Thumbs Down to Biased Reporting of WCF by ABP News

Yes, its over. The beautiful event that will go down in history as one of the biggest gatherings to celebrate love, peace, and diversity came to a graceful conclusion a week back.

But some people seem hell bent on doing mischief. Right from day one, ABP has been publishing false and negative news about World Culture Festival. The media house seemed to derive pleasure out of disparaging and discrediting what the whole world was praising.

From the headlines of today's interview with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, it seemed like finally things would be presented as they are. We would finally get to hear it all from the man so much in the midst of a controversy, and for what? For organising one of the biggest cultural events of the times - for making a wholehearted attempt to celebrate diversity & pray for world peace in a world torn by divisive forces. This was so much the need of the hour – this coming together in love and celebration.

But we were in for a surprise! A tone of sarcasm, of denial, and mockery ran through the interview published in The Telegraph Sunday edition. While the rest of the world hailed it as a beautiful event and were busy inviting him to host the event in their country, here was our media house taking great pains to portray everything about it in a negative light.

The interview quoted all the facts about the organisation, but in a tone that smack of suspiciousness. It couldn’t believe how can an organisation reach out to so many people? Do so many good things? Have all the world singing its praises? There must be something wrong!

Ok so with the facts and figures in front, it seems all is good with the organisation, so let’s just mock it all?

This is exactly the route ABP seems to have taken. With its back against the wall at not having found anything bad/negative about the organisation it chose to exaggerate certain things, which in the process sounded ridiculous and immature to say the least.

The mention of Gurudev having bouncers, living in a fortress, & having chained barriers are utter lies! It tried to portray an image of a formidable baba, when it is just on the contrary. If you question having regular security in the campus and having some sturdy volunteers by the side, God save you. You had to stoop so low to sensationalise the interview?

From my own experience, I have found that there has never been a person so approachable, and he in fact declines to have security people around him so that people get easy access to him. Where was your research?

And the mention of the youtube clip where Sri Sri is swaying to the tune of a bollywood number was juvenile to say the least. What does it prove?!

Presenting facts as it is is one thing and colouring it with your belief system is another. A newspaper is not the place to write a biased report Mr Avijit Chatterjee! You have a blog for that.

And just because you seem to be so ill informed, let me tell you, no, Sri Sri does not preach any religion. All he does is help people lead happier, healthier lives.
People from all religions flock to him. But somewhere maybe you ended up mixing it with hinduism and ofcourse, anything which even remotely hints of the religion has to be smacked. I bet if Dalai Lama or any other “non-hindu” leader would have done the event, there would have been no criticism.

Also, with a handful of BJP leaders attending it, the media house had to just see red.

Dear ABP, it is time we see things as they are. We can do away with your years of conditioning that all babas are frauds, that spirituality is bogus, that India cannot do anything good and spiritual leaders should just be somewhere in the forests meditating and not contributing actively to society.

Your article had all our facts and figures right. Just do away with the sarcasm, its passe. And learn to give credit where it is due. Else you lose credibility. Else people read you, and mutter how you are just going down the drain.

Dont forget that you cannot misuse your power. And yes, thanks to social media, you cannot fool us anymore. You cannot influence us anymore. We will form our own belief systems and opinions based on our own experiences.

As far as your writing is concerned, all of us give it the thumbs down. Many of our contacts who may not even be following Sri Sri have expressed their surprise at this immature coverage of the interview. But then going by the downward spiral of ABP in news quality, this is maybe one more shove down the drain?