Back To Bliss: A Journey To Zero by Santosh Jha (pdf e book reader TXT) 📕

Unfortunately, both for humanity and media; there is always a huge confusion about means and ends. Mayank remembered, a great writer had once said in one of his stories, ‘most people spend half their lives preparing for life...’. It was a real tragedy that even today, three fourth of humanity on earth spend their whole life fighting for survival. Of the rest of a quarter, majority waste their lives either stacking resources for good life or indulging in resourcefulness and abundance. The media has similar fate; either struggling for survival or indulging in insurance of abundance. Mayank was part of a media which had no issues of survival. His newspaper group was a large empire; the venture was sitting pretty on a profitability position and had a long secure future. Its marketing instincts and team were both perfectly geared up for any corporate struggle to keep notching up higher profitability benchmarks every year. The media in India anyway was having a good time as literacy and purchasing power were growing much higher than the population growth rate. The overall economy parameters were all in reasonably good health and there was no panic, some cautions apart. This, Mayank felt was the right time for media, especially his own newspaper to think of the purity and purpose.

He did not think changes were always risky. Even if it were, many media houses had enough resource to take the risks but they were not taking it because of lack of knowledge and not because of the reluctance to take risks. The content of all media needed to be reviewed in the light of the new purpose which a vast set of changes had brought forward. Most media leaderships and owners actually did not truly understand the changes that pervaded India and therefore he felt there were little initiatives taken in right direction.

The trouble, as he visualized, with most in media was truly representative of the average person’s psyche. People in general are mostly reactive to situations and not proactive and this was since ages. Civilizations that excelled depended on proactive thinking. The proactive thinking, which necessitates beforehand initiatives, involves risks. Proactiveness usually emerges when there is a calculated risk taking to attain an end which may not seem a probable reality in present but a highly possible yes in near or distant future. Reaction on the other hand creates initiatives mostly for handling current crisis to check damage to a contemporary position. Reaction is for retaining what is there but proactiveness is for attaining which should ideally be there.

Any big leap forward of humanity impacts every human life in some way or other. Nations, civil societies, families and individuals get affected but how and how much depends on lot of factors. Mayank had known, through his knowledge of history that all major developments in the world had three things in common. First, most of these developments were very good-intentioned and originated out of the long struggle or deep pain of humanity to make the world a better place to live. Second, it is a real curse that only a small group of people initiated actions over good ideas but they seldom penetrated and reached to the mass levels. Mayank being a man from media had learnt a hard lesson that all goodness started with a minority voice and needed support from all possible media to reach the masses to ascertain authentication from the majority. He regretted that most goodness in the past had either got a bad media or no media. The ‘no media’ was not as perilous as the ‘bad media’. He learnt the sad reality that in the long history of civilized nations and civil society, the media of their times failed to rise up to occasion and chiefly because the leaders of media were themselves very poorly knowledgeable and aware. The end result was low or unfocused people participation to support the goodness. The third and important thing was the natural corollary of the second. As the goodness could not assure involvement and participation of the majority, a small group of unscrupulous people very cleverly entered the scene as middlemen and usurped the benefits in connivance with the authorities entrusted with the task of delivery of the goodness. Here too, he felt, historically, media failed in its role to preempt and prevent such unwanted usurpation. Rather, in most cases, media and its leaders proved hand in glove with the pilferage mechanism and enjoyed undue heavens.

He realized the importance of two prerequisites for the success of any goodness that was initiated for general well-being of humanity. First and foremost was a very aware and proactive media and secondly, a well-oiled regulatory mechanism for fast and steady penetration and reach to the masses as well as the insurance that goodness reached in the right and avowed shape and size. Human ingenuity for pilferage was instinctive; it cannot be completely done away with. It has been said hundreds of years back by a wise man, ‘nobody can understand and check when a fish drinks water while swimming in water’. Self is an undeniable reality and selfishness is also very natural. It comes out of the genetically designed urge for self-preservation of any living cell. The nobility of human selfishness is however a social product. The fear or care for social approval and reprimand decides the intensity of inclination of selfishness to indulge in ingenuity of pilferage. The basic fear is the fear of majority and the only potent check on human ingenuity. Human beings are social creatures by nature and what they really dread is not hell or law of the land but complete isolation from the society. That is why; the only successful insurance for success of any goodness is the acceptance of majority. Corruption could not be successfully checked in most nations as our society in general not only approved of it, rather also encouraged it. We made the rich our icons eulogizing how he pilfered the whole system. Still, when the father of a bride goes for marrying his daughter to a suitable guy, the father of the groom proudly says, ‘my son is in government service…has orderlies to do all the work…has little work in office and most of the time he is at home…the salary you know is not much but has great scope for other income’. The father of the bride is too happy. Not for a single moment he thinks that he should not marry his daughter to a man who considers no work as a virtue and boasts of his illegal wealth making skills. The father of groom is anyway too proud to have such a son!

Mayank only wished, he could tell all these things to his Boss and he could really understand them so that he would allow his newspaper to become a potent and proactive vehicle of reaching the myriad face of socio-cultural evolution to the masses. He firmly believed that loads of scientific advancements had taken place and some very good-intentioned people were evolving a new thinking, based on holistic, assimilative and integrative wisdom of old and new for making the globe a peaceful and prosperous place to live for billions of people. But, he was sure human ingenuity had not spared the goodness of the new thinking trends and that is why he was very eager that it gets a proactive and good media to work on the archetypal thinking and attitudes of average and common people.

After much deliberation, Mayank decided against it. He repeated to himself, ‘all goodness has to be practical’. He understood; the owner would have neither the time nor the inclination to listen to things in details. Anyway, even if he would listen, at the end of it he would ask him, ‘so, what you expect me to do?’ He knew it well that the Boss, like all successful people considered thinking and analyzing as sheer wastage of time and energy. They believe in action and that’s why Mayank decided it would be appropriate if he simply told the Boss what action needed to be taken. It was up to his genius to devise an action plan that would contain remedies of all outstanding problems of media in general. He decided and zeroed on one thing that would have such linkages that it would touch the whole spectrum of issues. He picked up his laptop and started writing the mail to the Boss:

Dear Sir,

As I begin to tell you what changes I expect in the place I work, I am forewarned of the peril of the exercise. It is bound to have references of some senior people in our newspaper and the changes which I talk of may look like putting them in a position of disadvantage. At the very outset, I earnestly wish to say that my stand is purely professional, involving no personal biases as I believe, issues are more important than persons.

Media is a strangely specialized field of activity. The work process may not need specialized learning but the profession of media requires a special mindset, aptitude and attitude. It is believed that eligibility and qualification are two different things. In media today, especially in print media, there are more eligible people than the qualified one. Then, qualification and excellence are also two different notions. There are some professions in which only excellence is required as the very sensitivity of the job and responsibilities towards nation demands nothing short of excellence. Like Army.

Media is also a profession like Army. It needs special aptitude, a different propensity towards work. All people, who enjoy royalty and love their nation, cannot join Army. The Army has a very well-designed aptitude test mechanism to pick up the right people with mindsets and aptitude well inclined for a position in the Army. After that, it has a very tough and focused training module which ensures that not only eligible and qualified but excellent people join the ranks before they are part of the very important work of national security. Tragically enough, media has the worst recruitment process in the industry and that is why, media, especially print media has the worst human resource, highly ineligible, let alone qualified and excellent. Worse off, there is no training module in place of whatsoever nature, to ensure a semblance of sanity to the human resource management.

In our newspaper too, the biggest crisis is that of human resource. It would be improper of me to point out the grey areas in our team, especially in the editorial team. It is ideal for you to personally do the reality check. I would however like to register my sincere protest to the fact that in our newspaper, there are four eligibility criteria for recruitment – relatives, personal loyalty, political/bureaucratic connectivity and dubious antecedents. And all should come at a cheap rate. Naturally, it happens with active support of the department heads. So, we make a team of people who have nothing to do with content and media; all they care to do is keep the editor and other bosses in good humor by extending personal loyalty to them. The leaders are well served. Life is smooth.

The crisis however starts when owners demand quality. The hypocrisy is; owners want a newspaper for class people; those who have the money and means. The advertisers also want the same. But the team that most newspapers have is good enough to do only the press conferences and day’s events. They do not have the qualification or the training to produce quality content for class readership.

India is witnessing great many changes at different levels. It is brimming with potential for both smartness as well as