Today:
Reality is that Maoist violence is declining in the state, they (Maoists) have done this to gain publicity: Jai Panda
This is such a recurring theme. Nuclear activists protest nuclear plants for publicity, people do strikes for publicity, protests are for publicity. Anything another party does is publicity (and vice versa) The government sees little intention in citizens beyond publicity.
And then you have the media. Anything Poonam Pandey does is for publicity (apparently it is impossible to want to strip out of enjoyment and people in bikinis on beaches are fools). Rakhi Sawant attends parliament for publicity. Bhanwari Devi choose to die for publicity (if we are to believe some of the slander).
And then you have the people who dislike other people. Arundhati Roy writes for publicity, heck my blog has been called a publicity exercise.
Apparently the people of India are all publicity hungry. That is all we care about. It is impossible for us to have genuine needs. It is impossible for us to raise our voices for something without having an ulterior motive, and that ulterior motive is…. you guessed it – publicity.
I see an important reason for this seemingly irrational perspective on the world. We do not want to see people as people. We do not want to look at their words from their perspective, so we assign a label of publicity, which discredits whatever they are saying or doing as a pretense. Another reason is that if we didn’t call it publicity, then it would be real, and our lack of any human response to it – even for really crucial things would become indefensible.
So, this accusation publicity is a kind of drape over our moral nudity in refusing to see people as humans and hiding the fact that we don’t see people as humans as well.
No wonder accusations of publicity have never ever been agreed by those accused of it. They are designed to distance and demean. Finding middle ground would also mean inconvenient further efforts to resolve the differences.
A thought.