Monday, June 12, 2006

Controversy - Rakhi Sawant and Mika Singh

Everybody must have read about the controversy about Mika Singh's lip-locking incident with Rakhi Sawant at the former's birthday bash on Saturday night. Well, you couldn't have missed it as every news channel and every newspaper (on Monday) carried article about the same. Some national newspapers carried the story about this latest controversy on their front page.

For the uninitiated, Rakhi Sawant is famous for her raunchy item numbers and music videos and she has also acted in few movies like Chura Liya Hai Tumne and Main Hoon Naa. Mika Singh is Daler Mehendi's younger brother and also a pop star in his own right.

Last weekend’s incident just reminds me of the interview Aamir Khan did with Rajdeep Sardesai couple of weeks back on CNN-IBN (entitled "Citizen Khan") about Aamir Khan's controversial stand on the rehabilitation of the farmers in Gujarat.

During the interview, Aamir had stated that the media has this habit of blowing everything out of proportion and that's when Rajdeep shot back by saying that even the people from the film industry use the media as and when they want to promote their films. At that juncture, Aamir admitted that film actors do use the media as and when they want. However, he also said that media should act responsibly by not sensationalising even issues that are absolutely trivial as there are many more important national issues that need the media's attention.

Saturday night's episode was another case of sensationalism by the media over Rakhi Sawant and Mika Singh, both of whom have had no or negligeble contribution to the field of arts and entertainment. I am not even sure if this is a publicity gimmick. Surpsisingly, all the news channels carried this incident and one channel also did a live tele-conference call between Rakhi Sawant and Mika Singh.

I am not sure where will our media stop because personally, I found this very difficult to digest that this incident captured so much media attention, time, energy and money. Probably, one reason could be that there may be takers for these kind of news as well. If that is so, then it's really sad as to what our society has come to.

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