Bad Humour

The last post was a bad attempt at humour, which is why I steer clear of writing humour.
Now you know.
I wanted to use this post to highlight just how fortunate most journalists sitting in Delhi really are today. You can afford to be lazy, call and email your contacts and sit in the luxury of an air-conditioned office or travel in air-conditioned cars all the time. The media is relatively free, yes some might argue that we are beholden to corporate interests and would bend over backwards for our advertisers - even if they are lying twats like the Ponytail. But there are parts of this country - Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh come to mind where the media is caught in the crossfire of political interests. I'm no fan of Naxalism, but some of the means used by the government to combat the 'Red Terror' would make the Chinese seem humane.
But, from all that I have been reading, and I don't read anything about this in India's remarkably international-blind media (yesterday's Afghan attack aside) that reports on the madness that is taking place in Sri Lanka. Other than The Hindu, whose international focus is at the other extreme (an interview with Bashar Al-Assad on the front page a few weeks ago?) Indian papers and TV channels, even the mainstream ones have an extremely blinkered international opinion (the Hindi channel's India stops at the end of the cowbelt with Bombay being a distant enclave). The Indian government supports (and always has supported) some rather unpleasant regimes - Myanmar and Zimbabwe among them in its self interest - we want a permanent seat on the Security Council after all (the BCCI was loathe to lose a vote in the form of Zimbabwe, so...).
Anyway, coming to the point, the media has been under severe duress in Sri Lanka. There is not much someone can do sitting 2000kms away in New Delhi, but I can hyperlink. Visit the site, show your support, and if your publication or TV channel does look at the international scene beyond the PM's Hokkaido visit where he generally gets ignored and is told to reduce carbon emissions (lets shut off the generators that power the call centres - that would reduce our carbon profile who cares if the Americans crib) write about this sometime.