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Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
January 1, 2015
After 45 years in journalism I never cease to be amazed by the reader’s priorities. I write a couple of hundred words on a movie called PK and I get 50 comments, over 7,000 hits and a string of almost violent vituperative.
One guy even tells me I write badly he is so incensed. Such a display of hi voltage emotion. I was only commenting on the mediocrity of a film and the fact that it still triggered mob anger.
Compare the numbers.
I wrote a piece on air safety and I got 3 responses. Last week I wrote a scathing piece on peace in our times had gone to pieces and we are staring into the abyss and it is jet black and I received 15 hits.
A few days before that I wrote an insightful (or so I thought) article on the 27 trouble spots in the world and the child slave racket and the only person who wrote in said it was sad that over 30 million children were enslaved each year. That is a big story, much bigger than a movie.
Look, you liked PK knock yourself out, don’t go ape about it. Life has so many more major problems than being outraged because of a commercial venture. Syria. Terrorism. Iraq. Sudan. Corruption. Trafficking. Drugs. Ebola. Oh, Ebola. Carried a major item on it and not one reply.
But PK is the subject and you get this verbal drenching. Come on, let’s get our priorities straight. You have the time to get angered by a movie comment which was not even a review but you have no opinion any of the major compelling and frightening issues of our time. Even those that concern you like urban violence, social injustice, disease, exploitation, medical ransoms, education and the financial blackmail it entails but a movie, a damn silly movie and you come riding out like the light brigade. What a crazy world we live in.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
If my call is so important to them, why don’t they answer it for 22 minutes?
How come when I want to, but something specific online is the only item out of stock.
When I get into a queue or lane going fast, the moment I get in, it becomes the slowest and refuses to budge.
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