"Kid, You need some Supplement"

I call Sunday a day for some 'Good Stuff'. That includes a couple of weekend games in the Premiership and the La Liga, maybe a weekend race, a football match with friends and probably a good book. This list I must say has altered, it has one missing entry that would probably have the first a couple of years ago. That coloured 4-page supplement with the Sunday Times, they now call 'Life!'.
One might say that this article is inappropriate for a blog, which intends to criticize the Pune Times. However one must remember that PT is a welcome absentee on Sunday. The now-extinct 'Review' used to be a welcome change. It probably compensated for the weeklong torture that PT readers had to undergo. The writing talent they had and probably still have was absolutely amazing. Mini Chandran Kurian, Abha Shrivastava, Nona Walia, Priya Pathiyan are some of the excellent journalists still working with the Sunday Times. However the way in which the continuously keep on churning the stupid articles on 'Mobile Phone Hazards', 'Is Bipasha Basu Still the Nation's Sex Symbol', '10 Tests to Know if You and Your Spouse Have Problems' ! Such topics not only waste the latent talent of all the journos working with them. It's like putting Sachin to bat at No.9 or bringing on Wasim Akram when only 2 overs are left.
What the "Review" used to provide was a breath of fresh air. Maybe they did concentrate too much on filmstars, but then again they never neglected the cricketers, the hockey stars, IT czars, writers and maybe sometimes 'Society' types. They never had a supplement without an article on an environmentalist or probably a budding film--maker, probably an amazing article that asked people questions no one ever did before. It was truly a deep insight into people, not fully an interview, not fully a third - person article, it did something which nothing else I remember has managed to match (probably RD). It was an insight in to people's minds. What puts it aside was that unlike books(i.e. biographies and autobiographies) which focus on a single person in extreme detail, it was a glance at a lot of people at the same time. It beautifully encapsulated their lives, their struggles, their moments of victory and probably a very impartial third person, a sort of out-of-the-world synopsis overlooking the small wrinkles and bringing to us the beautiful inner face of the subject. It sometimes wove an unseen thread between the various people featured saying 'all these people fought through the hard times and came out on top. That was truly amazing !
I never remembering Review ever resorting to sensationalism, ever indulging in fruitless, futile gossip (less said the better for PT) or ever specifically glorifying/bringing down the public image of a famous personality. It never targeted anyone specifically but brought a balanced view of things in general. That does not mean it shied away from the tough questions. Esp. with regards to filmstars. I personally am not on the bandwagon, which opposes anything that some of us like to call 'commercial/masala' cinema. I think this is mass cinema, the masses (and sometimes, yours truly too) like these forms of entertainment and therefore The Review cannot be blamed for according the Shah Rukh Khans and the Kareena Kapoors their big coloured centre/main page slot. However what mattered was that some people get too soft while questioning filmstars while some go the HardTalk way and there is nothing but a slurry of futile personal questions. The Review did ask a few hard hitting questions however they never over-emphasised the personal life of their subjects nor did they make such matters the centrestage of their articles.
Then one Sunday morning suddenly people at the Times probably suffer an alien burgling of their minds or maybe they donate their rationality at the Alpha Centauri Local Centre for aiding greater research into the Mostly Harmless ones. They suddenly come up with this seemingly amazing idea of 'Men & Women'. They decide that the erstwhile Review needs a super trimmer programme and make it a four page supplement from the previous 6 pages. They decide that the ad area remains the same (obviously), so that most of the times, most of the paper is staring at us proclaiming that Arrow invented the collar. They come up with this flabbergasting idea of 'comparisons'. The review compared people without actually saying so. It as I said wove them in a sort of spell, M&W made it obvious and therefore tasteless and bland. Also probably some PT rejects were promoted (?) so that when two filmstars were compared they invariably would be Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapur. Ummm.. very subtle.. Then sometimes they came up with these weird ideas about how various people relaxed, what they wore etc etc. Notice how again the subtle comparisons of its predecessor is replaced by a more tasteless direct comparison. Still the supplement retained its focus on 'people' but in a much different way. We only knew what XYZ eats. There was no tantalizing foreplay, no more beautiful sign-offs , no more an 'article'. What we had was a collection of n number of facts presented together. That was bad.
They then deal the sucker punch. They give us "Life!". It's supposed to be everything. Health, Entertainment, Food, etc etc etc... It ends up being nothing. Again we do have good long articles but the supplement loses it backbone, - it forgets it focus on 'people'. Now we have long drawn out reasons for sibling rivalry, 10 reasons to find out if you have chosen the right man etc, etc. Even listing the topics would be terrible, let alone reading. Maybe the techno section saves the day, but why not leave that to the Digits and the CHIPs and the C@Hs to sort that out. All we want is a high class, well-written focus on people, as it was before. This is not a case of being old-fashioned, or not accepting change but a simple case of opting for the better. I've heard that the journo community is tuned in, so this is a fervent plea to give all the faithful readers those old times back. Till then, have a good Life!.

Abhishek
(for a change in all seriousness.)