Ganguly and media

I am not able to understand the behavior of the Indian media. No-logic! No-commonsense! No-ground realities! .What’s the big deal if Ganguly is out of the team? According to me, every player goes thro’ difficult times and makes a come back. Players who don’t have that reinvention capability remain forgotten heroes. It should be taken with the right spirit and appreciate the game of cricket as it is. Unfortunately in India nothing is taken in a realistic sense. We seem to ‘over-hype’ anything about cricket and make players to move in the ‘pig-to-prince’ spectrum and derive pleasure out of it. We burn effigies of players and coaches when they are not playing well, and perform poojas and dances when they become match-winners. Our media faithfully adds fuel to the scenario by calling arm-chair-activists and conducting SMS polls.

The cricket is just a came and should be given proper priority. Because of the ‘undue’ priority, cricketers become celebrities and start making money in advertisements, brand endorsements etc. I am not against it but what is the value we give to other sports and sport personals? Games like hockey, athletics, soccer, kabaddi have already taken a complete back seat. Neither they get media coverage nor do people watch it on TV. Players who belong to these games hardly make a living out of it and some of them come from very very poor family. For example, Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan, (who won the silver medal in 2006 Asian games recently) is from a very poor family. Her parents are working in brick- kiln and she could hardly afford three times meal per day. She was in the media when she failed her ‘sex-test’ after which she is totally out of picture. According to her to her coach, P. Nagarajan, her upbringing in impoverished rural India, where she reportedly only started eating proper meals in 2004, may be a reason behind the test results. Why the media is not discussing anything about that? Why only cricket? Why only they get millions of money in sponsorship, whereas people like Santhi could hardly make a living out of her profession?

In my opinion, the Indian media is totally negative and covers less of reality. Ranging from mega-serials to cricket it focused only on tapping people’s emotions for making money.