When I was working in a software development company, while appraising team memebers, we were alerted to the so called “recency” effect, by which we are likely to give more weightage to more recent deeds of employees, while we’re actually expected to evaluate their contribution throughout the appraisal period. A similar effect can be seen in the case of elections – a drought in the months leading up to an election can give rise to intense anti-incumbency sentiments. People easily forget that the government may have performed extremely well in the 4.5 years before the drought (even if we overlook the fact that the drought is not something that the Government brought on the state), and vent their frustration by voting for a change. This is also partly due to how sensation-hungry media try to make the most news out of any new incident and in the process build up a general perception that this particular incident marks a turning point in our evolution.

Anna Hazare gave the media enough gun powder with his “Sathyagraha” and at that time netizens rallied behind him, boldly declaring that this is the most important issue at hand. Come Olympics, all attention is focussed on India’s dismal performance and how we should better our prospects going forward. Not many people worried about corruption any more, till the time Arvind Kejriwal monopolized media space again with his exposes. At a time when there are not many objects of righteous indignation, Taliban comes to the rescue by shooting a girl who publicly opposed them. For the next few days, the world closely follows the developments in her condition, till the time she’s out of danger when they lose all interest in the matter. Come Gujarat elections, the ghost of 2002 riots is resurrected, and many journalists have a good time trying to tell peope how evil Modi is. Of course, this time there’s the other side of the story that was also voiced by many. In between there was some “honour” killing, which became a very important issue that had to be solved by making posts on facebook and twitter. And yes, there were a few others such as the death of a “nationalist” and much ado that followed.

Right now, a certain unfortunate event has brought everybody’s attention to the problem of crime against women. Yes, it seems this is somehow different from crime in general (or crime against humanity – a more specific guilt of which some governments are accused by their opponents) and needs to be handled differently. It is not that such crimes suddenly spurted out of nowhere. Nor is the case that it is going to subside as soon as we make some noise about it and put it as our facebook status till we are carried away by a newer fad. It is really easy to be agitated about an extremely disturbing event, and come to quick conclusions on what caused it and what needs to be done about it. But probably, it makes more sense to wait till tempers cool down, and calmly think of the underlying causes that led to this problem, and attempt to work out a plan to address the root of the problem. However, this can happen only if we find for ourselves, the issues that are closest to our heart and to fixing which we are willing to spend considerable time and energy – instead of being dictated to by the media that focusses only on fueling our emotions and keeping our psyche ever at boiling point.