01. Creating a visionary

02. Elevating the nonentities

03. An attempt at garnering popular attention

04. The majestic prerogatives

05. Cost of creating a Mahatma

06. To kill a commercial product

07. Creating a panic

08. The means of the media

09. Gandhi and his forced perching

10. A seesaw scenario

11. A disastrous endeavour

Coming back to the computer geniuses of India, the fact is that computer studies do not require a brilliant and unique mind. However, the fact is that the computer and software businessmen in the US swindled their own countrymen and brought in an immensity of outsiders as cheap labourers. It was more or less achieved by some powerful lobbying and using the media. When speaking about Media, there is a few things to be mentioned, which are not usually taught to the students when they are made to contemplate about what composes media. It is generally and foolishly believed that it is media that protects the nation. The truth is that it is media that can powerfully fool the people. It is media that creates leaders and Mahatmas. What the media wants the people to believe, they can make them believe.

Creating a visionary

I am going to digress here to go into the ways and means of the media, and about my own experience with media. Many years ago, may be in the year around 1980, I started reading articles in some newspapers about a particular political leader. He was mentioned as a visionary, a grand leader, and so many things. However, later when I grew up and came to understand more about politics, I must say that he did not seem to be more grand than many of the other leaders who were also aspiring for people’s attention.

Then how did these articles, and random mention about his capacities in unconnected articles come? He was a short-statured man, who later became a powerful Central government minister, holding a very significant portfolio. Naturally there would be people working behind the scenes to induce media men in significant positions to write about him in a much focused manner. The whole procedure would be quite cunning and meticulously planned.

I did hear people who had never met him even once, claim that he is of such and such personal calibre and refinement.

There is this item to be mentioned in this regard. A very inconsequential one. A small-time political party district area leader was talking to me about their committee meeting and the various resolutions taken. He said he had to contact a particular person who had been an insignificant young man in his locality. However, now he was the local correspondent of one of the major regional newspapers published from Calicut.

He said that the details of the meeting and the various resolutions that had been taken should come in the next day newspaper. So, this man was very important for them. He was their vital link to get the item published. Now, what his words, said and unsaid ones, denoted was the tantalising fact that whatever they do, good or bad, great or small, gets a meaning only if the details get published in a news media. Otherwise it is as good as they had not done anything.

Apart from this input, it needs to be understood this political leader had a claw like hold on him. For, he could use the lower indicant words on him, which even if mentioned in a most soft manner does hold a powerful command code. The Nee addressing.

Elevating the nonentities

This holds good for almost every item in ‘India’ that had achieved fame and glory through media and textbook indoctrination. Including such non-entities like Gandhi, Nehru, Sonia and many others of the various other political affiliations. If there is no indoctrination on their behalf, there is actually nothing of quality that can be connected to them, in a natural course of manner.

However, in the case of the British rule, there is constant indoctrination all over India and in many other nations, that they were the bringers of evil and looters of national treasure. However, if the indoctrination is removed, the next natural content would be that one should imbibe the British traditions and legacies, including their language. Their contributions are there everywhere to be seen. In a neutral indoctrination or no indoctrination national mood, British contributions shall hold out.

An attempt at garnering popular attention

Now speaking about the power of media, there is this incident that comes to my mind. I was in Delhi in the year around 1999. We were subscribing both The Pioneer as well as another prominent newspaper. In Delhi, The Pioneer is not a powerful newspaper. It pulled on due to some committed stance of some loyal readers. One day, a very prominent full-front-page news appeared in The Pioneer. I literally couldn’t believe their daring. Maybe someone among the personnel over there thought that

The Pioneer could get a jump-ahead move by bringing out this extremely dangerous news. It was a very profound coverage about a particular God Man of South India, who had his spiritual headquarters near to Bangalore. The whole news was that this man was involved in various kinds of regular sexual escapades insides his ashram. That some of his erstwhile foreign based disciples had left him due to these issues.

The news was published in the national Capital. Actually it should have created a huge hue and cry. But nothing of the sort happened. No one even condemned the news reporting or commended it. In fact, the way the other media reacted was as if such a report had not come in a newspaper in the national headquarters. No regional or state newspaper carried the news or even mentioned it. As to The Pioneer itself, on the next day, there was not even a single word mention about the news coverage. Not even an apology. It was as if that particular day’s newspaper had not come out.

In a way, this was a very powerful instance of how news gets controlled powerfully. There is another side also to this incident. Actually, someone could have made a controversy based on this news. Even this did not happen. For, I was later to learn that controversies are really marketing techniques. Either to promote a product or to kill it.

In the next day’s Pioneer issue, there was not even a single mention about this news that had come the previous day. It was as if such a thing had not happened.

The majestic prerogatives

Media rulers have the prerogative to kill any commercial product or any individual who they do not like. It is easy to focus on the negative aspects, and promote that idea in the media. For instance, India is full of bureaucratic corruption. Another terrible reality about India is that there is a real trade in selling females for sex, who are kept in confinement in brothels, until they are so spoiled that they cannot come back to normal life. Yet, no Indian media dares to go in for sustain focus on these issue to the level that the individuals involved are made to change.

Everywhere one reads about the media being the corrective force that keep the nations from going into atrophy. However, what the media actually does at best is to bring focus on trivial, isolated incidences, and issues, and simply use such themes to promote readers attention on to their own media products. There is no consistency in their work. They attack and destroy individuals, who are at that moment passing through a bad time.

Cost of creating a Mahatma

However, if one is to go through the ways and manners of the media, one can very well see the streak of money being used to urge journalists and media moguls to promote a cause, a person or a movement.

For example, there was a very recent Delhi based Movement against corruption. Well, it was quite candidly clear that there was a huge, multi-million rupee/dollar marketing campaign behind the sudden popularity that such a program got nationwide publicity. Another item very clearly visible was that the members of this team did have erstwhile senior bureaucrats in it. They, when they had power, did nothing to come out in the open against bureaucratic corruption. When their salaries, perks and pension were raised to astronomical amounts, and they could get-off with another loot called Commutation of Pension, they had nothing to say against it.

I did see a very powerful article in a national newspaper about the great simplicity of the leader of this team and how he was a very simple man with no personal ambition. Well, to get such an article published will definitely cost millions/crores of dollars/rupees. Otherwise such an article with such a very powerful advertisement, in the guise of an innocent writing, will not see the light of day.

To kill a commercial product

Now, about the power to kill a product, I remember this incident. Once, suddenly oranges started pouring into the local wholesale fruits markets. I do not know what made this sudden avalanche of oranges. They had a very bright colour and looked slightly bigger than the usual oranges. Prices dropped like anything. It went dirt cheap. People started buying in dozens of kilos. There were people eating many oranges at a time. Since I had some experience in this field of business, I could understand that some marketing error had occurred.

Suddenly came a news in one newspaper that some people had suffered from diarrhoea after eating these oranges. There was no mention about the number of oranges these persons had gobbled. The newspaper correspondent went on with his mediocre studies to the extent of mentioning that these fruit did contain dangerous chemicals, which had given them the exotic colour and the slight bigness.

Well, I did not see any documentary evidence of whether the journalist had really access to any such information. Might be pure conjecture. However, it had its affect. No one wanted to buy the oranges. For, it was poison, that was the new information.

Actually I had bought the same. My family members had eaten it without any particular problem. However, it is true that we did eat only a few on each occasion.

In the state of Kerala, there was suddenly a huge media campaign against Coca Cola. It was very prominently written that this American company was deliberately poisoning the people here. A lot of statistical evidences were mentioned. Then came a laboratory report mentioning the percentage of poisons in it. However, the contention of the company that this poison was already there in the drinking waters available in the state was not given any prominent reporting. The company had said that it was spending a lot of expenditure for removing or neutralising these poisons in the water.

No newspaper came out with the lab test reports of various other soft drinks available in the Kerala shops, including soda. Now, the fact was that a huge percentage of the local people blatantly believed the indoctrination that Coca Cola Company was deliberately adding poison to weaken the ‘super’ intelligent people of Kerala.

It so happened that Varuna and I were in Cannanore town on a particular day. She wanted a soft drink. I gave her a choice of names, and quite incidentally she opted for Coca Cola. We went to a soft drinks shop manned by a woman. We asked for Coca Cola. The woman looked at us in sheer surprise. She said, ‘Don’t you read the newspapers? The American companies are putting poison to kill us all and you want to drink only that?’

A market vacuum was being created and I could see very concerted efforts to introduce some soft drinks made by some local mega businessmen to fill the artificially created void.

Creating a panic

I remember the total solar eclipse that occurred in late 1970s in South India. Kerala newspapers started writing a lot of information, to the effect that even to get touched by a ray of sunlight during that period could create grave problems including cancer, impotence and many other disasters. People went into a state of sheer panic. The state government proclaimed a holiday on that day, or for that period of time. The whole of Kerala roads had a very deserted looks. There was not even a policeman on the State Capital roads.

Possibly the miscreants also went into hiding from the sunlight. In many houses, the parents made their children hide under the cots. At that time I was living in another house of an unrelated person. I, though young, did not heed the words of caution and admonition that the others tried to force on me. I could simply see through the words of the Kerala newspapers, which were making claims without any particular basis. They even tried to outdo each other in the severity of the tone of the cautions. My personal issue was that my reading level was beyond the parameters of Kerala newspapers.

The means of the media

Now, at best, media are just business organisations with no more social commitment than any other commercial establishment. They try all techniques to improve their customer base through all type of gimmickry. They promote persons and issues to which they have some liking or who have paid them money.

Even in the case of The Pioneer newspaper reporting on the South Indian God man, the basic idea was to garner publicity and to bring public attention to their own newspaper. The other newspapers did not carry this news not because of the fear of being overtaken by The Pioneer, but by the restraining control someone in the government had on them. This powerful control centre was activated by the powerful command centre of the God man himself or of his headquarters.

Media business organisations generally use all type of gimmicks to bring their media to the fore. I remember a gimmick used by a Malayalam newspaper doing this in its bid to overtake another equally prominent newspaper in Kerala. The year must be late 60s. That newspaper suddenly came out with a news of a newly sighted animal, which was called in Malayalam as Eenampechi. I was a kid that time and do not know exactly what was the great sensation that they made out of this animal, which was actually not a rare animal. It was basically the animal called—————, an ant eater. I do remember that in the small population wherein Malayalam literacy was slowly entering, it was a big issue. They were not then aware of bigger issues, other than what was generally written in the newspapers about Gandhi and Nehru and others.

Gandhi and his forced perching

Everyone parroted the same thing about Gandhi. He was the great man who drove out the British. Actually, if one goes through people’s memory of those times which are now called the days of Indian Independence Movement, it is seen that it was not such a huge movement, as made out to be in the nationalistic history and textbooks.

On my mother’s side, her father was a participant of this movement. However to say that everyone was everyday fighting for independence would be an untruth. For, it was a movement that sparked for a few months in 1919, then in 1930s and then in 1942. All of them more or less just lasted for a few weeks or months. For, in all these things, what stood as a great irritation for everyone was the perching of Gandhi as a leader without a base inside the Congress executive. He had entered the movement using the technique of media coverage. However each time, the Congress started anything, he would backstab it the moment he got wind that he would be isolated from the major leadership.

It must have been quite a tedious time to outmanoeuvre each of the others, as everyone scrambled to occupy the top space of the national leadership and various lower grooves. Being second is a very dangerous thing, when another equal man goes up. For, indicant words are relative, and these words can insert a sharp wedge between the individuals. One feels quite discomfited and the other man feels quite cosy. In other words, one becomes an Avar or Adheham while the other man may become an Ayaal or even Avan. It is solid terror that propels each man to outmanoeuvre any other man, who he feels may go up the ladder.

People who followed Gandhi in many areas were the feudal quality persons who did not enjoy the prospects of the British giving a chance for the lower classes to learn English and improve. At the same time, there were the lower class persons who themselves exhibited their subservience and loyalty to these very persons who kept them below eternally. However, the British rule had made grave changes to the social setup, which could not be undone.

A seesaw scenario

Now we need to speak about Gandhi himself. There is nothing great in him, if one does not find anything inimical and dangerous in the British rule of India. However, if one were to find out that the British rule was a very dangerous and suppressive rule that made the majority people of India to go into mental and physical decay, then his contributions can be taken up for scrutiny and study.

However, the fact is that if taken from a neutral standpoint, without parroting the cheap words of nationalistic historians and self-deluded other nations’ including Britain’s historians, it would be quite difficult to find anything terrible about the British rule or about the British. If the British were such a terrible race and the Indians such a noble race of people, there would have been no ambition to run-off to England among the Indians. The fact is that almost everyone in India, if given an opportunity, will escape to the land ruled by the ‘terrible’ British.

A disastrous endeavour

The fact about the leaving of India by the British is not as mentioned in the histories. British Empire was dismantled by the Labour Party that came to power in Great Britain, in the aftermath of the World War 2. There are some versions of argument that Great Britain was forced to leave India, because it had become powerless to exert command over India.

This is all quite fake stories and more or less the products of writings with pecuniary intentions. It may be understood that even after the World War, British systems worked with wonderful efficiency all over the world. Even the transfer of power to the Indian and Pakistani leaders was done not with any sign of instable hurry. The only thing visible was that once the decision to give the landscape to the control of certain political leaders of the concerned places was made, the British government wanted to do it fast and remove themselves from the scene.

The political leaders were in a hurry to take over the command of so many fantastic organisations, like the Indian army, Police, Civil administration and much more. None of these had been their creations. All they could do with their mediocre mental content was to spoil each one of them, to levels of third rate incompetence.

There is this much discussed picture of Nehru crooning and drooling around Lady Mountbatten. The easiest theme is that he had seduced Lady Edwina Mountbatten and used her for fornication. The funny thing is that this story is more or less spread by Nehru’s own supporters. What is that supposed to mean? Well, the correct explanation is that when this story is mentioned, Nehru’s indicant word value expands exponentially. For, he had ‘fucked’ a British Lady!

However, see this from Wikipedia: The affair is denied by the Mountbatten family, although other liaisons during the couple’s open marriage have been admitted. Lord Mountbatten’s son-in-law and former naval aide-de-camp, Lord Brabourne, citing the extensive, preserved correspondence between his mother-in-law and Nehru, was quoted on 12 February 2003 in the Indian news periodical The Pioneer as saying, “Philip Ziegler and Janet Morgan [biographers, respectively, of Louis and of Edwina Mountbatten] are the only two people who have seen the letters apart from the two families, and neither of them thinks there was anything physical”.

There is also speculation on what Lord Mountbatten was thinking of when this drooling scene is being enacted just behind him. The common words are that he was looking away from this scene as he was not much interested in women. However, his real thought might be on the gigantic blunder that Clement Atlee and his group of idiots were doing. That of handing over all that Britain had created over the centuries, like the fantastic Imperial Civil Service, the British-Indian army, Navy and Air force, the British-Indian Railways, Postal Department, British-Indian Police and everything else to crass self-serving politicians of Delhi. There is a great stature difference in the offing. Nehru is being placed on top of these things, while he himself was standing on a platform that was simply vanishing.

Speaking about information that can add or subtract values from ones virtual indicant codes, the fact is that this story about Edwina and Nehru, even though mentioned as a weakness in Nehru’s life, is really aimed at enhancing his stature. At the same time, his misdemeanours in Sabarmathi Ashram as well as the ignominious information of what disease he is reputed to have died of, would not be mentioned at all. This item should be discussed in the background of the war he unleashed against China, using the British bequeathed Indian-army.

[In fact, once these Indian leaders sat on top of such fantastic British-created organisations, they literally went power mad. Nehru did go into a craze for intimidation on all the other competing sovereigns of this area with this army he had received on a silver platter. His daughter as well as his grandson was also masters in using this army in moods touching total power mania]. This disease is reputed to create mental disturbances, nearing what is clinically defined as madness, if it infects the brain.

The disjointed pieces of land that had been united by the British Empire were divided into three pieces to cater to the political ambitions of the newly emerged leaders. Their aim was that the British should leave at once and they should get their hands on the lovely setups. Many other separate nations like the Jammu & Kashmir, Travancore etc. were suddenly in a very baseless state. They were without any armed force to protect themselves.

It may be noted that at that time, Travancore had more population that New Zealand. The Indian and Pakistani leaders were in a mood to take up as much for themselves as possible. Intimidating letters were sent to such nations, to join the respective country or face military intervention. As per the terms of agreement with the British Monarchy, it was Britain’s duty to protect these small nations from external aggression. {The US is currently doing the same to a number of similar nations including miniscule middle-east nations and Japan}. However, in the new mindset, all this was quietly thrown to the wind by the Labour Party in power in Great Britain.

There was another group of people who were waiting with drooling mouths for the British departure. I am not sure why the British individuals were not given any statutory right of ownership over their properties in India, including houses and land. Many of the properties had to be abandoned to be taken over by various local entities who became fabulously rich overnight. There is no sense in claiming that such properties were stolen from India. For, there was enough and more land in India at that time.

Anyone could have built houses and made plantations. To say that only such things made by the English folks are the stolen ones and the other houses and plantations owned by the local rich are not stolen goods is some error of judgement. However, it was true that English properties were quite different in looks and aura. For they extruded the aura of an egalitarian language.