Role of media in national integration What is media? Of course it is a plural of medium.

And a medium is generally thought of as a bridge that facilitates transmission of messages between a sender and a receiver. This reduces it to a channel. This is a structural and a limiting way of looking at media. Lets look at the media functionally. Media is anything that connects people between space and time. As an economist I know there were rivers and canals that helped exchange wealth and goods and stories and knowledge and cultures. There were bards and storytellers that told tales of far off lands and enrich lives of the ordinary people. There were wall paintings for the posterity and smoke signals for the future. There is television, newspaper, internet, etc. that brings us text, audio, video. They have all one thing in common: they facilitate sharing of ideas, experiences, knowledge They mediate between people. What they mediate for? Yes, they media to facilitate people share their experiences. But they do much more. Media energises this sharing. Media enriches this sharing. In the process of this sharing, media creates new experiences. Media is not just a channel. It is a storyteller; it is also a canal or a bridge; it is also an archive of the past and a record keeper for the future. It is a processnot any ordinary processit is a process of creation of human behavior. Therefore media is important. Therefore there is a need to ponder upon the role of media in formation of society, or the role it plays in the lives of our children and adolescents, or the role of media in national integration. It not only mirrors our times, but media also engenders discourse and consciousness. There are by far the two biggest roles of the media. By reflecting what we are it prompts us to fix a loose strand button here and an untamed strand of hair there. It tells is what is behind us and speaks to us what we should aspire to be. At present media is reflecting a lot of things that are happening in our country that challenge our nation and national integration. The four isms communalism, casteism, regionalism and linguism have always been the bane of our nation. Indias first Prime Minister Sh. Jawaharlal Nehru constituted National Integration Council in 1962 to find out ways and means to combats these very forces. This is the 60th year of the Councils formation. It has now 147 senior politicians and public figures in India who are still looking for ways to address the problems of communalism, casteism, regionalism and linguism the four cornerstones of fundamentalism. The problems have now multiplied. The problem of moral and economic corruption; the challenge of meeting the aspirations of the under-privileged millions; and the test of holding on to our value system in the face of invasion of the global cultures. While we all know how fundamentalism, in any of its forms can harm the country and the national sentiment, the challenges of corruption, deprivation and cultural dilution do not overtly manifest in form of a threat to the national unity, but they do erode the essence of nationalism the love for the nation, identification with the national sentiment, the sense of patriotism. Patriotism is the soul of a nation. A person dies when he loses his soul. When patriotism dies, when a nation loses the love and loyalty of its people, the nation dies and begins to decompose. Patriotism is not nation-worship, it is not even the denigration of other nations above ones own. It is an attachment to ones own country its land, its people, its past, its heroes, literature, language, traditions, culture, and customs.

Nation is a notion, the state gives it a tangible form. This notion is perpetuated in the pride of its people. Nation lives as an emotion in the people of the land. It is deeply rooted in peoples culture and history and incorporates fundamental elements of their identity. For a large section of the western civilization, it is impossible to conceive of a nation without a state. Council of Europe in its 2005 Parliamentary Assembly while discussing the concept of nation noted that for in many European languages there is no word that communicates the sense of nation. They noted that the concept of nation is used to indicate citizenship, which is merely a legal link between a state and an individual in some states. In several others the term nation refers to an organic community speaking a certain language and characterised by a set of similar cultural and historic traditions, by similar perceptions of its past, similar aspirations for its present and similar visions of its future. In some member states both understandings are used simultaneously to indicate citizenship and national (ethno-cultural) origin respectively. However, one thing is common to them all: for any all other cultures throughout the world, the nation is not imaginable without a state. Its how they conceive their world The body before the soul, the material without the spiritual, the state before its soul nation. On the other hand, our culture, our tradition has imbibed in us something that other people dont even know how to start fathoming that body is because the soul is, the material is only as important as the spirit it enshrines. Similarly, the Indian state exists because its soul the Indian nation has existed much before that. We had an Indian nation much before we had the sovereign state. Before the Indian state was formed upon Independence from the British, even before the British occupation, when the whole country was a conglomeration of various small and large quarreling sovereign states, the Indian nation had existed. In fact Bharat Varsh existed even before the West discovered its civilization. Have you ever wondered in a land as large as ours, in a culture as diverse as ours, in such a milieu of varying languages, how did this nation emerge? Something or someone must have engendered this feeling and continues to do this. Is it religion? Is it the shared elements within the diversity of our cultures, languages, traditions? Is it our value system? It is the monsoons and our rivers? May be it is all of these and many more un-define-able things. Despite the roots of our nationalism being so strong and so deep, there we still have to contend with challenges to national integration. The biggest threats come from sub-national and separatist sentiments.