I have never been more reluctant writing any opinion as I am now. I never glance over my shoulder to check if anyone is peeping into my laptop, just in case I am being read as I write, and being misunderstood. This time I am, almost hoping I had a rear-view mirror on my table which would allow me to check my discomfort.

In the past 10 days, ever since gunshots disturbed the hum of Batla House in Delhi's Jamia Nagar that sedentary Friday morning, we've so intensified the practice sessions of a new sport we now play; there is a danger of us becoming world-beaters at it.

It's a variation of long jump in athletics...it's called jumping to conclusions.

We have done this to every piece of fact. So, when the rightist Hindutva brigade calls the Jamia University's decision to legally support two of their students arrested on terror charges as an example of social acceptance of terrorism, which in turn incentivises people to commit terrorist activities, they have jumped Olympian lengths.

When they accuse the government of not tackling terror as it stubbornly refuses to bring back POTA, they demonstrate their best-ever effort in their jump to yet another conclusion. When they attempt to link a crime to a community, it's that sporting prowess again.

On another playground, when the police arrest an individual on terror charges, and in the aftermath of the Delhi blast claim they killed two suspects in an encounter, we jump within minutes to call it all a fake. The arrest of two students of the university is termed an attack on the institution itself, a jump worthy of bettering Carl Lewis's best. We continue to jump...we say Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma got killed not by the suspects, but by a rival police faction.

Both teams are playing on a slippery playground, where the chances of tripping and getting permanently crippled are high. We appear to be mixing up our metaphors. Opinion is being peddled as fact. Suspicion is being confused with evidence. The journey between prologue and epilogue is being abridged to absurd levels.

Worse, if someone refuses to join the "fact-peddlers" on either side, we jump to yet another radical conclusion. That the person must be a believer of the rival ideology, a traitor, an anti-national or a pseudo-secularist, depending which way the opinion is interpreted.

The danger in all of this is the distinct possibility of us becoming a schizophrenic society. We will imagine ghosts and demons everywhere, without waiting to check how many really exist. We may begin fearing and suspecting the routine and mundane. We will attribute motives to every nod of the head, and every time someone's lips crack just that wee bit to smile.

We will necessarily become a nation of slot machines. With every act of terror or crime, an ideological citizen slotted as a rightist or a leftist will pop out of it. We will call them a hardliner or a sympathiser, and worse, even secular or communal depending what coin we have put into the machine.

The concept of free debate and open exchange of views and ideas will get killed. The number of furrows on your forehead, while championing a cause or making a statement, no matter how fact-less it is, will determine the intensity and genuineness of your feeling.

Like carats measure purity of gold, the depth of the furrows will become a measure of intensity of belief in civil liberties or nationalistic fervour. So a 24-furrow forehead will be the purest form of a civil liberty champion or a true national. A 10-furrow one would be best suited for a corner shop in a small town mohalla.

One of the big triggers of this diametrically opposite national frenzy is news television. News channels are becoming guilty of isolating a crisis. Of unhinging it from its peculiarities, of refusing to peep within the streaming cob-webs which hang from the glass walls within which lies the secret of our crumbling and crawling criminal justice system.

In her book "Peace is War", Arundhati Roy writes how just like business houses need a cash turnover, the media needs a crisis turnover. Hence, a crisis driven media cannot afford to hang on to just one long enough, as it has to rush to the next one. Perhaps this is one reason why we in television do not have the time or patience to clear those cobwebs and peep deep into the system. Roy goes on to write about crisis reportage and says how governments have perfected the art of waiting out a crisis. "They have to find ways of precipitating crises, of manufacturing them in easily consumable, spectator friendly formats. We have entered the era of crisis as a consumer item, crisis as spectacle, theatre."

Use Roy's metaphor in what happens to us on a daily basis and you can see what is going on. The daily BJP and Congress briefings turn into one such spectacle, where a university's decision to give legal aid to its students is called social acceptance of terrorism. It tells you why activists, academicians, professionals leave their normal routine and conduct candle light marches after police arrests of level charges against suspects.

Just like a sportsman satisfies himself by saying he gave his best and it doesn't matter whether he won or lost, the spectacle provides the same satisfaction to the performers. Whether it had any desired affect or not, doesn't really matter. The worry in all of this is the danger of reading too much into anything, without adequate evidence or basis.

News channels have a responsibility to report. Day after day; and round-the-clock. So despite Roy's rather critical take on the media - frenzy will largely remain the way it is. But the need for balance, to wait to examine, to study, to understand hasn't been greater. And this can only be done by the activists, professors, academicians and other experts who must provide the balance, instead of using this frenzy to add to the spectacle.

Inevitable frenzied reportage should not hustle anyone into making uninformed choices. We cannot be told "you're either with us or with the terrorists" and cannot be constantly made to believe we have to commit ourselves to either of the participants in this sport.

Experts, academicians, activists and professors must understand and accept situation analysis on news television looks at Usain Bolt as a hero - a task that needs to be finished in 9.69 seconds. It does not care about Samuel Wanjiru of Kenya, the man who won the marathon gold at Beijing. Cannot blame them...Bolt is glamour and fame...whoever heard of Wanjiru?

But the lack of rigour in collecting facts often tragically teleports itself to shape the opinion of a significant number of even the learned. Their endorsements of this semi-baked logic then gets widely analysed, further endorsed and believed. This then becomes independent authorization of a theory, completing a dangerous cycle.

Television news also has an ability to magnify everything in its sight. It suffers from paranoia of the ordinary. Its camera works like the Hubble Telescope, whose sweep makes an asteroid circling million light years away look like a next door neighbour. So five sound-bites constitute an overwhelming opinion and 50 people raising slogans becomes outpouring of public sentiment. The desire to magnify a crises, scale up the size of the image, so that the audience can see better, is overwhelming.

The worry is there will come a time when the viewers will step back from the telescope and find the asteroid was much further than what they thought. The demon wasn't really here to devour everything in sight. And it is our professors, activists, academicians, the learned and the evolved that should help us all take their eyes off the lens once in a while so that we realise the asteroid is not that close.

India has a complex social ladder. It's not without reason that it is said state any fact about us and its exact opposite would be true. It isn't without reason hand woven embroidery is considered purer and better and hence is more expensive than the much quicker machine art. There is some element of raw effort, a sense of fulfilment in that work, provides as it does the satisfaction of a job well done....done harder, the more authentic way. Unfortunately, we have all come to love analyses of any situation like machine embroidery. Punch in a pattern and churn out dozens of clones, quickly.

If there is a price to be paid for the hand woven one, it's the necessary investment in time and patience. It will beget greater satisfaction, would be purer and consequently will get preserved for far longer. So while we must surely ask quick questions, we must also wait. We must, for instance, now ensure the trial of the Delhi blasts suspects is covered the way the Jessica Lall murder was. Till the very end.