Thursday, September 18, 2003

Who pulled the plug on Ara's television interview?

Tonight at 19:05 I got a call from my General Manager telling me that my interview was being televised on Artsakh T.V. and when I started to talk about the need for law and order, the signal went out.

My manager asked me what did I say and why they suddenly cut it off and what should she do?

I told her to call the transmitting tower to see what went wrong which she did and was told that the repeater in Jardar was not sending a signal and for that reason they could not relay the program to Martuni.

After I got off the phone with her, I got a call from Stepanagert with the same story of as soon as I started to talk about law and order, the signal was cut there too.

My land-line and cell were ringing non-stop with people calling in to ask me what went wrong and what we should do. They all knew I had said something that scared someone high up who then ordered the plug to be pulled.

The signal came back on about 10 minutes later and a huge section of the program was cut out as a result (the whole show was to be 30 minutes, but I have no idea what was cut in those 10 minutes. Probably my talking about some "rich people" who are in love with money more than in love with our people).

Now I'm not sure what happened, but will say that all day we were having power outages here in Martuni, but during the time of the show, the power had not gone out.

Though I didn't see any of the show, when I went to pick my car up from the mechanics, the mechanics parents told me that when I started to talk about law and order, law and order was broken here and I must have scared someone in the government for them to censor the show.

Again, I don't know what really happened, but will assume that it was just a power outage and if it was, I think it would be a really good idea to rebroadcast the whole show one more time on a day when we have normal power service so those that are already pointing fingers to the government for censoring the program will not feel that law and order was violated.

All I know is that Bill Gates could not have sparked as much attention and curiosity for his newest Windows operating system as this has in Artsakh among I would guess by morning, the entire population, who would have been talking about this interview anyway, but now that they feel I said something politically incorrect to get the plug pulled, are all going to want to know what was said during the 10 minutes that was blacked-out and are going to be glued to the television, listening to every word for what was so bad that it had to be censored. I would guess this could also include the younger people who would not usually be watching. Very cool!!!

I guess this too could in fact be another one of those deals with God's finger in it, since this was the coming out of Ara. Not to say that I have not been on television before and people dont' know me, but this was my début into the public arena as Ara Manoogian, the nephew of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the grandson of Shahan Natalie and a descendent of the 11th century royal Pakraduni family. If that was at all mentioned in the 10 minutes that did not get televised, then when people actually do see that, they are going to think that those in power know that their competition for power has landed and is rising to his feet (even if that's not my intention) and they don't want the population to know. And if they did learn that about the family tree before or after the black-out, then they are sure to think I had something very important to say that the people in power didn't want them to hear. It's almost like this was a planned stunt by me. Yea, I did plan it this way and I'm good!!! Just kidding.

I guess Armenia saw the 15 minute version of this show yesterday (unless the power went out there too) and the same should be run on satellite soon, if it has not been run already.

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