Pun Intended..

So my friend showed me there was more to the Times of India website (www.timesofindia.com) (than the sorry excuse of a website they have, and I'm just referring to the content). I was browsing through the ePaper version, which took a while to load, even on my cable modem and 802.11g home network. So finally when the page did load, I got to read the actual Indian newspaper, a nice touch I thought. But my eyes kind of skipped the whole TOI crap on top and I skimmed to some neat pictures and color photographs of gyrating Bollywood Stars, for a moment I though I was on page 3 of the rather infamous Bombay Times. To me the whole facade seemed like some cosmo-vanity fair hybrid. And all this from a newspaper which claims maximum circulation , although they always seem to be at loggerheads with Hindustan Times every year after the "results" are out.
To me, the day the newpaper group got into Entertainment and promotion for movies, it sounded the death-knell of good journalism. I have been reading this newspaper since I was a kid, what we have now is nothing but a pale shadow of the past. Changes are obvious and forseeable , but what peeves me is the abysmal quality of news reporting. Somehow the seriousness has all been squeezed out of the news , and all that is left is a cheap thrill tabloid report. What really baked my noodle were the "eye-catching" headlines I read :

"Anastasia is Mys Paris" // Sports
"Married Sehwag turns Bachelor, of Arts" // Sports
"In the house , now for the party" // Politics

Oh, my god, this is awful awful pun. This is just a sample of an endless bevy of bad rhymes, something you'd see upfront on the TOI website as well. Most of them are childish and some of them don't even make good puns. It just seems like a bad punch line taken out of the Sitcom "Friends". Does TOI consciously make an effort at producing such terrible headlines? You know what I think ? That they actually have a "Pun Department" , which takes in all the blase headlines and news reports from the reporters and the editor, and make an effort to see the pun in every situation. Haven't got a pun ? Improvise . Still not working ? Jam a few terrible non-sensical words .. Still doesn't work ? Use Hindi too yaar.. Amazing, you just gave a bunch of college hippies from South Bombay some brilliant work to do. Thank you for ruining journalism. Thank you for ruining a good newspaper and making my mornin coffee taste bad. Thank you for making reading in the Bathroom a whole shitload of pain. Get the pun , eh Times of India ?