Over the last 10 days, English dailies and many leading vernacular newspapers
in the country have been devoting columns after columns to pop star Michael
Jackson who recently passed away. About a fortnight ago, sarod maestro Ustad
Ali Akbar Khan passed away in the US, a country he had migrated to
some years ago. The Press here devoted just a few paragraphs to his demise.
Even a memorial meeting that was organised in New Delhi in his remembrance and attended
by several eminent artistes got desultory coverage. But on July 8, the same
newspapers were giving prime space to Michael Jackson's funeral.
The contrast truly brings out how we Indians have become culturally decadent.
By any standard the Ustad's stature as a musician was far greater than Jackson's. True, the American pop singer
made tonnes of money and his fans were spread all over the world. He died in
huge debt and the latest reports on his death say that he was literally living
on several different ‘pills', and that overdose might have been the cause of
his untimely demise. Yet, when one thinks about the obsessive media coverage
that Michael Jackson's death got as compared to the blink-and-miss variety
reporting that Ali Akbar's demise elicited, one is compelled to conclude that
our cultural values have slowly been eroded away.
For the last 15 days we have been reading a lot about Section 377 of the Indian
Penal Code that criminalises unnatural sex such as homosexuality and
bestiality. When the Delhi High Court gave its surprising verdict on this
section and dubbed it as unconstitutional, the usual bunch of ‘liberals' and
‘intellectuals' proclaimed ‘freedom'. But what was even more surprising is that
several newspapers encouraged them. What about the impact on society you ask.
The ‘liberals' couldn't care less. As in the case of Michael Jackson, they were
busy aping the West. They were not even bothered to consider the cancer that
such misplaced notions of liberalism had wrought on Western society in the form
of same sex ‘marriages', decline in marital bonds within heterosexual families,
increasing violence among children whose parents have changed partners several
times over, the spread of drug culture, etc.
A society that idolises Michael Jackson is highly superficial. Almost every
leading Western music band has thrown up idols who ended their lives
prematurely due to drug abuse. This fact has been revealed in their
biographies.
Over
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