The latest in this attempt to sabotage the creativity of my tribe is a gaffe by DD (Those watching Tamil TV channels should not confuse DD with the buxom anchor Divya Darshini. It simply means our good ol”Doordarshan.
In its Twitter page DD posted a picture of Narendra Modi and party colleagues at Bharatiya Janata Party’s parliamentary board meet. May be the person who did it wanted to lighten up the atmosphere at a time when grim brainstorming was going on about the party’s stance on formation of government in Kashmir where statte assembly elections brought a fractured verdict and a hung assembly.
No the picture itself was not funny. That didn’t lighten up the mood.. It was the caption which read “Santa Claus feeding monkeys in the zoo”. The clip went viral and a panicky DD played spoilsport by withdrawing the clip. These guys don’t have much sense of humour do they?
Granted NaMo does resembles to some extent the guy who ,manages to come down the chimney despite his formidable girth to leave good children gifts. And he has been playing Santa (some would say bad Santa) by lavishing Bharat Ratnas on the dead and the living.. But even if you accept him as Santa how come his party colleagues were perceived as monkeys. Where they wearing monkey caps. A section of the Sangh parivar has been monkeying around no doubt playing with people’s religious beliefs but would it be still fair to compare thdem to monkeys who are probably morally superior to our netas? Monkeys if they knew about the clip would hang down their heads in shame or commit mass suicide like lemmings.
If this is the reverse of Darwin’s theory of evolution with a man evolving into a monkey during my days in a news agency there was a remarkable incident of fasttrack evolution a la Darwin. There was a sports news item which had to be edited And when the edited story came on , the computer I was struck by the name of one athelete. He was called Human Singh. When checked it turned out that his name was Hanuman Singh and some wise editor became a factor in the cause of evolution by turning the monkey lord into human.
And what do you do with a junior colleague who wanted to sweeten up something as dire as hawala by replacing the word with halwa in one news item? You see geniuses are not a monopoly of the government media like AIR and DD. We guys in the private media can often be one up on them.
Talking of government media , a lot of things get lost in translation there. Many times in All India Radio translations end up being so hilarious that we humour guys pull up our hair in despair worried about being thrown out of business.Take this gem. The English news service had a story about communal riot which ended with the sentence “Security forces are patrolling the streets?) Some Hindi genius translated it as Suraksha Karmi sadkon par petrol chidakh rahe hain”(Security forces are sprinkling petrol on streets). May be they expected that the smell of petrol will keep the miscreants away.
Sample this gem. Once MMS (if you don’t remember who he is his full name is Manmohan Singh and he is our former Prime Minister) said something about Andaman and Nicobar islands. “The English bulletin talked about “The Prime Minister outlined steps to let the islands develop”. The translator in Hindi focussed on the words “”to let” and translated it as a”dweepon ko kiraya pe dena (renting out the islands).
And what do you make of a DD news reader who read the name of Chinese President Xi Jinping as Ten Jinping? The fault my dear reader is of the ancient Romans and not the poor news reader’s.. Who the hell asked them to com up with roman numerals?
And what makes you think that media guys have a monopoly of gaffes? When child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi became a Nobel laureate congratulations poured in from BJP cadre for Madhya Pradesh minister
Santa Claus And The Monkeys
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