This morning, for some strange effing reason the paperwala rang the doorbell after hurling the newspaper up the stairs. I grimaced when I saw the paper. WTF! It was TOI in place of my regular newspaper! So they had done it again! They managed to sneak it to my door. A paper I hated from the bottom of my heart.
This is not the first time. Every once a while, they do this. I am not aware if it is a strategy adopted by the publication to ‘boost’ its sales or an innocent mistake by the newspaper vendor. I suspect it is the former. I had previously warned the vendor about such mistakes. Anyway I had routine to do so with a cuppa in hand I settled down on the sofa to do the obvious - read.
The paper was heavy- it had all of 34 pages! I finished in about 15 minutes, what I normally do in not less than 45! Of the 34 pages, only 5 had NO Ads- the editorial, global & business pages and sports (2 pages)! So in effect 29 pages carried advertisements that were not too useful, were flashy or what the eff ever. In fact there were even ads that promoted sister publications and other related services of the publisher!
Then there were innumerable number of photographs of events, of people clad and semi (or micro) clad, and leftovers from yesterday’s net scan! So in effect, a considerable amount of the space was taken up by pictures- good, bad and ugly. The ‘news’ also contained anecdotes, tweets by so-called celebrities, and other internet downloaded stuff. The same ‘tweets’ were present in more places than one- accompanied with a picture! Net result: about 11 pages or 30% of the paper devoted to news. Under the circumstances, perhaps it was too much?
And they call it a “News paper”
The only person that probably would be happy with this publication would be the wife. For it would fetch more moolah when the raddiwala (or the old kali-sheesa-paper-wala) drops by! I'd prefer my good old DH. Any and every day.
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