Reality Bites ?

Nice to see a journalist like Rajdeep Sardesai in sombre mood of introspection and his comments on his profession & colleagues in India http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/rajdeepsardesai/1/53198/pakistans-reality-bytes.html , but somehow it seems that this is yet another piece of fine advocacy of Pakistan & Pakistanis by you (this time Pak media being your darling) after 26/11. Let's discuss it threadware here :

1. The point that you have made here of mainstream Paki news channel scoring over Indian mainstream news channels, is a complete farce. I am following our mainstream English news channels almost without an escape and have found that the quality of debate that our main English news channels like Times Now (Arnab Goswami leading the lot), CNBC-TV18 (Karan Thapar-the most erudite and perhaps one of the finest media anchors in the world), NDTV 24x7(Barkha Dutt-"Kiran Bedi of India Media" & the suave Vikram Chandra with flawless accent) and Hindi channels like Zee News (Punya Prasoon Vajpai-a clone of SP), CNBC Awaaz (Sanjay Pugalia) had had on scores of contemporary & current affairs were treat to watch & listen. Sadly both CNN-IBN & its Hindi channel IBN7 are still legging way behind, understandably because of its anchors being in no comparison to the abovelisted mavericks (excluding of course you and your wife Sagarika). Infact far from being trivia driven, jingoistic and less enterprising than its Paki counterpart, mainstream Indian Television has by & large fared much better.

2. To swallow the prescription that the incumbent government in Pakistan has admitted it's non-state actors' "partial role" in 26/11 owing to the investigative journalism of Geo TV & Dawn newspaper, is as bitter as a Quinane pill. This is in tune with Indian political leadership's bagpiper tune of Pakistan wilting under its "diplomatic pressure" to make such a "brave" admission. As if, this hollow claim was not enough, you've now appeared with such a wonderful "investigative story". As if, people in India are fool enough and they can't just see this one simple truth of Barack Obama's "man on mission" Richard Holbrooke being in Islamabad right at the moment. As a testimony to this fact, Pak's Interior Minister Rehman Malik sweating (under air conditioner) before the international media while informing them about the connivance of its bad boys' in Mumbai massacre have been seen by millions of Indians. Now please, don't say that the AC was not working that day ! Ha !

3. If at all, Pak media can be credited, even slightly, with bringing out the truth of Ajmal Kasab being a Faridkot resident (when the whole world knew it), much belated corrective steps of scalping of then incompetent political honchos (Patils, Deshmukh etc) by the drowsy leadership in India can be attributed to Indian media as well.

4. If you are really damn serious about the superior quality of Pak's mainstream television over their Indian counterpart & really wanna form some kind of positive opinion about them in India, then please ask Mr. Hamid Mir (Geo TV) & Mr. Nazam Sethi (Dawn) to show only this much generosity of providing some slot/space in their media to at least people like you so that if not listening to what the majority of Indians have to say about Pak, they can have access to first hand view of an Indo-Pak Friendship ambassador.

I can really write a whole article here on this issue, but what's preventing me is the shortage of time and that too for an issue of much lesser priority-the ever impossible "Indo-Paki" friendship.

Regards,

-Rish