Ironic!

Yes that is a monkey on a reporter’s head and no it didn’t get there by some freak accident. Believe it or not it was actually put there by none other than the bold and fearless journalist himself. Apparently the journalist, while working on his exceptional news report highlighting the tribulations faced by the monkey-trainers, actually came up with this unprecedented idea of PTC i.e. piece to camera (the part in news reports where reporter personally interacts with the audience).

You must be asking the most obvious of questions‘why in the world is he making an ass of himself on national television’. Let me take some time and answer that for you.

The PTC goes somewhat like and I quote “These people earn their bread and butter from these monkeys and it gets difficult for them if the monkeys don’t perform well” and what better than actually putting a monkey on one’s head to present the sensation of truly ‘being a  part of the story’ as it unfolds.

‘Being a part of the story’ is essentially the point most preached by the superiors basically designated to improve the ‘ratings’. Ofcourse they are in-charge of handling other petty things like ‘upholding the ethical and moral values’ and ‘ensuring the unbiased and disinclined information’ in news content, but hey, these trivial insignificant things can wait, can’t they? They sure can!

And what better than introducing the ‘human angle’ in the news stories? But ofcourse, the entire human drama prospect is not good enough presented ‘without masala’ and the credit of practically ‘being a part of the story’. So the coin-brain superiors make sure to eradicate the thin line drawn in the minds of journalists which helps them distinguish between ‘being sane’ and ‘making a colossal fool’ of themselves. Having done that, they further persuade them to become absolutely fearless of anything that even remotely resembles insult, embarrassment or humiliation and since the bosses have proved to be rather persuasive, the influenced journalists become capable of things beyond the realm of sanity and even common sense for that matter, as demonstrated by gentleman earlier.  

But the irony who most fail to observe here is rather sinister in nature. As strained the poor chimp might look, this bloke’s story is not completely dissimilar. They way I see it, this journalist is suffering from the same performance-dilemma experienced by the unfortunate primate. Only in his case, media owners are ones with the trainer’s stick, setting him loose on national television and driven by the fear of joblessness and tormented by performance-anxiety the poor fellow is doing as unprecedented feats as it is for a chimp to wear a hat.

Ironic, isn't it?