Subir Ghosh's Blog, page 7
July 8, 2014
Leaving the people out of journalism
There are many reasons why journalists are such a scantly-respected lot today, compared to even what we were when I joined the profession 23 winters back. One being that journalism, increasingly so, has ceased to be about people. The decline, steeply – if I may insist, started in the 1990s when most journalists lost the plot, when the ‘demos’ part of the democracy began disappearing from news pegs. What has been lost in the bargain has been vibrancy, truth.
Spins imparted by journalists, apar...
June 15, 2014
Talk of rights and become the enemy of the State
In a milieu where bedlam and mutual suspicion hold discourse to ransom, it is difficult not only to find voices of sanity, it is as challenging to remain circumspect oneself. One invariably ends up believing not the truth, but what suits one’s own predilections and narratives. It is this unsettling milieu that reigns supreme in the country today, and in such a frenzied backdrop comes a shoddily-drafted document that unabashedly spins a conspiracy yarn so fantastic that one would gleefully ac...
Faultlines: Talk of rights and become the enemy of the State
In a milieu where bedlam and mutual suspicion hold discourse to ransom, it is difficult not only to find voices of sanity, it is as challenging to remain circumspect oneself. One invariably ends up believing not the truth, but what suits one’s own predilections and narratives. It is this unsettling milieu that reigns supreme in the country today, and in such a frenzied backdrop comes a shoddily-drafted document that unabashedly spins a conspiracy yarn so fantastic that one would gleefully ac...
June 13, 2014
Hospitals begin the social media treatment
At a time when an increasing number of decisions made by consumers are being based on recommendations that gush forth from social media, hospitals cannot remain untouched, or for that matter shy away.
Hospitals en masse are not really getting there as yet, but some have started taking small, furtive steps into a realm that where a hospital needs to take measured steps.
June 9, 2014
Up next: A clearance sale
It’s almost always a given that when development for the greater good of the greater number is unleashed on a nation, the first casualty is environment. Against the backdrop of this inconvenient truth, when a political party storms to power having canvassed on the plank of development, it is a cause for anxiety. This, in turn, needs to be seen in the light of the hapless condition that the Congress-led government left the country in. The economy is in a shambles, and the ecology has been ren...
June 5, 2014
Climate change at the movies is an inconvenient truth
Purportedly entertaining films that feature global warming and climate change can indeed affect public understanding. But films are often bound up in problematic and limiting identity politics, which commonly reiterate racial, gender and sexual stereotypes positioning as they do white men as being the decisionmakers and the voice of authority.
These are findings of Bridie McGreavy and Laura Lindenfeld of the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine, who analysed t...
June 2, 2014
Rains and glacier melt will ensure Ganga water flow till 2050
If there’s one hurdle that the proposed Ganga project will not run into, it will be water supply. Not till 2050, at least. And there’s going to be an abundance of it. The reasons, however, should be disconcerting — this will be on account of climate change.
A projected increase in precipitation and glacier melt due to climate change, in fact, will result in greater runoff from rivers in High Asia until at least 2050, a paper published online in Nature Climate Change has projected. This sugges...
