COURAGE IS NOT ABSENCE OF FEAR

















Last night, when our paperwala came to collect the monthly subscription, a thought passed through my mind. “Shall I ask him not to drop the newspaper henceforth?” Trust me. For a second, this thought did pass through me!


What is this news-reading doing to my life? Am I being refined as a human being or am I being ‘poisoned’ and filled with prejudice?


Anyway, the newspaper will continue to come… At least, for the time being.


But, our TV - the 52”-Sony Bravia – has gone into a deep Coma ever since it was bought! I, at times, fail to understand our own compulsion to buy that idiot box. It’s over two decades now since we stopped watching TV. But, my wife and I are updated about what’s going on around us… Thanks to YouTube and news-feeds.


The more I think about it, the more I get convinced, that the worst damage we can self-induce to our own well-being is the Prime-time news and debates! We do not understand how damaging and toxic they are. In fact, that’s the last thing we all should be watching or listening just before we go off to sleep. Still, we all allow ourselves to be ruined by such poison!


Imagine what kind of values our little children imbibe watching those anchors scream, abuse and divide every night. Then, we wonder: Why are our children behaving so impatiently? Why are they not respecting another point of view? Why are they so biased and poisoned?


The news channels, their owners and anchors – yes, most of them have sold their souls. They do more harm to the society and our democracy than the terrorists and Naxals. They are the true traitors, anti-nationals and Urban Naxals!


Anybody who doesn’t allow me to ask questions to the people I elect to govern me – yes, he destroys my freedom, he destroys our democratic society!


News has become a blatant propaganda… the way it had become in the times Hitler’s Nazi and Soviet Union’s Communist regime ruled. But, we do not learn anything from history… We fail to see how we have allowed this to happen in our own society…


No wonder, despite the courses in Mass Media, we rarely hear, today, a young one desiring to become a ‘Journalist’!


The journalist is dead, Sir. If you think otherwise, you are simply fooling yourself. Honestly, you and I will never wish our kids to get into the kind of journalism we are witnessing today… What we are witnessing today is jingoism, propaganda… treason!


Thank God, everything is not lost… Every journalist has not sold his soul. NDTV’s Ravish Kumar is one of them. He symbolizes the true meaning of that revered phrase – ‘The Fourth Estate of Democracy’. Till such kind of journalism lasts in our society, the democracy will last. Young kids will, once again, aspire to be ‘Journalists’…


This Post is in honour of that recognition - The ‘Ramon Magsaysay Award- 2019’ bestowed upon Ravish Kumar a few days ago. He has won many such awards in our own country… The man has remained firmly on the ground, true to the journalistic values, which had fired his soul when he was a young kid.










“Courage is not absence of fear,” I have been pumping this thought into young minds for decades now, “It’s doing the seemingly impossible things despite fear… with a quaking heart.”


Thank you Ravish Kumar for testifying this thought.



GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: Ravish Kumar/Facebook

Videos: NDTV/The Wire

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