BRB

Will be out of action for a couple more weeks - parents and sister visiting me right now. Having a *wonderful* time and more importantly, they are having a great time in NY so far. Will continue reading your blogs in this interim period and be back to active blogging in about 2 weeks.

Play the media!

So the tabloid Star accepted that the much-publicized picture of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in a beach together was doctored - they supposedly even have a 'disclaimer' tucked away in some corner saying that the picture is not a legitimate one in the issue featuring the pic on the front page!. Previously, the cost of these pics was put at 9 million!

A point about the Indian media, it is amazing how they constructed the aura around Sachin Tendulkar for all these years and have suddenly turned to other stars now and never lose a single chance to bring down a player of his stature - he is now accused even when he does well (in the recent match against the Pakis where he scored 123 runs, took a catch or 2, bowled 6 tight overs, and even when he made a match of a last-over-4-runs-to-win situation with Inzamam on strike and brought it down to the final delivery (we lost!), Times of India (TOI) worded the report as if Sachin was the reason we lost!). Other cricket celebs - Dhoni is the panacea to all our cricketing problems, courtesy his single century, "India's answer to Gilchrist" screams TOI! Pathan may have made enough money in endorsements in a year to not care about the inswing anymore. Ganguly...I won't even go there. They are all a victim/product of the media, a lot more than the time they spent in the middle!

Back to the US media - you notice how ALL the channels get fixated/obsessed with ONE event all day, every day - it's the story of some bride-to-be missing (who 3 days later comes back saying she had cold feet about her marriage and faked a kidnapping, she'd wouldn't have thought that CNN would 1/2-hr updates on her status), or some husband killing his wife, or for days together, Dear Miss Schiavo. Don't mean to belittle the loss of a life or any single person, but don't we have other things that are more 'reportable'?! I prefer watching talk shows and reading op-ed pieces a lot more than listening to the news - debating, discussing someone's opinion seems a lot better than reading doctored 'news' or obsessing over a missing German-Shepherd!

Which brings me to my last point - I saw this very interesting, speculative, sensationalized video sometime back (courtesy: HeShoots-andScores) about how in 2014, nytimes ceases to exist and *everyone* contributes to "news" (blogs ver. 2014), get paid for it, and so on - http://www.broom.org/epic/ . Plausible..