Yesterday the Goods and Services Tax bill was finally passed in the Lok Sabha, having first been mooted 12 years ago, and resulting from a colossal consensus-building operation mounted by the present government to bring all state Chief Ministers on common ground, as a prerequisite to getting the Bill passed.
Also yesterday, Salman Khan was found guilty of causing the death of one person 13 years ago by driving his vehicle, under the influence of alcohol and without a driving licence in his possession, over the victim. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison, but immediately received a hearing in the High Court which granted him two days’ bail.
Salman Khan is an actor with a huge fan following, but I doubt anyone really believed he was innocent as claimed by his lawyers. Most people are also aware of the unjustly dreadful fate of one of the main eye-witnesses in the case, Salman’s bodyguard and police constable Ravindra Patil who’d promptly reported to the police what he saw, and was made to suffer as retribution. There is hardly a detail of the case that most people don’t already know, yet news channels were frantically covering it minute-by-minute, a la the Mumbai terror attack of 2008.
The GST bill, which the government wants to implement 11 months from now, will have wide consequences but how many of us know even vaguely what they are and how good/bad they are for each of us? Do we know why economists are calling it the biggest tax reform since Independence? We vaguely know that businesses will benefit, and some part of that benefit will eventually pass to the customer. So…er… it is a good thing, but do we understand exactly how? Yet, is anyone asking these questions or providing easily understandable explanations? Plus, thanks to the habitual suspicion and incredulity the media has planted in our minds towards our own elected government, we even wonder if all this GST-hoopla is part of PM Modi’s marketing strategy!!
We are too used to discussing only safe topics, those that are easy to discuss and do not require us to apply our minds too much. This mental laziness is the main reason why the media are able to lead us like donkeys on a leash to wherever it’s convenient for them (and their paymasters) at the moment. It is why we unquestioningly lap up whatever is offered to us at the 9 ‘o clock news along with dinner. It is not as though we don’t mind our intelligence being insulted- it simply does not occur to us that our intelligence is being insulted!
If it did, we could be studying the GST more attentively, doing what-if analyses around possibilities to make it work to our advantage, and generating enough interest to put it on the headlines where it belongs, but hey, no one is spoon-feeding us that stuff! If the news channels are not covering it, it is probably not that important. Why should we rack our precious, little-worn brains over it then?
Thanks to our media, we are now trained to view all good things with incredulity rather than analytically, and dissect all bad things in morbid detail until there is no shock value left in it. The media have made vultures of us.
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