd happenings in parts of the developing world,
is there an implicit moral judgment?
India with its vast rural population is a source for many of these stories.
Recently the BBC ran an article entitled "Man 'marries' dog to beat curse.
" As promised, it celebrates the marriage of one P Selvakumar, (meaning
Mr. Handsome),33-year-old man, to a dog called Selvi (Ms.Beautiful) in
a village in Tamil Nadu.The marriage is meant to cure the groom of
paralysis,which he believed had resulted from his having killed a dog.
And lest we forget, the actress Aishwarya Rai allegedly married
(according to the belief in their matriarchal social system) a peepal
tree and a banana tree in order to keep the faults in her horoscope
from afflicting er human husband.Furious feminists brought a lawsuit
against Rai,claiming that tree-marriage is against the Indian
constitution and that by assenting to such a "primitive" practice,
Rai is holding back the cause of women's rights in India.
(These are simply funny but over blown by vested interests
the story should read on the web.kb)
(Katherin Mayo does not fit here.Hers was a political
mudslinging game with an eye of becoming famous).
(1857 episodes also do not go together with the context).
("Living facts of India today," are superstitions.Absurd behavior
of so called =yogis= and =gawdmen= that commenced with
=balyogi= and Vietnam Beat generation of Hippies).
I know some people in the diaspora who become apoplectic
when they read these stories because they think it makes
India as a whole look bad.(It is because they remaining
isolated in their new surroundings,feel home sick and
super sensitive unnecessarily to loose the sense of humor.
There are no reasons to suggest conspiracies. Orissa woman
marrying is a joke since a marriage involves conjugal rights,
the unprofessional reporters do not conclude their stories!
In South Asia, where the urban middle class is often so out
of touch with village life, there is an appetite for these
stories in English-medium newspapers,which are of course
a middle class institution as a second language with least
understanding of real =education=.kb)
(In the future, SAJAforum will post some views about
rural coverage in Indian newspapers.)
In defense of the BBC, they did run a story this month about
a man in Scotland who was arrested after stimulating sex with
a bicycle.However,unlike their reporting on the developing
world, the incident was turned into an opportunity to discuss
privacy laws in the UK.
Although "man marries dog" stories are meant to be shallow,
it seems to me that they could use a bit more context. That
is difficult given space constraints and the media's emphasis
on neutrality, which demands that reporters not "interpret"
the news, but we often need more context to understand a
strange event as part of someone's life experience and not
something that we can smugly mock. Perhaps for the same
reason, the editor of the local newspaper in Sudan that
originally ran the story of the goat marriage now regrets
that news of the event has traveled across the world.
What do YOU think? Talk back to Arthur and join the
conversation by posting your comments at
http://www.sajaforum.org/2007
See other postings in the SAJAforum MEDIA WATCH
category:
http://www.sajaforum.org/media
(end)
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