It’s always great when you see an editorial in the newspaper that puts your thoughts into words succinctly and accurately. Sidharth Bhatia’s op-ed in todays HT says it all when it calls for media to return to the basics and brass tacks in terms of the standard procedures of verification, cross checking and editorial screening of the content it publishes.

Well, the lack of screening is something that is becoming a rampant problem. And it’s not just media, its each one of us. Because we live in an age of instant access, when uploading information and sharing it takes a few seconds and gets instant feedback and attention, we often ignore our old values. Values that asked us to be sensitive, to verify the truth of something before we shared it, and that demanded a certain check of quality before we deemed something to be ‘final’ and good enough to be made public.

We’ve all stared at our Facebook pages and tried to make sense of something that reads like this: “Wndrng wht to do tdy. BFF out! 😦 :(” and the message coming up on my screen right now says “dost, n.joy the fun of chilli dilli wintrs”…..I am glad to say I don’t have too many people who write like that on my friends list, but we are all guilty of hitting that share button without whetting the content thoroughly from time to time!

So when I sat with Udai this morning to cajole him into finishing the homework that had piled up all week, I was in no mood to tolerate shoddiness! He had done an hour of work diligently, but then he was lapsing into strange sentence constructions, poor spelling and bad handwriting…and it wasn’t the mistakes that bothered, it was the fear that he would think its ok to let things go, ok to not aim for perfection, ok to not better himself. It’s a real fear. I’m working on keeping the faith!