Things that have irked me in the last few weeks

I spent three weeks at home in Chennai post-endsems and pre-internship, preparing for a farcical GRE, and the trials and tribulations I underwent here due to heat and boredom were severely compounded by the following phenomenons, which when named, must be preceded by a string of the choicest invectives in all possible languages.


In no particular order, they were:
1. Times of India ; Chennai Edition
This lousy paper took over thus far staunchly The Hindu households (not the religious affiliation here.) due to their marketing policy that appealed to the cheapskate preeminent in all Tam-Brahms. At the niggardly sum of Rs. 260 or so, you could subscribe to this paper and get the lousy rag throughout the year, and they threw in a diary and a couple of travel bags for free. I think we paid for the diary and the travel bags though, for who could charge anything for such trash as the TOI paper? I come home from Surathkal, aching for the crossie and the Editorial, and find this vile joke of a newspaper basking in the seat previously occupied by honorables such as The Hindu and The Economic Times. Oh, sin!
Typos are the order of the day; maintaining consistency in article genre clearly means squat to the bunch of juveniles staffing the TOI office. A pathetic attempt at imitating BT Page 3 has often ugly and terribly dressed men and women posing for a cameraman who if he had any self-respect would kill either his subjects or himself. A Tween-times of sorts is clearly a forgery of Young World, and a terrible one at that. Severely demoralizing to see this paper every morning, leading to harsh words exchanged between mother and self lead to the eventual scrapping of this (i don't want to call it newspaper).

My sister claims people in the US refer to TOI more familiarly as the Toilet paper Of India. Well done, I thought.

2. Shobha De

Excuse me while I control my urge to retch and tear my hair out.

She wrote this book called 'Superstar India: From Incredible to Unstoppable' which was reviewed relentlessly by the media.

I quote, from the book ;

-- Your screen cannot display the content here on account of its atrociously inane nature --

In my opinion, Shobha De should be bludgeoned to bloody death by a rumpus of bibulous baseball-bat bearing baboons. The bitch.


3. Women with discount coupons:

I was recently in line at a supermarket behind a woman dressed to utterly blind, where she had about three cartloads of groceries she wanted to bill. The woman at the counter wearily lifted the last box of tissues (There were five, I think. Apparently a woman prone to much sweat.) People were waiting in line behind her, tapping their feet, clicking their tongues, making noises, whatever it is that people do to signify their irritation. This woman calmly, so calmly, takes out her Sodexho coupons and starts counting them. They're marked in denominators of Rs 5, and she has a bill of approximately 3k. I have a vague suspicion of having died and been reborn in the time she took to count to 300 or whatever.


I had a bunch more I wanted to write about, but it's already taken me three weeks or so to come up with this post I first started writing about way back in May, and it's June now.