There are two things that totally ticked me off yesterday. Early morning, I open the door, and take the newspaper and walk in. I am usually a first-page guy. I read the whole first page, and if there is anything more that interests me, I open and read further. As much as I would like to read the paper fully, time constraints me so. So what did I see yesterday that irritated me so much.
There is no front page.
The whole front page is an advertisement from Thomas Cook or some such travel agency. I am seeing this more and more. There are other irritating variants of the same thing that I am seeing in recent times. Some time earlier this month, we had a hole in the front page. Yes. No figuratively, but quite literally. The hole was a cutout in the shape of a VW Beetle – that was the day Volkswagen introduced the beetle in the India. The other variant of this irritating new phenomena is an whole page advertisement in the whole front page, with news interspersed between it. You get my drift. I am sure you empathize with me, when I say, that I had to search for the news that day. (It is already a popular joke, that in Times of India, there is more sleaze, and you have to search for genuine news).
Second irritant: “See culture, See Europe”. Or something almost similar. This is the bold fonted advertisement of some travel agency. *Deep breath*. Does that mean, we do not have culture in our country. Oh, we are in such dire straits, we have to travel to another continent to experience culture. That has been my pet peeve for quite some time. When people come back from an European holiday, and tell me that they saw so much culture, I sometimes ask them, have they seen all of the culture in India? Have they seen the temples of Tanjore, the Ajanta caves, the ancient city of Varanasi, the ocean temple at Kanyakumari, the beautiful rock carvings of Mahabalipuram? Most of them give me an absurd look, and walk away. But when I saw that front page ad, that ticked me off.
Well, that is my rant. And people object to it, this is my opinion, and you have the right to have yours. This is one of my objectives of this blog. And this is my space. ;-). Why am I sounding a little arrogant here. I have had people shouting at me in my comments, when I make some of these rants in the past.