9 July 2005

Over-the-Hill News, Down -valley Bloomers

The Hindu is said to be a staid, responsible national newspaper...and yet one can see rank acts of amateurish whims in it, all the time.
Today's Bangalore edition features a small story on a six-member team leaving for a trek in the Valley of Flowers. Why is that importantant??? Now, the Valley is just a trek, barely at the tough level. It's not a mountain, not a peak like your K2 or Everest, and is many a college student's early Himalayan high. (I have done it, too!). Why does that make news?
And then, the paper has a story on how "The Prince of Arcot" has condemned the London bombings.
Prince who?
Arcot is a small district in Tamil Nadu, and princes were kicked out in 1947, and their purses were off a couple of decades later...they are has-beens in the polity, and at best turn heritage hoteliers or wannabe fashion designers, barring the few who rehabilitated themselves in real, democratic politicsIs the Prince active in politics? Is he a significant community leader for Muslims across India...for that matter, at least in the south? How relevant is he to bombings made thousands of miles away? The story doesn't say why.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

*laughing*

You know, Seinfeld once famously said -- " It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper"

Well, from the kind of news we see floating around- apparently not!

You of all (this being the "mediaman" part of you ) will endorse to how newspapers are guilty of hoarding in times of glut so as to quench in times of parched scarcity...

This is perhaps what comes of such!

I would like a newspaper to be bold enough one day to leave a entire page empty with a small comment saying "nothing worth your time happened in the world today!" Now that editor I would respect more than the one who tells me the doings of the prince of arcot.

Whether his publisher will let him live after that day or not-- now that is an entirely different story :))

A