Stay away from each other!

For being India’s largest English daily, the Times of India doesn’t sell as much as it is bought. And in all probability, those inflated numbers could’ve provided the newspaper the motivation and confidence to take on one of India most reputed dailies: The Hindu. Being only a regular-sized newbie in Chennai, it awakened the city one fine morning to its first salvo, “Stuck with the news that puts you to sleep?” Mildly-amused media historians would later testify that the Times brought the ensuing advertisement pogrom upon itself.

[caption id="attachment_21598" align="aligncenter" width="365" caption="Image courtesy Sandheep Adhwaryu"][/caption]

At a time when finger-pointing was absolutely unnecessary, Times pointed an entire arm at a newspaper that catered to a significantly different audience. Perhaps someone should have told it right then that if one messes with bulls, one only gets horns. Because when The Hindu struck, it transgressed the borders of Chennai that the Times had limited itself to: the YouTube videos parading the former’s ‘Stay ahead of the times!’ line went viral, advertisement banners sprung up all around Tamil Nadu, and the Times ship was all but sunk.



Unfortunately for Chennai, this jejune tussle was news for a week. Retired station-masters used to waking up every morning to a tumbler of filter coffee and The Hindu were now being alerted to the existence of Page 3 parties and wardrobe malfunctions. Large sections of important pages were given up to poking fun at the Times with thinly veiled smugness while readers tried to understand where the logic was in advertising about The Hindu in The Hindu to people who were already buying The Hindu. Masquerading media muscle under the pretext of snubbing the Times? Maybe.



Thinking it had thrown the kitchen sink into it its attack against The Hindu, the Times blanched when it got the bathtub back. Its first response was to acknowledge the “waking” of The Hindu to its competition. This led many to believe that the competition concerned the invention of catchphrases, prompting Dhanush to go back in time and record Kolaveri.

[caption id="attachment_21602" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Meteoric comeback!"][/caption]

To the Times, it is plausible that any publicity is good publicity, but The Hindu, in the opinion of many of its readers, overstated its strengths and wasted important space and time retaliating to a competitor’s notably specious claims. As the dust begins to settle now, residents of Chennai are finally waking up to a world where nothing has changed… except for a grim parting shot from the Times that makes too much sense.

[caption id="attachment_21603" align="alignleft" width="640" caption="The Hindu could take a leaf out of Einstein's book and (apart from running a daily science page) hold back from becoming a condescending news-giver."][/caption]