Minutes before I started writing this post, thundering splashes of "Breaking News" sprayed across all Indian news channels. The Chief Minister and Home Minister of Maharashtra, the state where Mumbai is located, had both resigned. Funnily, the reasons for their resignation had less to do with accountability and more to do with their 'lack of sensitivity'. Let me explain.
A day after the siege ended, the Chief Minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, visited the scarred and devastated remains of the two hotels with his actor-son Ritesh Deshmukh and a Bollywood film-director Ram Gopal Varma. The media picked the term 'disaster tourism' and flayed the minister's insensitivity of such an act. "How dare he visit such a place in an official position with his son and friends?" asked angry citizens (and the media).
The sad truth is had it been a B-grade director instead of the realistic film-maker Mr. Varma, half of the media's antics wouldn't have erupted. Mr. Varma's own reputation of making films grounded in authenticity and realism made the media speculate that he was visiting the hotels with the intent of making a movie on it. When Mr. Varma replied via text message that he was only casually accompanying Mr. Ritesh Deshmukh and didn't even know the Chief Minister personally, none of the media channels did a backturn that their speculation was ill-founded. They rather went forward with the story that it was indeed very insensitive on the Minister's part as well as the film-maker's part to visit such a place at such a time.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
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