The media reflects our values

The media reflects our values

We wait for The New York Times to carry a story informing the world of this incredible advance that has been made in India, in a frontier area of research, and then copy it from the NYT. 

THE MEDIA REFLECTS OUR VALUES


V S SUNDER

A young Indian researcher (Manindra Agrawal) has worked with a couple of undergraduate students (Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena), and succeeded in cracking a problem of very long standing, which the best minds in the world have been unable to solve. (A line for the interested reader: they have constructed a `deterministic polynomial time algorithm¿ to determine whether a given integer is a prime number.) Having done so, this Professor Agrawal has the human decency to share the credit for this result equally with these students. I am confident, on the basis of my experience with the hierarchical attitudes and structure of our universities, that not too many professors in our universities would have exhibited integrity of this order.

It is interesting to see what our news media does when presented with what ought to be seen as a first-rate scoop:

(a) We see continuous coverage of a Commonwealth Sports event where, we are told, our athletes have won many medals - never mind that the best athletes of the world are not participating.

(b) We are asked to watch with bated breath while the authorities try to decide if one of our medal winners is guilty or innocent of taking performance-improving drugs at this event.

(c) We are made privy to the incredible suspense behind whether our politicians have been guilty for decades of giving licenses on the basis of heredity and other social connections.

(d) We wait for The New York Times to carry a story informing the world of this incredible advance that has been made in India, in a frontier area of research at the crossroads of theoretical computer science and number theory; and then on the next day, one of our national newspapers (The Hindu) re-prints that story from the New York Times.

I don¿t know why I get really angry and ashamed of our news media for not making a beeline to Kanpur and carrying interviews of these three stars on national television or the national newspapers. I should realise that this is an old tradition. We needed a G.H. Hardy to tell us that Srinivasa Ramanujan was a truly exceptional number theorist and one of our greatest national treasures of the time. We need Bill Gates and the crowd at Silicon Valley in the US to tell us that we have an extremely talented pool of computer scientists.

I hope somebody somewhere is paying a thought to just what values we want our children to look up to, and in what direction we are trying to focus their interests. Ask the man on the street if he wants his son to be a Laloo Prasad Yadav, or a Sanjay Dutt, or an Azharuddin, or a Manindra Agrawal; WHO?

Prof Sunder is a Professor of Mathematics at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. contact:sunder@imsc.ernet.in

Posted August 12, 2002