Our newspaper sucks

We have been ignoring this for a long time (because we simply have no other choice) but our newspaper, The Asian Age really sucks when it comes to acting “secular”. Not that it is a lousy newspaper — in fact I wouldn’t like to get any other newspaper at the moment. It’s just that it is highly biased. Take for instance the recent Salman Khan fiasco. It has been totally blocked out. There was a small news concerning the police recording Aishwarya Rai’s voice, but nothing about Salman Khan. This is, to put it mildly, blatantly absurd and biased. I hate to give such comments but this newspaper shamelessly sidelines anything that portrays the Muslims in bad light. This becomes more conspicuous when they highlight similar news from other religions. A few months ago for two consecutive days they kept publishing the photograph of a south Indian priest drinking blood of a live goat as a ritual. A few days earlier or later they published the photograph of a Muslim child carrying a lamb in his arms on the occasion of Bakrid — same thing shown with a totally different perspective because in both the incidents the animals a butchered barbarically in the name of religion.

Then, recently when two suicide bombers were nabbed in Delhi, for this newspaper the news was not of much importance. Whereas almost all the newspaper carried the news on their first pages, The Asian Age published the news in its city supplement, and that too in a single column, in the right corner. Let Togadia say something and it becomes a national presentiment for them.

News should be news; it should not be Hindu news or Muslim news or Christian news.

Even the columnists seem to be at a constant ideological war with either the RSS or the United States. There is always a reason (although they mildly oppose the actions as if performing a formality) for the terrorist acts, but the RSS activities are of the inexcusable type and totally abhorrent. Narender Modi becomes the Bad Indian (he totally deserves the title) but people like Osama etc., are the bi-products of faulted American foreign policies and hence do not incur verbal wraths the way others do. Terrorists interpret the Koran wrongly, but they are not beasts even if they lock up school children without giving them food, water or clothes.

Now that I’m on this subject, I am compelled to say that the Muslim community is quite shrewd (and they are always acting the victims of a transcontinental conspiracy against their faith). Whenever they are in majority they cannot look beyond the Shariat but the moment they are in minority they embrace secularism and cry for human rights. If you are in a Muslim country, you have to abide by their whimsical laws and customs. If they are in some other country, they want their customs and laws to be assigned special privileges, and if they don’t get those privileges they resort to terrorism — well, not always, but this is presented as a reason by the Muslim intellectuals. In the name of secularism they always want to have an upper hand. They don’t want to follow other faiths, but they want their faith to be followed. And this is not just limited to the lower classes. Most Muslim columnists of The Asian Age are perhaps highly educated and well-read (Oh! I can’t believe I’m talking like this!), still, they cannot come out of the wail of their Muslim ideology (again, I can’t believe I’m talking like this!).

Still, we are not going to change the newspaper because no matter how biased it seems, it still is perhaps the best newspaper available right now.