+ News As It Happens... And As It Doesn't

I am a little late on this, so you may not be able to refer back to this. Sorry.

Happened about 10 days back. July 13. A headline on the front page of the Chennai edition of the Indian Express said: Tea export hit by rupee’s fall.

Oboy! that must have been pretty drastic and sudden, I thought. For, as far as I knew, the rupee had been strengthening continuously for some time.

But again, the rupee’s fall would never hurt tea export – or any export, for that matter – from the little I know about trade and economics.

Well, the first paragraph of the story set it right for me. They did mean the appreciating rupee. Only, I guess, the sub editor who gave the headline didn’t know the difference between appreciation and depreciation of currency, or didn’t know the meaning of the words.

How did that sub become a sub?

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The sub must have become a sub the same way the guy who collated the videos for the Shankaracharya story became whatever he has become. This is today, and I saw the news item on Headlines Today just a few minutes ago.

The story slug said Seer Charged or something to that effect. Vague enough. And the story kept talking about the “Shankaracharya”. But come on, I thought impatiently, which one? There are five Shankara Mutts. And the only Shankaracharya who has recently been in trouble has been the one at Kanchi. When I saw the visual, I thought with horror: What?! The Sringeri Acharya in trouble too?

What else would I have thought after being shown about three minutes of close-ups and pans of the senior Shankaracharya of Sringeri?

But then, I had fleetingly seen on a Tamil channel, when I was remote-surfing, a shot of the Kanchi Shankaracharya. I clicked back to the channel, and eventually the headlines confirmed what my momentary glimpse had made me suspect. It was another problem for the Kanchi Shankaracharya, who had earlier been hounded by a murder charge.

Questions:

How can anyone confuse between the Kanchi Shankaracharya and the Sringeri Shankaracharya?

Why was a person who could confuse between the Kanchi Shankaracharya and the Sringeri Shankaracharya allowed anywhere near a newsroom or a news production facility?

Is this what people mean when they say “Making news”?

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After this, the news slug on The Times of India, Bangalore, on Sunday. Pratibha Patil had just won the presidential election to become the first woman president of India, and the there were two pictures - one of Patil with Sonia Gandhi, and the other alongside it of Patil as a kid of about two. The slug: “You’ve come a long way, baby”.

Par for the course.

No more comments, but....

Which do you think happened first: the slug or the kid photo?
And, in the light of the Shankaracharya bit, this slug was – how would you put it? – jujube...?