Indian of the Year contest
Posted by Ashish on December 27th, 2005
NDTV is running an “Indian of the Year contest” in collaboration with Airtel. The nominees are:
- Rahul Dravid - Cricketer
- Sania Mirza - Tennis Player
- Amitabh Bachchan - Bollywood Actor
- Aishwarya Rai - Bollywood Actress
- Sonia Gandhi - Politician
- Manmohan Singh - Indian Prime Minister
- L K Advani - Politician
- Nitish Kumar - Politician
- Narayana Murthy - Infosys Chief
- S. Manjunath - Indian Oil Employee who died because he didn’t bow down to corruption
- Aruna Roy - Social activist, who also received Magsaysay award
- Sachin Tendulkar - Cricketer
I will simply BS this list - at least half of the people don’t deserve to be on this list. A few of them could still be controversially there but there are a few who just don’t deserve. After all - what has Aishwarya Rai, Sonia Gandhi, L K Advani, Nitish Kumar and Sachin Tendulkar done this year to be on this list. In fact - same about Amitabh Bachchan also. Agreed that he is a great actor but is that enough to get him nominated for Indian of the Year? And, yeah, by what definition is Laxmi Mittal an Indian?
And I see this list populated with either the bollywood personalities, politicans or sports-person. Strange enough - they don’t think that any entrepreneur, singer, designer, lawyer, journalists or any other emerging talent needs to be there! Or is this list just made up to suck up to the already influential guys?
Reminds me of the controversy inside IITK when they chose to confer the 2 undergraduate students with the “Distinguished Alumnus” awards (for their work on finding a new polynomail-time algorithm to determine if a number is prime or not) - which traditionally is given to an industry veteran with already many other accolades. The selection committee still stuck to that saying that the new and young talent needs to be recognized and encouraged.
Why can’t the media do the same and give equal importance to people in all fields rather than limiting itself to the glamour industry - Sports and Bollywood - and, of course, politicians.
December 28th, 2005 at 12:52 pm
“NDTV is running an “Indian of the Year contest” in collaboration with Airtel”
The last word of the above sentence should answer your question on what prompted this list to be generated.
December 28th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
Agreed 100%. I usally ignore most of these polls..
December 29th, 2005 at 10:41 am
As your blog is quite popular, why don’t you come up with some list…
December 31st, 2005 at 3:41 pm
Ashish,
100% agree with you on Aish, Sonia, Bachan, Sachin not to be on the list.
Alas, who did emerge the winner ? Bachan ..isnt it ?
Its pathetic….
January 7th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Oh great - Bachchan did win
This is so interesting!!
January 19th, 2006 at 10:42 am
fully agree! I will not be surprised even if they have put veerapan’s name!
February 2nd, 2006 at 11:12 pm
I heard from some one that Laxmi Mittal still has an Indian passport. However I have doubts on that claim…
March 21st, 2006 at 12:46 pm
India is a poor country. A lot of people here are poor. So, respect and encourage wealth creators - Entrepreneurs and encourage scientists. Sports people and film actors dont create wealth. They just suck wealth from poor people and become rich. They dont become rich by adding something of value to our country. When will we get out of this stupid attitude of worshiping film actors?