Choosing our Heroes of Tomorrow

        It was one of those evenings when I called it a day at 8:20 PM. Given that so much had happened in India (the country where I am from) and United States (the country where I currently reside) in the past few hours, I needed some time to gather myself, to relax under dim lights with my phone set aside, to feel the silence on a cold evening, to take a step back, and ponder.

        I could draw numerous parallels between the Indian general elections of 2014 and the US presidential elections of 2016. The left leaning party held the highest office for 2 terms; through a leader (LLP - leader of the left party) who was a first from his race - a Sikh Dr. Manmohan Singh and a black Barack Obama. A weird case where people loved the LLP as an individual - a family man who was intelligent, highly qualified, and clean; a nice man who was merely incompetent as a premier. Yet, there was a strong vibe of anti-incumbency, because nothing seemed right about the state of the nation within and the looming threats from the outside. The left leaning party's current standard bearer was a woman (Sonia Gandhi and Hillary Clinton), whose husband was once the premier of the very same nation. This woman was looked as someone who had been in politics long enough to have known the game, the rules, and the cheats. The woman, sadly, was not destined to have her husband all by herself in her lifetime, for disparate reasons of course. The woman, sadly, was also accused to have had involvement in the biggest of the scandals in her nation.

        The right leaning party then brought a leader (LRP - leader of the right party) from nowhere, who went on to win the election. The LRP was hated by the mainstream media to begin with. The elevation of this LRP was not taken well by their own party allies - Nitish Kumar and co. for the NDA and the various Republicans for the GOP. Other party veterans too had had to be cajoled into endorsing the LRP, because that seemed to be the need of the hour. The political power centers dug as deep as they could to uncover facts and secrets about this LRP. There arose questions about the LRP's significant other. The media questioned and doubted - did the LRP really create something as awesome as he claims he did in the previous position he held? Or is he making it sound grandiose in his speeches just to gain some public eye? The media took pride in being able to obtain testimonials of individuals who claimed to have lost everything they owned and had because of the LRP's previous position and actions. As the weeks went passed, the media labelled the LRP as a human rights violator, a perpetrator and abettor of numerous ghastly crimes and as someone who managed to conceal the truth through his might!

        I realize that the parallels that I drew omit the uniqueness of all these personalities. I also realize that these individuals themselves are really really really different people. I only wish to highlight the sheer arrogance of the mainstream media and their modus operandi here. The three major world events in the last two years - Narendra Modi becoming the Indian Prime Minister, Britain's decision to vote leave, and The Donald becoming the POTUS-elect were predicted only and only contrarily to what actually eventuated (which curiously happened to be favoring the left in all three instances BTW) by the mainstream media. There are two possibilities here - either they genuinely did not know what the people felt, or they knew and were hence trying harder to condition the minds of their consumers by their own endeared delusions. Media should ideally be taking in what they saw as is, and ideally be distributing what they took in as was. If that is true, how could they have not known?

        Before I lose any of my readers here, let me put in a disclaimer - I do not wish to tangentially rant on about the insatiable desires of the media and their supposed reach that their arrogance finds genesis in. I also do not wish to discuss the dichotomy and righteousness of right and left - there are good and bad things about both. Today, I ponder upon how will we choose our heroes of tomorrow if this is what is the current state of how and what gets fed into our brains? Where will we get the realities from? What would we base and not base our decisions upon?

        Think about it. Two decades from now we will have candidates who would have had social media presence since they were fifteen or seven or soiling themselves. Imagine the kind of images, videos, and statements that we would uncover about them then, that they once had themselves willingly made public. Imagine the extent of micro-aggression that can be induced upon these candidates by ways of memes and trolls which are majority of the times half-truths and irritating manipulations. The targets of these memes and trolls are not limited to political figures. Imagine what we would discuss on public forums tomorrow about candidates if today is what is the nadir for many consumers to be able to take! The way I see it, I don't see it in any election interminably which won't make us choose that candidate which is the least of all the evils. The world moving ahead will only and only have evils as candidates / celebrities.

        Today the media, as we have now established, has leaned so far left that more than of propaganda, theirs seems to be a strategy of denial - a contagious disease so unrelenting that it obviously would take nothing but bitter to antidote, and reason alone would obviously not suffice. I look at them more as diseased and less as propagandists. And here is the catch - what will the mainstream media and the diseased, now that they are unveiled, do next to contaminate our minds and systematically condition us and preoccupy us?

         Brand managers and social media influencers, and NOT the mainstream media are our biggest threats going forward. The new challenge will come from both the troll makers supposedly leaning left and working for the left and the troll makers supposedly leaning right and working for the (pay attention here) left. There will be media persons and celebrities who will develop belated wisdom and try to keep themselves in good books with the new power centers like twitterati and the right. Beware of them! While the mainstream media and the mainstream supposed prime-time funny-men have lost relevance and have imploded in their own slander-propagation, there still are forces which will try to contaminate by their mere presence any new platform that most neutrals, truth-seekers, and rationals adopt and look up to.

        The future ain't what they said it would be!