ANUSAT - Where is the news?

For those of us living outside India, the online newspapers are the one big connection providing contexts to prevailing situations; whether it is the election fever, terror attacks, cricket mania, or bollywood tidbits, the online news sites provide a strong dose of the desi sensibility to NRIs/expats. Part of the mandatory chore for many in the mornings is to browse the Indian news channels for the latest and greatest, movers and shakers for the day. This keeps us in touch with the perceived reality in India. Weekend gatherings are forums to exchange and share news collected over the week. Don't we feel good when offering opinions of our country (useless as it may be), feeling patriotic at times, disgusted at others, discussing the latest achievements, industrial, financial, technical? Yes, we do. No matter how far away, if you are a 1st generation Indian in a foreign country, you need a sense of persistent connection through tv, news and friends to belong. I want you to close your eyes and think about all news that you read about today. Then try to connect with those news items - a mental bond to establish a relation with those news items...what those mean to you and your family, how it affects your day, and how it affects your future. Did I ask for too much??? Does it surprise you that 75% of what you read puts your thinking into a 'I could care less about this' bin. The remaining news - 'Wow, that Sonam Kapoor does look stunning in Delhi 6. Papa Anil must be so proud.', or 'I want to kill that Sehwag guy for being so inconsistent', or 'Man, I can't understand how Mayavati is so popular..I would never vote for a person who cannot represent modern India in the western world'....eventually leading to a disconnect and lost interest from contributing to the real world. Did you realize that most, if not all, of the feel good factor comes from reading movie based news? Yup, that is the truth. Now ponder about this - when so many people work hard to accomplish their dreams and are happy when they go home to their families, why do we look (largely) to movies for a representation of today's Indian psyche. This is not to deny that movies have their place in our world and offer an escape from the daily grind, and of course, cinema is an art form. But for God's sake, can we please spend more time on the achievers, successes through struggles, motivating people to participate in the society? If people are made averse to contributing or believe that they cannot make a change, they really cannot. Isn't it amazing how much power the online news channels have, power that can be used very positively? Now re-ponder about how the media shapes what we think and how we think. Are they being true to their purpose? Opinions are created by news. Opinions mean prejudices, harmful or not. Indian news media feeds a lot of prejudices. Not in a clever, in-your-face, US kind of way. In US, people are well aware of "media craftiness" and the oft repeated bias, in fact, to the point that it has lost a measure of its meaning. No, I urge you to see what the Indian media is offering you. Ok, I do need to get to the point....ANUSAT.

What do you say when the stupendous accomplishment of an academic institution (yes, a non-IIT one!!!) is pretty much ignored. Whatever news comes of this is tucked away in a sub-sub-sub-section of your news paper many clicks deep that you would never venture to navigate. And it is drowned by the spy satellite that India built with Israel's help.

For those who understand the differences between schools in US and India, it is much easier to comprehend the magnitude of this exploit. The skills developed as part of this project will go a long way in more grand undertakings. Plus it is a significant boost for other schools to take on sizable projects. Shouldn't we be celebrating the fact that a bunch of university students built a working satellite that is orbiting the earth! I am proud of where our universities are going, albeit slowly. This is front page news. Not to belittle Oscar achievements by A.R. Rahman (he deserves them and more), but this news is really big for Indians. And it has received a fraction of the space and time. It may not be a global feat like the Oscar, but it should be the responsibility of Indian media houses to give it the dimension it deserves, place it in context, provide the glimmer of confidence in our education system, highlight the collaboration of the government, private businesses and our academia, spur students and schools to bigger and greater things. In another view, do we not deserve to know sufficiently about this? I am certain we that complain about the sorry state of affairs in Indian schools, will appreciate signs of progress such as this. We all agree that this is a small drop in the ocean of possibilities. It is only a 40kg micro-satellite...sigh! May be not much will come out of this. Notwithstanding funding, red-tape, corruption stifling projects in infancy, the coverage that this has received is deplorable. I am not convinced that this news needs to be sold through professional PR for it to appear at the amongst the important list for the day.

Of course, I am only picking this news item as an example. It sure seems like many may have come and gone without our knowledge. I stumbled upon this by chance and explored. Here are some of the search results on Google. Please read and revel in pride.

ISRO

The Times Of India

Google Search Results as of April 22, 2009