The (Insipid) Times of India

The Times of India - India's most widely read newspaper, and according to itself, a pioneer in its field. I have been a subscriber of this daily ever since I was 8. Having moved from the morbidly boring Deccan Herald, I found TOI to be quite a refreshing change: crisp, coloured pictures, sensible editorials, good English without any gross grammatical errors, catchy banners, useful trivia... most of all, for the comics. While most of my friends still relied on sleepy papers like DH and DNA ("Daily News and Analysis", pfft! What a sham!) I had moved on. Back then, one of the reasons I moved to the TOI was, and I admit this without any shame, the liberal depiction of semi-nudity in Bangalore Times. Man, was that something! Bikini clad celebrities, sneak-peeks of the latest wardrobe malfunctions, nip-slips, calendar shoots... TOI was simply awesome!

Years rolled by, I cared less and less about the semi-naked babes staring at me seductively through the pages. "Not now, ladies." I would go straight to the comics, finish the Sudoku, try my hand at the "Mindbender" and "Whatzit"; read the joke and random fact, have a laugh or two and then move on to the main paper. The headlines, sports, foreign, "trends" and the national pages in that order (I couldn't care less about state and local news, because I'd hear them later as gossip anyway).

And then for a year, I was forced to read DH for my daily news (because some trickster salesman offered us a year's subscription at 360 bucks). It was horrible. But what was worse was the changes happening at TOI.

I returned to the TOI, and the first issue I picked up almost knocked me off my feet. A full-page ad replaced the front page, the pages were littered with cheap ads and classifieds were thrown around all over the place, editorials were left to inept douchebags like Chetan Bhagat and Swami Whateverhisname. It was a total mess! I thought it was a one-off event.

A year later, nothing has changed. The proverbial straw that broke my back happens to be today's issue (06 August 2013, Bangalore) of what is clearly an obnoxious and otherwise insipid newspaper out of touch with its readers. I will run you through the various elements causing my disgust now:

1. The ad replacing the first page about TOI's initiative "I Lead India", just a component of its multi-pronged self-gloating campaign. Strike one.
2. The "Justice for Durga" thing. The woman is going through hell and this paper is bent on getting hits for its own website, directing people to join the campaign on the TOI website, while more credible wars are being fought elsewhere. Strike two.
3. A section to the left on the title page, called "A correction - and a question". Instead of just admitting that the paper had printed the amount of notes received by the RBI as 598 million when it should have been 589 million, these shameless twerps divert the attention to how the RBI is not functioning as well as it should or something. You should read it to realize exactly why I'm this incensed over such a triviality. Strike three.
4. There's more. Pages 19 and 18: three minor, irrelevant articles on sports barring which all you will find are ads and more ads, and a bunch of public notices strewn all over the pages.
5. Page 16, titled "Tech-a-tete". There couldn't be a worse lie. The page has an article on crowdsourcing, making it seem like it happened just yesterday and the great minds at TOI spotted it. It's a full-grown phenomenon, for God's sake!
   Another article is called "Now, learn your lessons through games, quizzes". I won't even go into the details of that.
   A completely unfunny meme, called "Meme of the week", which goes like "I forgot to bring my phone to work. Now I have to work while at work". Wow, they must have worked very hard to find that one!
6. At this point, I'm tired. Nothing in the business page to piss me off. Thank goodness. But not really. The foreign page covers articles such as how Marilyn Monroe confessed to Jackie about JFK affair, Mandela being told to pay $660, Obama being the butt of jokes, and other completely useless factoids while actual news only gets half of the page. Apparently, Bieber going crazy at a party is big news around here.
7. Now I cover the most utterly useless and unproductive page in this mass of  junk: Times Trends.
   Disclaimer: The title of the page has nothing to do with the actual content on it. Go read the stuff on it, you'll have a hearty laugh at the jobless, contemptible blokes who scoured the web for these works.
8. Page 11. A full-page disguised ad for UTI Mutual Fund, parading itself as an informative initiative by TOI. 
9. Page 9. Three-fourths of the page lost to ads, again.
10. Page 7: Ads take up close to 60% again.
11. Page 6: Over 75% lost to ads, tenders and notices.
12. Page 5: Around 40% lost.
13. Page 4: More self-gloating about the Donate an Organ movement or whatever it was. An article on how Friendship Day turned sour for 2 guys. Apparently, they just died in road accidents, but hey, let the day take the blame for that, not a problem.
14. Page 3: Apart from around 60% space being used for ads and gloating about Vijay Karnataka (a part of the TOI group), there's an article on how a family tills, sows on its own. My grandparents do that, and they're 75. 
15. Ads, ads and ads. And some news here and there.

And there it ends (and I thought it never would!). The TOI today is more about itself than about news. It's about gaining revenue, advertising its "campaigns" at the least cost possible. So, instead of getting some writers with decent command over English, they go for complete noobs that spell words wrong, use all the wrong prepositions, appalling syntax with the overall literary quality of a 12-year-old's diary note. And the sports section is littered with garbage by idiots like Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar (they were great cricketers, no doubt; but they're puppets in the hands of the BCCI and that, in turn, means that facts are always bent in their favour, and also, their writing is shit.) The only guy whose writing is actually interesting is Bobbili Vijay Kumar, for who I've grown immense respect over the years. But in the face of a lack of competing authors, his writing too is slacking nowadays.

The editorials aren't awful, but they aren't great either; I've seen blogs of better quality. Movie ratings reflect how much they get paid for those. Really! Wolverine, for example, was a disgusting movie with no proper story or a gripping narrative and yet, it was given 3.5/5 and the review did not include any of those as major drawbacks, insisting that it's worth a watch or two. My prediction for Chennai Express: 3.5 or 4, just like every other mainstream movie released under a famous banner these days.

Bangalore Times is the only thing that hasn't deviated from its former course: that of sleaze, toilet humour and gossip. It's now just as shitty as it ever was. 

And that reminds me of their website. My God, is it horrible! Flashy slideshows, disorganized banners and ads, a page packed to the brim with content disappointingly low on actual information. And no matter what you're interested in, the articles suggested to you will be those on performing better in bed and foods to improve your sex life. Feels like a porn site with too much text, actually.

What do I propose? A complete overhaul, nothing less. Keep the good ones, get rid of the rest (that includes the editor, sadly); hire journalists that think with their brains, not their unmentionables, and most of all, STOP THE GLOATING!

I'm tired of all this typing, I think I'll go watch some Adam Sandler movie and rest my brain a bit.

Until next time,

Ciao!

PS: If you're a girl, go check out my girlfriend's awesome blog here. If not, do it anyway.