Month: July 2009

Tunisia To Get New TV Channel Called Elyssa TV? Again With The Historic Names!

I just read that the Tunisian production company Cactus Prod has gone on as expected and filed to get the rights to launch a new television channel in Tunisia under the name: Elyssa TV.

If all goes as planned, broadcast tests for this new channel could start as early as this coming December 2009, with an official launch following early on in 2010.

Now, this is all great, after all I think it’s good to see more players enter the audiovisual market in Tunisia, maybe push the envelope a bit further, give viewers more options, and enrich the scene in one way or another.

What bugs me though is the name!
I went on a similar rant around 5 years ago when the name for Hannibal TV was announced, and here I am again, five years later, thinking the same thoughts.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m as proud a Tunisian as you’ll ever find, and our history is one that is very dear to me, it runs in our blood and defines a big part of who we are as a people, but I’m seriously fed up of every other business in Tunisia, from the neighborhood coffee shop, to travel agents, to the country’s first MVNO, to our TV channels to everything being named after Hannibal and Elyssa.

Come on, we can be more creative that that! Let’s stop living in the past!

Hannibal and Elyssa were great, they are a part of Tunisian history that will always shine throughout the ages, but we’ve overused their legacy; let them rest in their graves, and let us live in the present, let us create for the future.

It’s the same all around the Arab world too, not just in Tunisia, it’s as if we’re a nation clinging to the past, because it holds the only shiny points in our history that we can think of, instead of actually doing something to change the miserable state our nation is in, and building a better future.

Death & Numbers… People aren’t statistics!

This is something I’ve had bothering me for a while now, and that I’ve been wanting to write about for some time.

On the news, in newspapers, in conversations, everywhere; whenever there is an incident, war or whatever with deaths involved; numbers are pulled out… X number of people died here, Y number of people died there, more people died on this side than that, less people were lost than in some other incident… and they go on and on and on.
The bigger the numbers, the more tragic they display it to be, and the more they talk about it.

But what they’re actually doing with all this is just cheapening down human life to a set of meaningless numbers.

People aren’t statistics!

Every single death means that a person who was once a parent, a sibling, a child, a spouse, a lover has left this world, and left a group of people aching with broken hearts. To those people, it feels as though the whole world was lost, as if everyone is gone. To those people, in that moment, they don’t care how many other people died, or how their loss compares to someone elses, all they care about is that someone very dear to them is gone.

Some might think that sounds selfish for them to only think of their loss and not that of others, but whether we like it or not, that is basic human nature and totally understandable, when in a moment of grievance such as the death of a loved one, no one is in a spot where they can afford the luxury of selfless thinking. At moments like those, they hurt more than if all of humanity was lost because of some tremendous tragic disaster.

In the end what I guess I’m trying to say is that death is death; one death, one hundred deaths, thousands or even millions of deaths, all amount to the same thing: a tremendous amount of pain, a huge loss, and that to at least someone, somewhere, it feels as if the whole world came crashing down and took everything with it.

So instead of insensitively counting numbers and turning lost loved ones into just another numeral on a piece of paper, that we use to compare and evaluate loss, maybe we should accept death as an absolute constant value, and react to it as something that we should do everything we can to stop it from happening in vain.