I had been hearing of the Times vs. The Hindu wars in Chennai which had taken the media battle into reader domain without as much as an excuse me. But since I was not the target audience I did not get involved nor did I get unnecessarily worked up.

Today however I saw a blog on thesouthreports.com site and much to my discomfort and displeasure I found myself being dragged into a futile conversation.

Don’t blame me. I have been a Deccan Chronicle and Hindu reader almost my entire mature life. And decided that while DC was extremely effective as a mover of bowels, the Hindu was without any pretensions the mover of minds. Don’t get me wrong, I love the DC and love the way it endeavours to make my day by doing everything from putting its foot into its mouth to creating news just for the heck of it.

By the time the Times made a dent into my world I had reached a well considered decision that all the newspapers were the same. All different avatars of the same malaise.

But proudly enough, the Hindu stood aloof from the mass media movement that insisted on packaging trash and promoting junk.

So when I saw the Times Ad Film for Chennai, I smirked. Telling a staunch Chennaikar that Hindu Readers were not just sleepy joes, but also that they knew it because they had been numbed by generations of Hindu reading. This was a bigger joke than the Times could ever crack.

http://youtu.be/kxz4WvGG7uA is the youtube link to the film from Times that started it all.

And the Hindu ad which was produced as a retort can be viewed by clicking on http://youtu.be/Ckzsh9SpUAQ.

If the Times had painted a Hindu landscape with different shapes of drowsiness, the Hindu painted a bunch of otherwise normal people with shades of dumb that would have left Surds and Blondes gasping in relief.

Both the films thus landed up painting a scenario that would find a few takers. And with the films being viewed merely for academic purposes I would imagine that the quiet winner of the skirmish was a cutesy coy cat otherwise known as Deccan Chronicle.

Or a newspaper which in amalgamating both the Hindu and the Times conceived a successor called the HINDUstan TIMES.