Tag: News

Social Media; Both Sides of Story.

How do you use social media?

I, too, am one of the many million who use social media for the purpose of connecting with people, reading news, listening to music and keeping abreast of what’s going on around the world.

I use it more for the purpose of knowing facts and fakes.

Social media provide me with both sides of a story. Sometimes multiple sides, perhaps. Much like how astronauts see the beauty of the Earth from the sky too far away, located in geostationary orbit. 

As a writer, I find that a boon.

The box that raised me up.

What experiences in life helped you grow the most?


There are plenty I can list out, but I owe it largely to the family I was born in.

My dad, mom, two brothers and a sister gave me a lot to learn. With our relatives living close by, we were a huge home-study.

(My brother-in-law, sisters-in-law and kids soon joined us in our studies and made our home almost a home-run university now).

We never missed an occasion to meet up. From celebrating the birth of babies to attending weddings, we were an entertainment ourselves. We traveled a lot to have a laugh. 

I have got a lot of friends. We studied and played a lot of time together. Cricket was our favorite game. 

My dad was an engineer and I have always looked to him for guidance. He never failed us.

He taught us good values and helped me get a good education in India. I am so proud. 

Carrying a cuppa in hand and reading news so early in the morning was how we started the day in the 80s.

The Hindu was our family newspaper. With the Oxford English Dictionary in one hand and the newspaper in the other, our breakfast couldn’t have been any richer, each day of the week.

Dad surprised us one day by bringing home a television. It was a B&W TV.

We were just left wondering, as there were not too many television shows, let alone television stations. I listened to the cricket commentary only on the radio when India won the World Cup, in 1983.

The box therefore remained mostly shut at home. So sad.

On the advice of colleagues in my dad’s office, we put up a tall Burj-Khalifa-dipole antenna (about 18ft tall) on the terrace of our home.

All that for a one-hour weekly show called ‘Road to Wembley’, beamed from Sri Lanka. We lived closer to Sri Lanka than India when it came to watching shows on TV.

The show was a Friday special, capsuling the English Premier League football matches. It was a rage those days. 

If the weather permitting, we (people in the South) were able to watch the show thanks to the tall new aluminum Burj-Khalifa on the terrace.

Evenings on Fridays soon became a ritual. We took showers, wore new clothes, visited places of worship, canceled the day’s appointments (if any) and got ready just in time for the transmission from Sri Lanka to start.

Half our family were sent up to the terrace to stand guard, roll the antenna, fine tune and try tapping whatever signal was available in the transmission, just in case.

Pat, came the reply soon when Delhi Doordarshan set up a station closer to our homes and started transmitting a one-hour UGC (University Grants Commission) educational program on TV. Seven days a week. 

But the show sadly ran to an empty audience. Nothing was as captivating as ‘Road to Wembley’, by Rupavahini.

Came the 90s, the landscape in the sky changed, forever. Star TV opened up shops in India and that revolutionized watching television in Indian homes. Good god!

I’m becoming a student of mass communication, choosing a career later on as a television journalist and now a consultant in the media was largely because of my dad and the box he bought in the 80s.

Call it the idiot-box (sorry for the language), but it gave me a career for a living. 

As the person I’m today, I owe a lot to my dad. And as a journalist I’ve become, I owe a lot to the box I grew up with.

Now, I miss them both.