My NEET Experience: Wish Indian Media Had Covered It Like Rhea Chakraborty

Let’s not become too technical and generalise the term media. When I will be talking about the medium, then it would not be “the plural of the medium”. Instead, it would be the so-called journalists and most broadcast journalists.

Imagine an average middle-class house where the elder male of the family returns to home. The next thing they are going to do is to turn on the TV and that too news. Wait a minute! Does this also happen in your house?

So what happens when you turn on Hindi/English news channel? There are only a few things you get to see on TV news and some of them are:

• Noise
• Propaganda
• Hate Spread
• Vast Social Distancing From Being Neutral

Sadly, none of them isn’t what the media claims itself to be. When corona entered our country, we saw a non-stop 24/7  coverage on COVID-19 for months. Although it was very important to cover COVID-19, it would be wrong to say that there was nothing else important in the nation apart from COVID-19. After the sad demise of Sushant Singh Rajput, the media turned its head towards that matter and they attacked Rhea, Bollywood and every other person/institution coming in the as painted wolves.

When there was a dispute with China, they invited retired soldiers and they started discussing it so intensely that “Rajiv Pratap Rudi”, former union minister had to interrupt and say that there are enough experts in the touch of government and sensitive information regarding the geography and condition of Ladakh should not be discussed on the national TV.

My Experience With NEET Exam

Another big event happened in September 2020 in our country, of which I am a victim myself. It was regarding the conduction of JEE Mains and NEET exams. By the end of August and even in the starting of September, millions of tweets were coming daily in a request of postponing the exams. The media seemed to ignore this thing as if nothing happened. They pretended to cover it. By the way, if they had given it even 10% of the footage of what Rhea Chakraborty received, then we would have had no complaints.

Look at what one of the top journalists of Hindi media has got to say on this.

Let me tell you about my experience. I was a NEET applicant and I travelled around 85 KMs to reach my centre in Patna. Although I was lucky to have such a short distance. Many students had to travel more than 500 kms for the same. Nevertheless, my centre was Arcade Business College, Opposite to St. Karen’s School, Saguna More, Patna, Bihar.

Let me tell you a truth, I didn’t have a table/desk to write/encircle or simply keep my answer sheet. You read it right. I was made to sit upon a chair, that’s it.

And it would have been a luxury if the writing pad would have been intact to the chair. The writing pad was just kept there, it was broken. The whole exam I was struggling with Aadhar Card, a passport size photo, Admit Card and question paper in my lap and the writing pad kept slipping again and again so I had to use my lap for encircling the answer sheet too. I was encircling in a constant fear that my answer sheet might get torn while encircling.

And SOP, what is that? I was the only odd one out who went into the exam hall with mask and gloves.

The reason I narrated my tragedy wasn’t because I had to deviate from the topic or something else. It is to show you the hurry our government was in for the conduction of the exam. And the media remained numb throughout the course? It’s as if we people are invisible. Our voices are as unimportant as that of the nightingale singing in some urban area, nobody to listen or even care.

Do we people matter in the eyes of the media? Is our media behaving like the Big Brother of George Orwell’s 1984? And it’s US who make the democracy. It is US who are called anti-national for participating even in a digital protest.

Please think about this before you turn on TV news today because I am no one to certify them biased. I can just choose to ignore them the way they do us.

Featured images for representational purposes only.