Usually I avoid whining (complaining with pain). But when things go wrong and as a consumer I don’t expect the desired service, I voice my concerns. Here goes one such bad experience I had with The Times of India.
I have been observing the quality of news being carried out by the Times of India for over 2 years and I finally felt this newspaper is not worth my time. The Times group proudly claims to be the sponsor of everything on earth, starting from the much-hyped (and fizzled out) Femina Miss India Content to the bakra Brand Equity Quiz. However when it comes to offering quality news to their readers, I could see that they are failing miserably with their poor reporting standards and insipid editorials. At times they uses cliché such as the “National Readership Surveys” as fig leaves to camouflage their inefficiency.
At least once in a month, this newspaper carries some readership survey and projects itself as the salt of the earth. I’m sick of watching such things being published somewhere on the front page. If you take a look at the city supplements, you can see the same Dhar, Dixit and Sundarams letting their hair down and shaking a leg in the same old pub, day after day. And if there’s a festival or a national holiday round the corner, this newspaper carries all those ads that definitely are an eyesore (Remember the RAMzan..DIWali..ad). As readers, can’t we expect something useful other than the stuff that literally tests our patience?
Another thing that literally put me down was the way this newspaper carried the recently concluded Indo-Pak friendship cricket series. During the one-and-half months or so, the full page was dedicated to cricket with the pictures of the captains of both teams carrying all those heavy guns as if they were engaging in some kind of fierce gun battle. I understand that most of us love cricket. But what’s the point of making mountains out of molehills? I wonder at the way this group covered the cricket when such a harmonious bond was being nurtured between the two countries.
Well, let me put an end to my prolonged quetching. I’m sure the recently concluded Miss-India Content has left the Times Group with an egg on their face, thanks to Laxmi Pundit. It’s high time the Times of India wakes up from the slumber and takes a cue from newspapers like The Hindu to improve the quality of reporting. Otherwise, as readers we have every right to flush it out.
With ’’Lukewarm Regards’’ to the Timesgroup..
Murali