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Deccan Chronicle Apologises - Hussain Doesn’t!

On February 22 the Oscar awards were announced with the British film - Slumdog Millionaire - bagging a majority of them including two for its Indian music director. On February 24, the 'Deccan Chronicle' of Hyderabad had two prominent features: its first lead in large type described the Indian music director as ‘top dog’. The paper must have realized the faux pas of attaching the phrase to the name of a member of a particular community and promptly apologised to the community. The paper did the right thing for however inadvertently hurting the feelings of the community. The second was by M. F. Hussain who has not so far done the decent thing the paper did - apologizing for his sacrilegious paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses.

The letters they rejected!

In any case newspapers are ‘brands’ and ‘brands’ survive by winning and retaining their customers’ mindshare, in this case their readers’ mindshare. Newspapers use various devices, not least their ‘letters to the editor’ columns to win the elusive mindshare that according to marketing gurus is locked in a black box (so designated because it is difficult to fathom) in the brain. This they do by attempting to mould public opinion at a subliminal level. Therefore the editing of these columns is taken very seriously and the content that goes in is filtered and sieved, cut and edited and at times even mutilated to strip it of its meaning and context to suit the paper’s professed or covert ideology. ...
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Indian or Chinese?

‘Is it Indian or Chinese?’ is the question that puzzles the viewer after watching the highly hyped television programme - which we shall see. In a press conference held in the first week of November last year, Two BJP MPs from Arunachal Pradesh, Tapir Gao and Kiren Rijiju narrated incidents relating to Chinese incursions into their state. In one such incident, in the first week of November, 2007 Chinese soldiers blew up a Buddha statue - well inside Indian territory - which was there as long as anyone could remember and which local inhabitants worshipped. In NDTV’s February 16 Big Fight, (Should India talk tough on border dispute?), a presumable sequel to the press conference, Kiren Rijiju’s concerns were tossed aside on the floodtide of Singhvi’s eloquence. Prakash Javedkar’s protests were dismissed as a paranoid party’s undue alarmism. Comrade Ren Yan, could go home with the satisfaction that the ruling establishment and popular media in India alike support China’s cause because they had to spite her principal opposition. Is it ‘The Big Fight’ then Indian or Chinese? ...
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Marxist-Jihadi Criminal Enterprise

The prevention of crime and anti-social activities is an important responsibility of the government-one in which all segments of society have a stake. But on that crime fighting ideological front, the Marxist government in Kerala has been notably deficient. (In the view of the Marxists aligned with the Jihadis, peace loving, law abiding Hindus are the real problem of social tension, crime, violence and Jihadi terrorism)....
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Sonia Mania and media Managrams

Kushwant Singh?s surgery to create a cross between Play Boy and Pent House out of the staid Illustrated Weekly of India hastened the magazine?s endgame to use Mukul Sharma?s pun. Sharma was one of those who was trying to nurse the magazine back to life during its dying days. He ran a brilliant column called Mindsport - MS for short again punning his own initials. He called one of the items in MS, ?Managrams? in which readers were asked to describe a celebrity in witty ?shorthand?. For example one reader described Sridevi as ?Winker, wailer, boulder thigh? recalling the film star?s debut with huge hoardings showing her lavish thighs. Those were also the days when Bofors? made headline news and triggered creative juices in the English novelist Geoffrey Archer, who included the story with thin camouflage in his anthology of stories, A Twist in the Tale. To cut a long story short, a participant in MS? Managrams reveled in his creativity by describing the pilot turned Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi thus: ?Sonia Mania flying high; drawbacks kickbacks plenty why??
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