THE FOGGED-UP MIRROR













“Bad news travels fast.
Good news takes the scenic route.”
Doug Larson

Interestingly, many young boys and girls tell me, that they love horror films, and, they like to watch them late in the night.

“Are you able to sleep after that?” I ask them.

“Very well,” they say.

One of my ‘nighttime problems’ is this: If I take any bad news to bed, I am not able to sleep. So, leave alone the horror films, I avoid watching the gory TV news and toxic debates at night… It leaves me disturbed. Another problem, in my case, is, that if a sudden phone call or something like that wakes me up from my sleep, I find it difficult to catch it back. So fragile my night ecosystem is!

Last night, a mild beep on my phone broke my sleep. It was around 12.45. A relative of mine, had just sent to me this video on the ‘shocking’ incident at Mumbai’s Sion hospital (Wrapped dead bodies were kept along a Covid patient's bed).

I had come across this news earlier in the day. But, not from this TV anchor… Here, he was, like most of his fellow-anchors did, was trying to hammer this ‘horror stuff’ into my hypersensitive skull so much – just showing that one single image over and over and over again, that I literally cursed myself for bothering to check what my relative had sent… “Why on earth you had to send it to me at this time?” I felt like calling her up and blasting. But then, I controlled me asking myself, “Why the hell did you check it out?”

Funny is this horror-news thing… Some, like my students and relative, can’t get sleep without it. And, someone like me, can’t get sleep with it!

Sometimes, this question pops up in my mind: “Do I need to know what happens in the world out there?” “Even if I need to, is it possible to know everything that happens in every nook and corner of the world?” “What if I don’t bother to get any news and simply say ‘No news is good news’”?

It seems it’s ‘Bad news is good news’ for everyone out there. Only when a man bites a dog, it will be called news… not when a dog bites a man. And, the news business is always like this: When, on an odd day, if an odd man happens to bite an odd dog, the news has to be even more amplified: ‘The Mankind bites a dog’!

Yes, just like the Sion hospital news - big, bad, shocking and breaking news!

Now listen to this journalist:





Karan Thapar’s interviews on ‘The Wire’ are sponsored by the ‘The Glenlivet’ whiskey. Even though I am a teetotaler, I simply love the song in this whiskey ad…






Yes, it’s better to amplify…
So, take a l’le trip with me, down this lane of memory,
So, let’s raise another glass, for the glorious past,
Yea, yea, for l’le that we know –
Good times come and go, but the best is yet to come!”

Hope, you raise your glasses, too…


GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: www.dreamstime.com

Videos: 1. Source unknown 2. The Glenlivet Books

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