I woke up this morning and was feeling lazy and unhappy for not being able to sleep more on a holiday. I picked up a Telugu daily and saw the front page expecting and looking at the obvious headlines with the pictures from the cremation ceremony of the demised Chief Minister Dr.Y.S. Rajshekar Reddy. It was not the number of people that attended the ceremony that shocked me but one more article that stated that 348 people died due to the shock caused by the death of YSR. More than 25 were suicides and the rest of them were heart attacks caused by pure shock. As i was reading the article I was wondering why so many people died due to the death of one person. Accepting that he was a great leader I was still wondering what created such a killing shock wave. The reason I could find reasonable was hype. The sensational hype created by the super hyped up telugu media. From the day he went missing, all news channels were broadcasting only one thing and the people saw only one thing. The CM IS MISSING. It was covered so much and created so much of tension that people were actually becoming hysteric. They were both hopeful and tense. And when it was confirmed finally after two days, that the chopper crashed and all of the people in the chopper died, people were just not able to digest the fact that he died. This initial blast killed many weak hearted people. If this was not enough they went on for one more day showing all the misery and even the family ritual of him being buried, which was supposed to be a private family affair. I could see my mom all vexed up and tired the evening he was confirmed to be died. It was due to the fact that she was watching TV all day. It is understood that it is not the mistake of the media that they are doing this to crave their own niche in this era where news channels are increasing at a dramatic pace. But this is one ill effect it shows on people which has been proved lots of times. Even when the Taj hotel in Mumbai was taken by terrorists. Its high time that the media stopped hyping every single incident to the state of tension just for the sake of TRP's. And is it not high time that the government put a lid on the alarming increase in the number of news channels? And the content they show itself doesn't look so healthy. This trend should change....
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