The Hindu's bias ?

Over there, Sikhi, one of my former colleagues at work, mentioned some interesting stuff about the Hindu. I really love this paper. While I was in the US, I found it very hard to read any newspaper seriously, I never got myself to subscribe for any length of time to one. After moving back to India, I can't do without my morning dose of newspaper and specifically the Hindu. I don't know what exactly is the deal but newspapers in India are so much more compelling. Partly it is that the news here is more 'serious' and doesn't go into the human interest angle that all American newspapers seem to go for. The NYT and WSJ are of course as serious as you could want but perhaps they were too highbrow for me. The NYT always seemed to go into formal lengthy discourses about fairly stupid things :-). I have a tendency to want to read all the news in the newspaper and these guys try to cover so much that I would get exhausted and cranky. And about the WSJ, the less said the better. Anyway, the Hindu is just about right for me.

Getting back to the link above from Sikhi, it looks like the editor of the Hindu (N.Ram) is a 'card carrying' communist, and that causes him to bias the coverage of the Hindu towards China. According to the link above, the Hindu uncritically carries news stories of Xinhua (the mouthpiece of the Communist party in China), and systematically distorts Tibet-related news.

Umm.
Just wanted to put it out there for those passionately interested in such matters :-)

Wouldja believe ..

The Hindu had a interesting article about some word mangling that has been happening and the blame is being laid on internet culture. However the interesting thing (for me) is that I found I was guilty of some of the manglings. I was quite surprised :-)

Here's a listing:

correct: just deserts | wrong: just desserts
correct: strait-laced | wrong: straight-laced
correct: fount of wisdom| wrong: font of wisdom
correct: free rein | wrong: free reign
correct: buck naked | wrong: butt naked
correct: vocal cords | wrong: vocal chords
correct: shoo-in | wrong: shoe-in

To conclude they made an interesting point about common word usage: only men seem to hijack, crouch, kidnap, rob, grin, shoot, dig, stagger, leap, invent or brandish.
And only women seem to consent, faint, sob, cohabit (!), undress (:-)), clutch, scorn or gossip.

The 'co-habit' and 'undress' things remind me of an amusing thing I read a long time back: in a survey of sexual behavior, the number of different sex partners that men on average claimed to have, was above the average for women.

Doesn't compute :-)