Times of India’s role, Chetan bhagat, Empowerment and Women

Times of  India’s role, Chetan bhagat, Empowerment and Women

There are colloquial expressions either single word/phrase /idiom in every langue which express experiences so well that you cannot translate it in other languages  as they are without giving detailed explanations or some circumlocution to bring out the full or complete meaning. One such expression is Tamil is as transliterated ‘vettu perungaya dabba’ meaning ‘empty asafetida box[usually in olden days it used to be in paper boxes unlike the present day plastic one]. It refers to a box which when you open and kept in a room will give you the same impressions in terms of smell/odor/flavor/stink whatever you wish to call it as but when you really approach to take the box presuming that it contains asafetida you will be surprised to find that it has not even a dust /particle of asafetida totally devoid any content that you were expecting.

Two things in the past week happened like that one is the much hyped but unpaid and unfixed [unlike NDTV Burka Dutt] interview of Rahul Gandhi with Arnab Goswami and yesterday Chetan Bhagat’s article in Times Of India about that interview. While trying to ridicule Rahul Gandhi, this did a mess as he did not have either enough humor, even copied references or did not have enough guts and ended up writing about women wherein he mostly meant or tried to mean feminism or feminist liberation and their empowerment. The beauty is he did not do any justice to the two issues nor propose anything to the two namely  empowerment and feminism in alphabetical order much less connect the two in any way . As I got a chance to read the Sunday central page very late at night I thought I would request Times Of India not to promote authors because of their brand or at least do not insult by publishing it in the same page where such good writings/columns like those of M.J.Akbar appears.

Let me add Chetanji, do some home work because  you are given the privilege of writing narrative and descriptive article, unlike the mundane news reporting, it is a privilege because you can evaluate, explain, opinionate, quote examples of rural women empowerment [ from Gujarath for which the whole media seems to have an in built bias] etc. So when you are given a detailed  atlas just do not show the oceans that too without names but  try to learn the names of countries and in this case  try to give some original opinions so that even if you do not have the qualities of asafetida at least act as a substitute and not be an ‘empty asafetida [paper] box’.

For your benefit some years back Times Of India itself carried a series of wonderful articles from experts, scholars, successful people from various fields like Mr. A.J.Abdul kalam, Wipro Chairman Mr.Aziz Premji, Biocon chairman Ms.Muzumdar etc on empowerment. I am equally worried about  Times of India’s standards?

Here are two links for your benefit on those two topics, on which I have with my little knowledge, attempted to write something. In fact the one on empowerment was my response to the articles on empowerment by TOI and another my response to some article of feminist rights in Youth Ki Awaaz’

1] http://contentwriteups.blogspot.in/2013/07/empowerment-review-and-reflection.html

2] http://contentwriteups.blogspot.in/2014/01/feminism-and-feminists.html

3] also see for good articles on Empowerment http://www.selfgrowth.com/empower_articles.html