Poverty makes it to Page 3

It looks like the Indian media is on an overdrive these days. The new avatar of the Gandhi scion on the floor of the house, mustered up all his Doon School honed debating skills to try and whip up a passionate ‘neta like’ speech under the guise of a R K Laxman’s common man. As we all know there can be no better head turning anecdote in a ‘neta’ speech than the one on the poorest of poor? He did exactly that.
He spoke of one Kalavati whom he met, a person living under abject poverty in a non-descript village in Maharashtra and linked her to the benefits of Nuclear Energy. He could have shown some respect for the privacy of this person by atleast using a fictitious name.
Barely had he mentioned this, our media friends were knocking at the doors (if there was one) of this poor lady’s house with OB vans et al and one prominent media even went to the extent of reporting that she had’nt eaten for 2 days. Where are we headed for… I wish the lady had shown some business sense and sold the rights to her story and pictures for a good sum and probably been out of poverty atleast for a few days. Never have I witnessed such blatant trespassing of privacy. Privacy is not a privilege for the poor I suppose.
Kalavati will be forgotten in a couple of days and will continue to remain in poverty, but how does it matter, the media had its moments and so did the ‘neta’.
But the irony was that poverty had attained a momentary celebrity status and catapulted to Page 3.