Think Media .

Over the past few days I have been thinking a lot about how the media is making us think . I am from India , one of the world's biggest democracies in function and now I stay in the US which is another one of the world's most successful democracies . We are believed to have the freedom of thought , speech etc and we believe that our opinion is our own and nobody can tell us what to do but it seems like we can be told what to do .

Recently saw one of bbc's documentaries about why US went to war in Iraq ? The reasons not withstanding what caught my eye the most in the documentary was that an entire nation of free thinking people could be convinced by a carefully planned publicity program that war was the way to go about it .

And then yest I went to the movie Sivaji . The movie sure had a story but who was bothered about that . All that mattered was the whoses and the washes ..(thats the sound that you get every time Rajnikanth moves a bone in his body ) . Here again the carefully planned publicity program made sure that the a movie which no where stands up to the cadre of good movie making ...is right now making crores in 120 countries all over the world .

Public opinion ...public's opinion or opinion which is potrayed to be coming from the public ...

well its for the media to decide and tell us so that it can be called our opinion ....

Imagine a dollar being credited to your tax refund account bcoz some bummer somewhere in the US wrote down the same SSN number as yours and decided to send one dollar to the US govt as his expression for solidarity with Bush !! Well whatever his reasons were that guy cost me 500 bucks coz the computer just bumped over my account as it could not figure out what to do with that one dollar and bingo I never got back my tax returns . Several days and a hour length of phone call later the guy at the IRS fixed up smthing which would I think enable me to get my hard earned money back ... I m still not sure though ...

Now that happens to one in a million people ..what are the chances that it would happen to me ..

Not until today though when I start my internship at Seagate . I come in all dressed up , raring to go and the lady tells me that my name is not in the system . My manager is not in town and the lady who can fix this is in california who doesn't come in until 2 hours later. Some forms which were to be sent by my manager to that lady never went thru ..rest all of the interns head happily to the orientation while I wait there ..1 hr down , 2 , 3 , 4 ,5 ...and I see the interns all heading back happily with the orientation goodies waving at me . I m still there stuck in the lobby .... Finally they figure out a way to get me in ..only to be followed by a cold reception by a computer which doesn't like me too much ..it refuses to install any of the softwares ...The guy helping me says ..." Well its almost like you were not meant to be here ..." ..aha ..thats wat an intern wants to hear on her first day at work !!!! ...

Well so now what are possibilities of all this happening to the same person ...Pretty less you would say ..

Well I dnt think so ..get talking to people and you realize that each one of them have had these chance games ( thats what I like calling them ) ..happening to them some time or the other ...and I guess this unpredictibility is what makes life so much fun ...
Even when we think we have planned out a lot of stuff in our life ..there is still a lot of unpredictibilty involved there . I some times wonder how different my life would have been if I had stayed back in India , or maybe chosen a different university or done a MBA as I originally planned . It would sure be fun to get back into a time machine ..take up the other choices and see what they result in ...!!!!