Random Monday Morning

 

I mostly wake up late these days. I mean as late as 6.50am or 7.00 am. Speaking honestly like a good number of you the first thing I do in the morning is to check my phone or run to pee. Sometimes I even have to pick my phone from under the bed, I don’t know who it fights at night. I check the charge, as if some ghost was using it overnight. I check what time it is, after which I can go to my email, twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

Mostly email has nothing interesting apart from Quora inviting me to read the ‘scariest stories,’ and LinkedIn job notifications that you will never get. I would then scroll twice or so then remember it would have been wiser if I prayed first and set my day in the able hands of Were, God of the eye of the rising sun. Amidst scrolling this morning, I came across a screenshot of a post by Kisumu TV. I later looked for Kisumu Tv and couldn’t find it. Wherever it disappeared to God knows.

I don’t enjoy writing sad stories much - but sad stories are also stories, aren’t they? The screenshot was about the heart- wrenching story of the demise of Baba Mona, his daughter Mona and his two sisters in a grisly car crash. The post by Kisumu Tv was informing the public that the bodies of the departed were being transferred from Muhoroni to Star hospital morgue Kisumu. In this post what hurt the people and led to serious flap was not the news about the horrible deaths. Neither was it about the ambulance in which the departed were to be ferried in.

On top of the post by Kisumu TV, it was written in caps lock ‘ENTERTAINMENT.’  I personally give a hand to everyone who condemned the admin or whoever it was that was running the page. That was the most invasive, unkind and downright disrespectful tag someone could ever put on such a news. I also noticed that a fraction of the people did not realize that the post had been classified as Entertainment, or perhaps it didn’t appear offensive and just dropped their deepest condolences.

Improbably there was a substantive argument from some guy named Julius. He said that ‘when a sports man dies, his death and other related activities are published on sports pages.’ This somehow made sense, actually it almost convinced me that there was even nothing wrong with the post. But the tag ‘entertainment’ still brings a different picture. It makes it sound like something that should amuse people, whereas it shouldn’t. There was a reaction from Kasirim, a guy who said that, ‘people do perceive that any content creator on Tiktok is an entertainer by default. Baba Mona was more educative and inspirational to many.’ He earned himself a few applauds and critics.

There was still a lot of mixed reactions in what left me even more confused. Some said bad things about the journalists and called them all the names but some said it was just okay because Baba Mona was an entertainer as well. My take is that the classification should have been ‘entertainment news’ instead of just a flat ‘entertainment’ that made it rub up the wrong way with a section of the people.

Deepest condolences to the family of Baba Mona