New York Times (June 3, 2012)
Newswallah: Long Reads Edition
By SRUTHI GOTTIPATI
Reuters
A magazine stand on a railway platform in Mumbai.
Open magazine takes a look at Pakistan’s “newly liberated” media and
reports that it is taking on India bashers.
“A new breeze is blowing over Pakistan – most Indians are unaware of
this because they cannot watch Pakistani TV channels – and it may well
be a sign of the road Pakistan might go down in future. It augurs well
for both countries,” writes the author of the article, Rajendra Bajpai.
Mr. Bajpai reports that educated and liberal commentators air their
views on Pakistan’s privately owned news channels. Pakistani media’s
“praise and admiration for India is almost embarrassing. It advocated
free flow of trade between India and Pakistan. Just a few years ago,
these thoughts would have been regarded as anti-Pakistani and deeply
subversive. But Pakistan’s media is now free. It is on a roll and it is
angry and rebellious,” he writes.
The story illustrates this point with some choice comments on Pakistani
television. (Only available in print).
Elsewhere, Tehelka finds that an unprecedented number of toddler deaths
in a hospital raise serious questions about health care in Kashmir. The
magazine reports that there have been around 380 crib deaths since
January this year at GB Pant Hospital, but an investigation has still
not established what caused the deaths on such a scale.
“While negligence by doctors has been cited as one of the main reasons,
the inadequate infrastructure at the GB Pant has also been highlighted
as a reason for crib deaths. The hospital has a sanctioned strength of
170 beds but the occupancy, on an average, remains upwards of 350-400
patients,” the magazine reports. “The hospital has just 62 doctors and
is woefully short of paramedics and support staff. Insofar as the
essential equipment is concerned, the hospital has only six
ventilators.”
Outlook magazine ran an issue devoted to film this week. Entitled
“Cinema Century: 100 years of the world’s most mesmerizing moviedom,”
the issue celebrates films in India.
“Colonized countries like ours borrowed the short story, the novel and
literary modernism itself from the West,” writes Mukul Kesavan, one of
the essayists in the magazine. “Pioneering Indian novelists used
historical romancers like Walter Scott as fictional models. But the
feature film as a fictional form is unique because it emerged at
exactly the same time in India as it did in Britain or America.”
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