I have finally decided to stop reading TOI. TOI aversion was going on for a long time. I am a subscriber for this newspaper for the last five years and I have been a loyal reader. But honestly it is slowly loosing the capacity to excite me. May be I am dull and so not been able to appreciate the finesse. Whatever I pay for the paper daily and I have the right to be happy. My father used to subscribe to all sorts of odd Bengali news papers. I revolved against it because there were no cinema news, no pictures of cricketers….absolutely nothing to keep a teenager hooked. But slowly I realized that newspaper is for information. It’s main task is also to enlighten and not entertain. That’s what my father believed.I was never exposed to English newspaper much apart from Telegraph. When I came to New Delhi five years back I could find neither Telegraph neither The statesman….papers which were hugely popular in Bengal. So I subscribed to Times and kept reading it for the last five years. But now no more. Why? Well for the last one year, thanks to Internet, I am reading Hindu and Indian Express frequently. And the recent Political Advertisement scandals highlighted by The Hindu and pushed by Indian Express have only increased my TOI hatred. TOI editor (if they have any!!) has a simple formula. Whatever news the paper publishes it must bring revenue. At the end of the day its money honey. And other newspapers like HT are no less.
Besides I am now fed up with two people’s write-ups in TOI. Bacchi Kakaria and Jug Suraiya. People well past their primes only trying to write to sound young and hip. Nah! Not my types. Jug used to write impressively years back. No longer. And Bachhi. She is always writing complicated stuff…sometimes on phonetics..sometimes on ethics and whatnot. Overall essence remains the same. If you cannot convince just confuse. I am in no mood to pay money every day and in turn get confused.
Recently with the advent of Chetan Bhagat getting a big editorial space every Saturday….sorry TOI, its better we part our ways. It's almost criminal to waste main editroal space by having an article written by some one who has run of ideas and busy writing about his love marriage, keeping in mind potential Bollywood script! He writes without knowing what his objective is. Like today he wrote a huge stuff on the problems of Indian Education and supply demand mismatch. And his solution is if you can have a kilometer wide mall why you can’t have a kilometer wide University. Well Mr Bhagat. Get out of Mumbai. Go deep inside India. You will see highways lined up with colleges after colleges. It's not the size of University which matter. There are lot of Kilometer wide Universities. For example Vidyasagar University (I studied here) in West Bengal. Such huge is the campus that two T20 match can go on comfortably with adequate spectators. But quality.....well agreeable. You have never highlighted the root cause of the problem of Indian education system. It is the lack of passion and utter neglect from the part of teachers. And it’s also the stupid political system which wants the country to remain a little backward. Infrastructure is fine but unless you know how to manage it its back to square one mate. You have studied in an IIT and IIM. So you will not understand what I am trying to say. UGC appoints the best brains (rote memory champions) as lecturers. And they are least bothered to teach inside the class. Teaching outside the class if more profitable for them. And Mr Bhagat. You keep beating around the bush. Try to acquire some guts and do some finger pointing my dear ‘best selling author’. If you think like you are the messiah of Indian Youth then do not write to please the editor and play to the gallery. Gets the facts out of the closet. You have got a chance, which people dream of. Use it. The country will be obliged if you do it. But then unfortunately you write for a entertainment paper called TOI. Even if you want you cannot. It is a paper full of Blackberry and laptop totting journalists. Paycheck matters more to them than their journalism.
Time to say goodbye TOI. Au Revoir!
