“I’ll strip on national television, if India wins the world cup”, those were the obscene words from a juvenile aspiring model Poonam Pandey, when she was asked about her support for Indian cricket team. Naturally, the words grabbed many eyeballs, people were ambivalent about their opinions but certainly Poonam made sure that she got all the shutterbugs to push her career and even managed to signed some big modeling assignments.
This is how it works. Want to seek attention, just kindle the emotions of masses by your nitwitted remarks or raunchy comments and there you are, ‘in the headlines’, the next time you blink. From Bollywood to Hollywood, from Cricket to Golf, from Obama to Osama, everyone is doing the same but in their own chic.
For instance, you write a book but you are not a celebrated author and still want to sell a million copies worldwide. What will you do to promote it? Well, the easiest way is to elicit the people by driving your book into controversy. Either names it after some not so loved political figure (like Jaswant Singh named his book “Jinnah”) or lambast about some worthy and respected public figure (like Joseph Lelyveld did by calling Gandhi a homosexual in his book “Great Soul”). No doubt, the people will be furious at you or might even want to abduct and kill you but no matter what your business is done, million copies sold!!
We are living in an era of tech savvy generation. A generation where every 4 out of 5 are on Facebook. A generation which is slavish under peer pressure. Everyone wants to be recognized. And hence people try to indulge themselves into preposterous activities, to stand out of the crowd. Media act as a catalyst. They try to boost their TRP’s by showing them over and over again.
In a country like India, where literacy rate is only 74%, illiterate people often believe what they are shown and thus this increases the social responsibility of media manifolds. Media, instead of blandishing such publicity stunts, should try to curb them at the root level. Media should criticize these cheap publicity stunts because they have a profound impact on the adolescent minds of the country and can even lead them towards a bleak future.
We must understand that we are social animals and our actions do have an effect on our surrounding environment. We must not indulge ourselves into knave tactics to be in the limelight rather we must focus to gain prowess and excellence in our respective field, ethically.
Remember : “Success through controversies is only ephemeral”
