One of the saddest incidents in the life of Mother Teresa was her death on 5th September 1997.
One of the saddest incidents in the life of Mother Teresa was her death on 5th September 1997. While her passing was in itself a major cause of grief for the world, even worse was the fact that she died almost at the same time as Princess Diana, who passed away on 31 August 1997.
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Many a times, the media has, by its selection of stories, shown what we could call in Hindi as its 'asli jaat'. The international coverage for Diana was considerably greater than the amount of screen time given for Mother Teresa, a Nobel Laureate.
As an example of how the media went overboard with Diana, this site says, 'NBC Nightly News began with Diana and devoted nearly 13 minutes of a 22 minute show to her, her upcoming funeral and...squeezed in a profile of Mother Teresa by reporter Richard Roth that lasted just over two minutes.'
And if the recent Oscars are anything to go by, then it is clear that the media is just as biased as ever. We are all talking about how Slumdog Millionaire is such a great movie, and few are mentioning Pinki Sonkar, the true heroine of the Oscars from the Indian perspective. In its own way, the story of the transformation of a poor little girl with a cleft lip who was teased and humiliated by friends and later emerged with confidence thanks to a simple surgery is something that should inspire all of us.
And in case Slumdog Millionaire had not won any award, I'm sure that all of us would have hailed the success of Smile Pinki. But this was not to be, and a film truly deserving of coverage got the short end of the stick.
This is not to say that I'm criticising foreigners. There have been many who have tried to genuinely study India and understand its myriad intricacies. Two names come to mind Paul William Roberts, whose book Empire of the
Soul: Some Journeys in India offers a nice view of both the grandeur and the decadence of India across the 70s and the 90s, and The Greatness of Saturn: A Therapeutic Myth by Robert E Svoboda.
The reason why these books are interesting, nay, inspiring, is because the authors have tried hard to understand the country that is India. For instance, Svoboda is conversant in various Indian languages like Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and Sanskrit, while Roberts has studied Sanskrit at the Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi. And their knowledge of India is reflected in their works.
For example, when Svoboda describes the scene when Saturn approaches Vikramaditya, you can almost see it unravelling in front of your eyes. And when Roberts writes about India, he writes about diverse people like a penniless ex-prince as well as religious men like Satya Sai Baba and Ramana Maharshi. The squalor of India comes across, but so does the serenity because such people, unlike Boyle, are immersed in India.
As is Pinki.
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