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A Sympathy Card for Media – Exploited Leaders & their public lives

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By Riya Anna Kuruvilla

Tharoor, Clinton and Berlusconi.

Other than making national security decisions, holding cabinet meetings, reading intelligence reports, meeting high profile dignitaries and other world leaders, giving the go for important negotiations, and other riff raff, the head of government and other high posts have one very important, although a very latent function – Satiating public curiosity.

Be it their family life, their promiscuity, the assets they occur, the events they conduct, their childhood, or even their favourite colour – the public wants it all. At times I stop and think that the price they pay for fame and power and a position to achieve lofty ideals is quite disproportionate. Surely, having people paint you in a bad light (assuming you’re not ‘bad’, and even if), a light that may not even have proof or the facts right.

This unwanted exposition about everything personal in your life will have you wanting to give up a post you may have put in a significant amount of your sweat, blood and tears (and maybe even other nauseating bodily fluids) for. Then again, power is addictive and if you’re a visionary, then the pursuit of your vision even more so. Popular media representations tend to ‘capitalize’ on each and every little perceived fault, official or unofficial of these baited leaders. Someone trying to really not be biased must speak for this numerical minority. We cannot completely deny the popular media trying to make a profit out of the unfortunate events in these people’s lives.

Privacy is something seen as given up by these leaders for a greater, or on the other hand another selfish cause by a majority of us. David Archer in a piece on privacy defends the official capabilities of these leaders by a sound logic. Check out his book “Privacy, the Public Interest and a Prurient Public”. Their lives have been made very much a joke to the world, their dysfunctional personal relationships and the trying times in their lives a laughing stock to the world. Do they really deserve it? What about every other Tom Dick and Harry who do the same? Yes, as leaders they are more responsible, but what proof can establish the relation of their personal lives to our public ones?

They have am official accountability to us, not a personal one. Since I’m in a sympathetic mood, I’m going to take time and look at some of the better decisions and achievements that three political leaders (notorious in the news, past and present), which of course don’t make up for some of the unwise and wrong decisions they’ve made, but surely do not entail an ignorance by public memory of the ‘good’ they’ve done in their very experienced lives.

Our first place recipient of this painstakingly composed sympathy card is the one and only, Shashi Tharoor. The poor guy has it bad. Not only did his wife tweet about what possibly wasn’t an affair between him and Mehr Tarar, he lost the ‘love of his life’, his wife (in case you were wondering) Sunanda pushkar on the 17th of this month, to we don’t know what yet. This not only wounds him (understatement, sorry) on a personal familial front, but has ramifications for his till date very impressive career that could spell the very end of the same. According to India today, with the CPI-M in Kerala and other competition pointing fingers at him and going so far as requesting a criminal enquiry, will present the toughest obstacle yet to Tharoor as a party candidate. Tharoor served 30 years in the UN, the career which he began after completing his PhD at 22. Throughout his life, he has been a human rights activist and in 1997 became the Executive assistant to UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. He was India’s candidate for the UN secretary general, but lost to Ban Ki Moon.

He has had a series of political victories since the beginning of his career in India since 2009. He is a writer of great calibre and has produced a great number of works. Surely, none of this should be forgotten should he come to be proven guilty or otherwise in the light of all sorts of conspiracy theories and implications in regards to Pushkar’s death. If guilty, punishment by the state should be enough. Judgement by the public and the media is uncalled for, as we will never know enough about what happened and why exactly it happened. With a mix of politics and maybe even espionage and blackmail, and a dash of passion, we may never have a real and very accurate understanding of everything that transpired as is with secondary information. So let’s withhold judgement, yes? We don’t even have first-hand information.

This probably holds the same for our next two recipients, the Lewinsky-gate or Tailgate tainted Bill Clinton and the media-mogul turned Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The former can be lauded for a number of achievements during his presidency such as the signing of the Oslo accords and leading the nation into an economic boom, whereas the latter has had quite an unstable political career and the overwhelming negativity in the media, including his allegedly not so legal methods of earning the wealth he did through his various enterprises, plus his not so hidden sexual promiscuity (bunga-bunga parties testify to one aspect of this). Berlusconi is probably least deserving of this sympathy card; however the man must receive appreciation for the sheer determination through which he built his empire, rising from his humble beginnings.

We live in an age where the freedom to express is a powerful medium (especially through the social media) for the progress we make at an intellectual level. However, in-depth introspection and retrospection is an essential check to the freedom of expression, otherwise it’s chaos. It is the twitter battle between Pushkar and Tarar that all started it all for Tharoor, and the role of the media in the publicity of Tailgate and not so legal pursuits of Berlusconi is not even questioned. The media undoubtedly is a necessary and indispensable tool for progress and democracy, but being part of the ‘righteous’ media and the public, we sometimes forget to look in the mirror, which can prove dangerous (trust me, I’ve been there).

Maybe all of this is completely deserved by Tharoor, Clinton and Berlusconi.

We must however, never stop the questioning – aimed at them, but equally as important, at ourselves.

SOURCES: http://www.indobase.com/indians-abroad/shashi-tharoor.html http://www.emirates247.com/news/sunanda-pushkar-autopsy-sudden-unnatural-death-shashi-tharoor-at-cremation-2014-01-18-1.535087 http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/after-sunanda-pushkar-death-end-of-shashi-tharoor-career/1/338618.html http://www.biography.com/people/bill-clinton-9251236?page=3 http://www.biography.com/people/silvio-berlusconi-9209602

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