My doctor asked me a strange question last month. “What do you read every morning?” I said “karnataka news today”. He wrote a prescription: “Stop.”
This is not a joke. I had high blood pressure at 34. Not from work. Not from family. From news. Specifically, from “karnataka news today”.
Every morning, I woke up to:
A political scandal in Bengaluru
A farmer suicide in north Karnataka
A flood warning in coastal Karnataka
A traffic nightmare on Silk Board
By 8 AM, I was already exhausted. My heart was racing. My jaw was clenched.
My doctor said: “Try one month without news.” I tried. This is what happened.
The coffee planter who never reads news
I went to Chikmagalur to escape. Met a coffee planter named Raju. He has been growing coffee for 30 years.
I asked him: “Do you read ‘karnataka news today’?”
He laughed. “I read my coffee plants. When they are happy, I am happy. When they are sad, I am sad. That’s my news.”
I asked: “But what about the political scandal? The farmer suicide? The flood warning?”
He said: “Political scandal? That’s in Bengaluru. 300 km away. Farmer suicide? Tragic. But one farmer out of millions. Flood warning? In a different district.”
“You are taking the problems of 6 crore people and putting them on your own shoulders. No wonder you have high BP.”
What I saw in Chikmagalur
I spent 7 days in Raju’s plantation. No news. No phone. Just coffee and mountains.
Here’s what I saw:
A school where children learn in three languages. No headline.
A woman who runs a small bakery. Her cakes are famous in three villages. No headline.
A temple that has stood for 500 years. No headline.
A stream that has never dried up. No headline.
A family that eats together every evening. No headline.
This is Karnataka. Not the Karnataka in “karnataka news today”.
The math of anxiety
Let me calculate what “karnataka news today” did to me.
30 minutes of reading per day. That’s 182 hours per year. In those 182 hours, I consumed:
300+ political statements (none affected me)
200+ crime reports (none happened near me)
100+ disaster warnings (most were false or distant)
50+ expert opinions (all forgotten)
My brain processed all this as threat. Threat after threat after threat.
My body responded with cortisol. Cortisol raised my blood pressure.
I was literally making myself sick. For stories that didn’t matter.
What I do now
I still need to know what’s happening in Karnataka. But now I get it from: