The great thing about wish-lists is that they need not adhere to any logic or norm, except the one they have to be unrealistic. Or at least the ones that newspaper compile are.

So without much ado, here is the compendium of things I would want to see in 2010 or perhaps even later, say by 3020. So folks, the dope on the hopes.

1) Any one who says he had Chinese food, and includes Gobi Manchurian in the list, deserves to be deported to Fu Manchu or any such place where they eat dog meat only. Sorry for shouting, but IF GOBI MANCHURIAN IS CHINESE THEN KATERINA KAIF IS AVVAIYAR.

2) Legally ban low-waist pants over size-32. If the Constitution doesn’t allow it, well, ban the Constitution. Or even burn it. We don’t need the Constitution that isn’t even remotely useful to the public. To see the tummy lolling out like double-pillows while the pant sags somewhere near the ankles is to suffer the worst form of pornography.

3) The courts shall not entertain any graft case involving amounts less than Rs.1,000 crore. After A Raja and Madhu Koda scandals, amounts less than Rs.1000 crore are an extreme  insult to corruption. The Supreme Court can also seriously consider thinking up a special branch to deal with corruption cases. Needless to say, Dinakaran should head this court, as none comes with better credentials than him when you are talking of corruption.

4) All banks must explain in clear-cut logical terms as to why they need to have 16-digit numbers for savings bank accounts. To me, it just seems a sheer waste of numerals. Normal human beings cannot, I repeat, cannot remember numbers involving digits higher than 3. To create 16-digit numbers just for the convenience of unthinking computers is an exercise in excellent perversity.

5) Why don’t telephone companies come out straight and accept that they themselves don’t understand their various plans and talk-time schemes. It’s advisable to quarantine anyone who claims that he or she understands all the schemes on offer. Such openly deranged people are a threat to humanity.

6) In the interest of larger common good, each and every individual of this nation should monetarily contribute large sums to Sun Pictures if it promises to stay away from film production. Sun Pictures, for the record, not only backs all the worst movies produced in a year, but also comes up with the most torturous trailers for them.

7) The Prime Minister or the President should finally take the initiative and address the nation, unravelling the biggest secret confronting humankind: What’s the need for a Vice-President in a country like India? Brand the President or the Prime Minister as straight liar, if the explanation is anything other than: The Rashtrapathi Bhavan has too many free rooms.

The country must willingly sign any nuclear test ban treaty if the list of ‘bannable’ items include Barkha Dutt.

9) It’s time to despatch a strong showcause notice to Prince Charles and the men folk in Scotland seeking their explanation on how on earth they accepted kilt as their national attire. To the rest of the humanity, wearing kilts can be acceptable only if transvestitism is a non-negotiable national rule.

10) All movies where the hero uses unimaginable quantities of prosthetics and shows up as something like an unborn boy or a mummified zombie will have to suffer penal tax of 35,000 per cent. A further service cess and octroi will have to be levied if the hero sports a six-pack in some scene. Further, Kamal Haasan’s make-up kit will have to stand confiscated.

10a) With particular reference to Tamilnadu, directors of movies that involve Madurai as their backdrop should be taken aside and shot dead. This has to be done to as a safety precaution to prevent the dangerous virus from spreading further.

11) People using perfumes, which cost above thousand rupees, must be counselled with the help of specialists in common sense that the human nose doesn’t come with built-in sensors to differentiate between ordinary body-sprays and expensive ones. And it also needs to explained to any man that women are not going to be aroused into carnal pleasure just because he spends Rs.10,000 on a vial of perfume.

12) Call all the intelligent scientists of the world. Bring in all the top IQed men and women. Get them all together and figure out  how a person could be named: Uda Walawwe Mahim Bandaralage Chanaka Asanga Welegedara. This Sri Lankan fast bowler has obesity in his name itself.

13) Union of Sports and whatever other portfolio he holds has to declare on the floor of both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on the need for the government to run the Wushu Kung-Fu Federation of India. He has also got to elaborate what the heck is this Wushu Kung-Fu. (Latest news: After a bit of googling, it has come to light that Wushu Kung-Fu is an ancient form of martial art that nobody is interested in anymore, and this includes also the makers of insufferable Chinese movies shot in low budget in downtown Hong Kong).

14) The man, or the team, that invented the idea of Captcha need to be gassed. Now, Captcha is the system of rightly typing out randomly scribbled askew letters for validating that the user is a human being and not a spam machine. There are any number of ways to establish humanness. But this has to be the most cruel way ever devised. And if this doesn’t deserve extinction, human kind can never be saved.

15) The nation should pardon Akshay Kumar’s dress sense. While it is at it, an all-party delegation should go to Kareena Kapoor and tell her that meaning to look slim is fine. But if she thins anymore there will be a technical problem: No person can be slimmer than her photograph.

16) Writers in English in India should reaslise that this is a land of several hundred languages. To understand English itself requires extra effort. So to involve strange Latin or French phrases in English writing is plain stupid. Ipso Facto, Crank’s Corner is exempt from this rule.

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

But this may not be the idea that you will get if you have been keeping track of the Ajmal Kasab Mumbai terror attack case. The man has been caught on camera unleashing bullets and mayhem and was clearly part of the contingent that splashed into Indian shores and wreaked unprecedented havoc, killing nearly 200 innocent people, in Mumbai November last. But the case has been going on in the court as if we are all set for 1000 years of life.

Pardon me if I sound very lay and totally uninitiated, but to me the court had to decide just one thing: On which date should Kasab be hanged. But they are discussing everything apart from that single-most important detail. It’s bit like getting every thing ready for the marriage, without deciding the bride and the groom.

At this pace, the matter may reach some kind of denouement by around 2097. As I said, most of us would be gone by then. But why should we miss out on the whole run-up and all the events. So here it goes on how the case will pan out in the years to come, and what all the attendant events that the media will report.

Actually thinking up this was not difficult: I just tried to be logically stupid.

Kasab’s lawyer demands case papers in Pashto

Mumbai, Aug 26 (2018): The ongoing case in the Mumbai terror attack took an intriguing turn today with Ajmal Kasab’s lawyer, Abdul Khaleej, filing a writ with the Mumbai High Court seeking the case papers to be written in Pashto, the Arabic language that Kasab is most comfortable with.
Khaleej, filing the writ, told the Court that Kasab has not been able to follow the proceedings because the relevant papers are not in Pashto, the only language he is familiar with.

Hearing the case Justice Khoobchand Mirchandani ordered the prosecution to provide the translation of the case papers in Pashto to enable Kasab to keep track of what is happening to him.

Meanwhile, government sources said that the translation of papers into Pashto will take two more years as there are over one lakh pages to work on. The government has decided to set up a high-level committee of language experts to decide on what the hell is Pashto.

It may be recalled that Ajmal Kasab was caught red-handed some 10 years ago trying to pump bullets on every bystander in his vision. The prosecution’s case is that the Ajmal who massacred people on Nov 26, 2008 is the same Ajmal who was caught and is also the one who is in judicial custody now.

It may also be recalled that the papers pertaining to Ajmal case have already translated into Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Esperanto, smsese and Karachi slang.

The man who shot Kasab dead,
case takes intriguing turn

Mumbai, Jan 26 (2025): A pall of gloom today descended over the Breach Candy hospital here as the photographer, who shot Ajmal Kasab while he was busy shooting others at the Churchgate and Taj Hotel, today died of massive heart attack. He was 85 and is survived his close family and Ajmal Kasab.

The photographer, working with a popular group of newspapers, had clicked on his camera the visceral images of Ajmal, toting his machine gun and going on a killing spree at the Church Gate. The photograph was one of the important evidences of the prosecution.

Meanwhile, following the photographer’s demise, Ajmal’s lawyer moved the Mumbai High Court urging it to not take into account the photograph as an important material evidence.

‘The photograph ceases to be valid and legal as its photographer himself has faded out of life,’ said Ajmal’s lawyer not unreasonably. ‘When the photographer himself is not permanent, how can you rely convincingly one something that he produced,’ the Lawyer said.

The Court, which had reconvened after the two month summer holiday, posted further hearing in the case to July 26, 2026.

Elsewhere, Pakistan pooh-poohed India’s latest dossier of details on Islamabad culpability in all the terrorist activities on Indian soil. The dossier include latest graphic video clipping, including that of Pakistan President personally hand-picking grenades and sten guns and handing over to Taliban recruits, who needless to say, were not dressed like stuntmen in a Vijayakanth movie.

MNS storms HC, seeks reporting in
Marathi by English newspapers

Mumbai, May 26 (2035): Armed activists, all reportedly fully paid-up members of the Maharashtra Navanirman Sena, today barged into the Mumbai High Court premises, and created stir by threatening all the news correspondents of English newspapers to report in chaste Marathi.

The MNS activists, who were carrying many dangerous weapons even though they were not all manufactured in Maharashtra, also wanted the court to provide a Marathi translation of the case papers to Ajmal Kasab.

‘Ajmal has been in Maharashtra for the last two decades and his knowledge of Marathi must be good enough for him to right a play for Jathra. So it is only fair that he be provided the case papers in Marathi,’ said a MNS spokesperson in chaste expletives.

In a related development, Ajmal today became a grandfather as his daughter gave birth to a baby boy in Karachi. Ajmal, it may be recalled, got married here some 25 years back when he was new to this place.

Following strong activism by leading human rights activists like Arundhathi Roy (she wrote a stinging 39,000-worded single sentence article), the court had given Ajmal special permission to live with his wife in a well-equipped villa constructed inside the jail. Ajmal’s wife, daughter of Abu Al Quereshi, a well-known al-Aaida terrorist,

Kasab dead, fast court set up to expedite case

Mumbai, Nov 26 (2075): Ajmal Kasab, the sole survivor of the first Mumbai terror attack case, which unfolded somewhere in 2008, today passed away in his sleep at his well-appointed room in the hi-tech villa in the heavily fortified Mumbai prison.

Ajmal was 85. He death came under normal circumstances, his fifth wife said in a statement. Ajmal is survived by 35 sons, 25 daughters, 8 wives and an orphaned case.

In a related development, the Centre today told the Lok Sabha that a Fast Track court was being set up to expedite the progress in the Kasab Mumbai terror attack case. This, the Home Minister said, will help in bringing to book the culprits in the case at the earliest.
Elsewhere, the whole of Pakistan was heard to laugh uncontrollably.

PS: For the sake of MNS activists, the sound of laughter in Marathi was heard as: Ha, Ha, Ha!

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

And the people were happy and had nothing to worry, as Barkha Dutt was not born yet. And then, calendars were invented. History periods began. Students got a genuine reason to bunk classes. Mornings shows in cinema halls became a cultural necessity. And some Vijay starrers could be stealthily shown to have run for 100 days as some obscure theatre had featured them in their morning slot, leading to a situation wherein some youths began to feel that history classes were comparatively sufferable.

Anyway, it is not impossible to come to the conclusion that human life would have been lot simpler and far easier had there been no invention of the calendar.

For starters, scoring marks in 10th standard exams would have been a cinch, as students would not have to remember when the hell did Stafford Cripps come to India and when on earth did the Minto Marley reforms unleashed. Students could actually write and get away with lines like: ‘well the Cripps chap arrived but the Gandhi guy wasn’t impressed’.

Still, why these things are deemed important is a historical secret. I know who Ghajini was —- a man with a strange name who spawned an even more strange screen character whose exclusive trait was that he was such a such dork that he couldn’t remember his own name  —– and why the Crimean war was fought —- because reality shows were still to be conceived and they had nothing better to do than involve themselves in gory combat.  But these information have not earned me a single extra paisa in life, nor the knowledge has conceivably made me a better human being. I cannot also imagine that the security guard in my residence holds me in higher esteem just because I happen to recollect some of the dates and years deemed to be historically important.

Without dates and years, history tomes, with no numbers to carry, will surely look slimmer than a visiting card. And history itself can be unfussily recorded. Like: India was a land of peace and the Vedas, which till date nobody has a clue to, and then there were a clutch of Panipet Battles and the Mughal invasion began, to be followed by the Brits, one midnight Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, okay India got freedom, and Madhu Koda made several thousands of crores of rupees by being a humble son of the soil. See in a few crisply conceived lines, we have elaborately covered the entirety of India’s broad history that otherwise would have taken pages more than A Raja’s crores to write.

No calendars also mean your grandfather cannot take off on his terminally tedious lines: ‘back in 1940, we walked 10 miles daily to school’. If he said that you can stump him by pointing out, ‘thatha, don’t blabber just because thathas are supposed to. Calendars aren’t invented yet. So 1940 will just mean the stupid way that railway authorities run their clock’. But this will not stop your granddad from constantly yabbering, for oldies like him are programmed by nature to gabble incessantly and incoherently to young people who find them irrelevant even in the best of times.

Furthermore, without calendars we wouldn’t age in numerical terms, and more importantly, there would be no birthday parties to throw or attend. Birthday dos and celebrations, if you get down to them, have caused more harm and destruction to the world than global warming possibly has.

Let us talk specifics here: Take the parties that zealous parents are wont to throw on the first birthday of their child. These are increasingly becoming shows in which more money and human effort are wasted than that was expended in fighting the First World War. And one look at the venue after such parties are over, you may actually come to the conclusion that the First World War had just been fought there.

Mankind has evolved and developed on so many fronts, but still it has not understood that ordering a 2 kg chocolate cake on a kid’s first birthday is criminally useless as children, at that age, find delicious only things that are carelessly strewn on the ground. Dirt, insects, wooden pieces, wastepaper are all gourmet items in Planet Child.

Try this quick experiment if you have a kid handily around: Place a scrumptious piece of some wonderful eatable and an equally crunchy portion of everyday household filth on the table. The child, if you observe carefully, will not touch both. Because, well, it is sleeping. Kids always snooze off when it is time for you feed them. They are timed to wake up and throw a racket only when you are utterly popped out.

Talking off popping out, these days it is mandatory, almost by a strict constitutional rule, to involve a ‘party-popper’ at birthday celebrations. Now you may wonder what is a party-popper. Quite simply, it is a small canister, with a turnable base, that ceremoniously guzzles out, with a festive pop, celebratory confetti, more classically defined in everyday terms as paper waste.

How this letting loose of tawdry and tinsel strips of showy paper amounts to sensible celebration of anything, will forever remain, like the mystery of Bermuda triangle, an unsolved conundrum.

Party-poppers are uncoiled at the precise moment when the cake is cut, and this is fine only if the whole purpose is to make the cake uneatable and the rest of the surroundings ‘uncleanable’. The beauty of the waste unleashed by party poppers is that they manage to get into the impossible crevices and nooks in any room and removing them is an exercise that has to be vigilantly attempted till the next birthday party.

I say this with the agonising authority of organizing several such parties over the years, including one last week, for my daughter. I will like to tell you more, but I have two urgent works to finish.

A house to clean.

And a daily-sheet calendar to strip.

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

Yes, food has now evolved to be the new F word and calories, which were once just the unit of heat, has now become the measurement of people’s fear and anxiety. However, it is not right to ridicule people’s desire to look fit and stay hearty as it is a question between living unhealthy and dying and living healthy and still dying.

Once you decide on the latter, more than what to eat and how to sweat it out, what to wear become imperative needs, because there is no bigger show off in the world than the one who is working out in gyms and supposedly eating all the right food. It is never impossible to spot the physical fitness fiend even in the midst of thousands: He is usually the one in the T-shirt four sizes smaller than his regular fit. Yes, regular fitness exercises come at a price: Reduced thinking faculty. Exhibit A: Salman Khan.

But since that has become the norm of the times, it is important that we answer a few vital questions related to individual well-being and workouts so that we are done with bigger exercise, which is to find reasonably healthy material for this weekly column.

What is the best time to exercise?

This is a good question to ponder over, because this gives you a valid excuse to further delay your decision before you actually get down to go on a fitness regimen. But the moment you make up your mind one way or the other, there can be no room for complacency, as you have to keep thinking up fresh reasons to further stay away from working out.

Luckily for souls like you, enough opportunities would present themselves to be thrown up as excuses to remain committedly lazy. During summers, in the mornings, it is a no-brainer to go to a gym to sweat it out when you can actually manage that better in the comforts of your own AC-ed bedroom. In the evenings, it is even worse, as people perspire so much that some of them may even think of fitting a sweat-water harvesting apparatus to their bodies. The winters, fortunately, are easier, as the weather itself is conducive for convenient and compelling lies to keep you warm in your laziness.

If for some strange reason, if you indeed take your exercises seriously, it is usually advised to get in touch with a physician. This is done with the fond hope that he will helpfully suggest some practical ways and means for you to avoid fitness routines altogether.

Can you explain the difference between calisthenics and aerobics?

Aerobics, as the dictionary defines it, is a set of physical exercises that are designed to increase the need for oxygen. This is usually managed by the commonsense logic of wearing extremely tight-fitting clothes. The beauty of aerobics attire is that it almost garrotes people at all the wrong places. Strangulation of little finger is a common cause of death among aerobics people.

Calisthenics, on the other hand, is another clutch of general fitness routines that involve specially trained people looking foolishly cheery even when they are making a complete ass of themselves in front of a rolling camera. Calisthenics, it should be said here, is only for demonstration purposes, and there may not be anybody out there who is actually doing it. Calisthenics is known to impart a suppleness in joints, especially since it can be spelled as callisthenics, too.

Which is better: Yoga or aerobics?

This is a very important question, and is actually a personal call a person has to take, taking into consideration various things like the smartness and personableness of the instructors. Yoga teachers are generally known to be flexible while aerobic tutors can be pliable. You decide which type suits you better.

Yoga, at the core, is a form of holistic routines conceived for the overall well-being of an individual, and is constructed on the traditional truths of this land, which is to thoroughly zap unwary individuals with high-sounding Sanskritized terms. Yoga involves various asanas that provide immediate litheness to tongues that utter them.

The main difference between yoga and aerobics, and an important reason why yoga usually tends to score over aerobics, is that a yoga expert can somehow trick people to believe that he or she is a yogi while an aerobics instructor cannot for the implicit reason that there is no word called ‘aerobi’.

How much time should one spend (on an average) at the gym daily?

Experts are unanimous that nothing less than two hours daily at the gym will deliver the necessary results. Experts also suggest that the two hours at the gym can be handily split into operational parts like: Five minutes of some random physical activity with weighty implements, including vigorously looking at them. And 115 minutes of ogling at your own figure from every possible angle on the myriad mirrors provided helpfully by the gym authorities.

What’s size zero? How does one attain that?

Size zero, as is self-evident, indubitably refers to the IQ of those who become so desperate in life that they end up believing that looking thin is chic and beautiful, when in reality they seem like walking, tragic exclamation marks.

Ramp-walk models are size-zero specialists and they achieve this exalted state by eating food that provide energy just enough to carry the little shreds of strangely cut cloth, which they are wont to wear in joyless casualness.

Write a note on Kareena Kapoor

There are some sceptics who assert that the Kareena who is seen in public with an impossible figure is actually a computer graphics-enabled model while the real Kareena is somewhere living happily and eating contentedly like the rest of the humanity. The sceptics base their argument on the unimpeachable logic that Kareena’s public looks and body structure are possible only if she were to subsist solely on decaffeinated, calorie-cut and fat-less oxygen.

Anyway, the Kapoor gal is a wonderful example of the strong-willed and steadfast types in Bollywood who sincerely live out the ultimate dictum of show business: Truth doesn’t matter.

How do health foods work?

Oh, do they?

But as long as there are people who are ready to shell out large sums of money for fat-free chocolates and sugar-less coffee when elementary logics suggests that they should pay less for all the things that are removed from their eatables, the health food will continue to be in good health.

If the Great God had really wanted us to consume tasteless things, which is what health foods are really, he wouldn’t have given us a long tongue embedded with taste buds and a longer tongue to complain if what is served is vapid.

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

Ha, ha, ha. Anyway, the way to be smart and chic on the internet is to speak the lingo that the pros speak. That is, you have to be an expert in crisp communication, otherwise defined as nonsense.

Talking of nonsense, here is a carefully compiled compendium of everyday internet usage and its specific utilities. The whole idea behind this urban and technical dictionary is to, well, there is no idea actually.

ASAP: It’s a good example to start this exercise as it represents the slapdash convenience that is at the core of this lexicon. ASAP gets to figure here because of the fact that it begins with the letter A, and I can’t think of any other internet term starting with ‘A’ to be fitted here so that it lives up to the ‘A to Z’ billing in the headline.

Usage: We will get to the actual focus of the article ASAP.

Fav: If you bother to take a microscope and carefully focus on the innards of the word ‘favourite’, you will realise the letter ‘u’ to be full of microbes, virus and other unspeakable worms of this world. And that is why the good souls in America amputated ‘u’ from favourite to make it favorite. But apparently, the letters ‘orite’, by virtue of the fact that they were so far promiscuous with the letter ‘u’, seem to have gotten a similar virus attack. So the good old favourite, and its neological cousin, favorite, have been clinically chemotherapied to classically read just fav. If this treatment doesn’t work, fav may be sloughed off to ‘fa’ to ‘f’ and eventually to just . The preceding blank space, in case you didn’t notice, read ‘favourite’.

Usage: Among the classical languages, Sanskrit is Karunanidhi’s fav.

FYI: For your information, FYI is the contraction of the phrase For Your Information.

Usage: FYI, the previous sentence should elicit laughter from you. 

Hashtag: This has to be the biggest discovery and contribution of the internet world to the rest of the humanity. For decades, the symbol ‘#’ had been lying forlorn and uncared for on the keys of the typewriter. No one knew what it was, and none had the courage to go anywhere near it as it were some kind of HIV-carrier, and ‘#’ remained untapped for closed to a century. And then the internet revolution happened, and not only ‘#’ found a use and a name was thought up for that: Hashtag, it is.

The tables seem to have turned with the vengeance, as it impossible to use modern application like twitter without ‘#’. In fact, neo-web researchers confirm twitter rests on the edifice provided by ‘#’. You take it out of life, a lot many people wouldn’t know what to do in their office time as twitter is the sole thing that seem to occupy them. Perhaps some of them may have to think of the dreaded future that may involve the monster called work.

Usage: I don’t know how to use # in a normal sentence.

Kewl: This one word represents the brilliance and the ease that define most of the internet. You may not have guessed it: Kewl stands for cool, which, as you can see, is a very difficult word to spell. The intelligent souls that people the worldwide web understood that cool could be simplified by the unmistakable convenience and contraction provided by kewl.

It is impossible to misspell kewl, as the four letters that make the word appear just once. But with cool, it is quite conceivable that you may stumped by the challenge as to which of the ‘o’s go in first.

Usage: Kewl.

LOL: Roll together Charlie Chaplin, Nagesh, P G Wodehouse and T Rajendhar and carefully distill all the humour, wit and comedy that these gentlemen beautifully and brilliantly represent. And what do you get? Well, LOL. It is the Viagra for the erection of humour, the magic capsule that powerfully adds all the witticism of the world when appended to any sentence.

Let me illustrate with an example. Suppose you say: ‘Telecom Minister A Raja is the most honest person in the world’; you will be immediately hauled up in the courts for defamation of public opinion. But when you make out a sentence like this: ‘Telecom Minister A Raja is the most honest person in the world. LOL’. The world around will quickly comprehend the thigh-slapping comedy inherent in the lines and congratulate, not you, but A Raja for his finely honed sense of levity and amusement.

Supreme Court verdicts, especially those authored by the likes of Dinakaran, will soon sport the asterisk of ‘LOL’.

LOL is also used to convey all manner of appreciation of humour. From extreme to pedestrian, every comic item has to produce a ‘LOL’.

Usage: Laughing Out Loud is what LOL is said to expand to; but in the history of the world nobody who has used LOL on the internet has ever really laughed out loud. No office allows that.

My Bad: Internet and technology people are always hard-pressed for time, space and grammar. Since they are so engrossed in their work, they can’t be troubled to write big sentences like ‘My Bad Luck’ or My Bad Time’. Instead, they succinctly shrink it amplify it as: My bad, I have to read Crank’s Corner. To which my only response could be: LOL.

Usage: It is my bad if you have not got the joke.

1: The inventive folks who populate the web understand the importance of multitasking and that’s why they have cajoled numerals to do double-duty as letters. 1 is won, 2 is to and too too. The previous line is not a mistake. L8 is late, L88 is late by eight minutes or eight years. Gr8 is great, while Gr is sound of a bear after eating the 8.  B4 is before, B is being on time.

If your question is: why resort to such confusing items, when to can be written with more clarity in traditional terms itself? Well, then you haven’t even begun to understand what internet is all about: It is about saying the most rational things in the world and doing them with utmost irrationality.

My industry, the newspaper industry, is a good example to define the underlying philosophy of the internet. Every newspaper regularly invest millions and millions of rupees and dollars to constantly upgrade their internet editions and continue to offer instant news through the very many distribution outlets that modern technology has thrown up. There has to be very good reason for us to be pouring in so much money regularly: Yes, you guessed it right, every newspaper, on an average, rakes in, dollar terms, zero per cent return. It’s official: No single news media outlet has made even a single paise out of internet operations. Content, as they say, is king. The finance minister, obviously, is somebody else.

ZZZZ: Your right response to this piece.

Usage: Like you care.

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.