Mr Raghavendra Puthraya fwded us a thought-provoking e-mail, the content of which is purported to have been authored by no less a person than the President, Dr A P J Abdul Kalam. Accompanying note asks the e-mail recipient to forward the mail to friends, instead of feeding them with jokes and junk mail. I dont suppose the President would have put it quite that way. Anyway, the substance of the longish e-mail is worth sharing, in five takes.
Why is the media here so negative?
Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements?
We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them Why?
We are the first in milk production.
We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice.
Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self- driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in bad news, failures, and disasters. I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.
In India, we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.
Why are we so negative ?
Another question:
Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things?
We want foreign T.V s, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?.
Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance?
