Mark it: Mirror doesn’t say/report/write anything; it exclaims(!)

Keeping on with Mumbai Mirror, here’s another example why the ‘tabs’ are seen as irritatingly stupid. Take their Feb 25 lead story, for instance. Sample their strap/sub-head/intro/what-have-you (copy-pasted here): “Four assailants hammer three nails, each of them 2.5 inches long, into an HSC student’s head in Ambarnath; cops clueless on who did it”

A great story, no doubt, for any paper — enough tragedy/pathos/human interest/what-have-you — let alone a city tab. But what does the headline say? “NAILED!” goes without saying, the size is HUGE, and the as-good-as-obligatory exclamation mark in red, though the rest of it (the whole word of six full alphabets) was in red. What’s the point? I am not worried about the red in the exclaim-mark — that could be the work of an over-enthusiastic but under-educated designer, and can be easily pardoned, though not the journalist who saw and okayed it — but weren’t we taught to be sensitive in such cases back in kindergarten? What’s so funny about a guy being robbed and then three nails being hammered in his head? It’s freaking outrageous. But when will we learn to put that rage, that anger, that fury on print without demeaning/mocking it by taking recourse to the mandatory exclamation mark?

Mumbai Mirror on the wall, tell us the day you will fall

When, oh when, on earth will Indian journalists learn to kill the cliché and write ACTUALLY good headlines? I don’t live in Mumbai (and praise the Lord for that), so I don’t HAVE to read its Mirror (and thank the Lord again for that). But then the Web is such a curse for peace of mind… So imagine my horror when I went to its website in between work this evening: A screaming “BY GEORGE!” in some 72/96 points — if not bigger in actual print — greeted poor me. Now, haven’t I heard that expression before? In fact, haven’t I heard it some one-thousand-three-hundred-and-thirty-two times, if not more?

And going by the two other headlines for the small pointers on the front page (“SISTER ACT” for an Amrita Rao story and “GAME OVER” for Sourav Ganguly), I thanked the Lord the third time this evening that they had two ads running on the top and bottom of the page. At least they saved me from reading other allegedly smart attempts by their headline-writers.

Is Kiran More a dimwit?; or, to rephrase, is he a dimwit?

"To gain knowledge, comprehension, or mastery of through experience or study. "

That, says dictionary.com, the lazy man’s lexicon, is the explanation to that strange verb ‘learn’.
But trust Indian cricket selectors to stand the verb up on its backside every time they sit in one of their closed-door meetings — to drain knowledge, apprehension and jugglery through inexperience…

Indian selectors. Aah, that rare, but certainly not-on-verge-of-extinction, specie which simply refuses to learn. So they pick the team for the first Test against England, which is still a good week away, on the first day of the Board President-XI’s practice match against the visitors.
And what do they get? Eggs, a hundred and eight of them, on their face as Gautam Gambhir, dropped from the Test squad, goes on to hit those many runs the following day.

And who, pray, did they include in the squad in his place? Wassim Jaffer, who was taken as the specialist opener to Pakistan but instead got an all-expenses paid special sight-seeing role — from either behind the pavilion-end sight-screen or outside the ground.

Agreed, a home series is as good as a walk in the park for Indians on their spin-friendly tracks, but logic still demands the players be seen practicing their skills against the visitors, doesn’t it? Or is the team, named ironically after the Board’s President, just a joke? If yes, then the Agriculture Minister should be intimated forthwith. If no, then the England team management ought to know they aren’t getting the best available practice before the crucial series that their players and the media have already dubbed as tougher than the Ashes.

Don’t trouble your gray cells too much (it isn’t worth it, not when the ‘discussion’ in question is Indian team selection); just jog your memory back to the recent Pakistan series. The ODI team was selected (rather, Sourav omitted) on the fourth day of the last Test. A fourth day that still had to lend way to the final, when Sourav and Yuvraj failed to play the odds, time, patience and the Pakistani bowlers — in exactly that order — and avoid defeat. What if, like poor Gambhir at Vadodara today, they had managed to? Bring on the eggs, gentlemen…

But then, Kiran More and his ilk will retort that that’s the practice — picking the team for the next exam even before the results of the current one is out. And that they are merely following tradition set down by selectors over the years.

Tradition matters helluva lot in Indian cricket selection. As do eggs.

ouch rajdeep, that sting hurts a sum total of one!

Watching parts of the ‘gotcha’ sting on UP mantriji by CNN-IBN set me thinking (aye, aye, I do think once in a while): Good or bad? I mean, too many of ’em? Tell you what, methinks we ought to give it to them this once. At least they are doing some legwork. These days, it seems getting your backside off the office chair and doing something (barely something, I am not even using words like ‘meaningful’ et al) is an obligation few reporters bother to take. Just look at the Times of India, for instance. Some jazzy (and ultimately meaningless) headlines, punched with a jazzed up first two paras — that’s all they have for page-1 news, which, more often than not, are a rehash of everything we have seen on the nine-o-clock the previous evening.

As for news magazines (a misnomer, actually, because they hardly ever carry any news — just some more rehash and even more stupidly inane columns that none bar the authors and poor sub-editors read), less said the better. Their supposed original ideas begin and end with lifestyle stories about coming-of-age hetro/metro/detro/ghetto/outrosexual males, or some such banality.

Not that I am a fan of Rajdeep (too superficially, I-am-breaking-news-and-taking-arse loud) and his team of anchors (equally shallow, minus the volume), but then, give the devil his due when it’s due, right?

sorry, cartoon network on leave. protestors have taken over

Have they gone insane? Or, have they gone insane?
Really, this is the only possible question that tickles the back of the mind (is that where the brain rest all day long? well, never mind) as Subject thinks (or tries to think, considering the brain cell-numbing pressures of the job) about the Islamic reaction to what in effect is ‘Cartoon Controversy’.
Now, let this be stated outright before hackers hack it down: this Subject, for one, does not hold any grudge or bias against any religion in this world or Mars, simply because he does not feel the need to believe in any religion. But have they lost their mind, those protestors? Let us, for once, keep the question hanging. For, there really is no answer. Or is there? Let us give them the time to collect their wits and figure out if protest is a verb to be used every day —— like snoring, or farting, or, maybe, pissing off.
In the end, maybe, perhaps maybe, there will be protests from certain sections about metamorphosing into cartoons ourselves. And that's the day the Subject awaits. Amen.