Monday, June 30, 2008

On defending...

Actual conversation today...
"Why are you of all people siding with office vamps?"
"What?"
"You removed that comment about that woman..."
"Not because of her, but because the person who asked me to remove it had a point."
"But K, of all people you should not sympathise with vamps."
"People have all the right in the world to sleep around, you know, emancipation and all. Of course, that does not lead to good taste but, to each his own."
"So you're defending office vamps and sluts?"
"Well, there are man-whores also in offices, they're as bad."
"You are defending marriage breakers."
"I know what you are getting at, and I just think that the marriage was not stable enough as it is if the lure of a dirty hole can break it. But that is just my opinion on the matter. I've been an innocent bystander to my parents broken marriage. I can't spend the rest of my life asking 'What If's?' way too many dependencies. Dangerous area, since that will probably throw me over the edge and I'll need to visit a shrink again."
"And what about HT now?"
"Don't know, I just hope that they can get a good guy, because that paper deserves it after cocking around the last two years."
-----------------------------
Thrash incomeptence, which is what almost everybody is guilty of in the sorry mess and not stupid affairs. Because the incompetence was there to begin with and not created as a result of what might or might not have happened. Yes, it might have made the problem worse, but the bigger problem with HT is not in the editorial, its in management!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, you ask why the 'stupid affairs' are not to be blamed. The affair is to be blamed in this case. PP started off strongly. He was given the task of reshaping the web edition, which was supposed to be his forte. And he was good. The affair is to be blamed for his downfall, because he later had NO time for his staff other than one person. This one person was ALWAYS in his cabin. This disrupts work, rubs people the wrong way too. He delayed decisions, delayed meetings, and put the blame squarely on his staff, whom he called "bodies". Never accepted responsibility of what was happening. His going was not surprising, it was actually surprising that he came back from America after four months there.

Anonymous said...

i didn't see the comment you removed, but from what i can gather, it must have slandered some individual. well, good that you removed it. but why did you put it in the first place, since you moderate comments? i have said this before, don't let this blog go the way of earlier media blogs which indulged in libel.

Anonymous said...

Good riddance for HT, the guy was no good as far as editorial goes. He never had a single story idea, he never had any critical input to give on stories because he did not understand the news part of the business at all. He was apparently good with design, that's what he's done all his life and he was someone who did understand technology. By and large he was a stooge of the management, he didn't have the guts to stand up for the people he was responsible for. In fact he was right because his job was to basically cut costs, cut jobs, give minimal raises to save the company's money as his best pals were the CEO Verma and the HR guy Saxena apart from of course the sports woman. He would have been excellent in Sharad Saxena's position, as he was polite enough to be an HR guy and since Saxena also heads technology Paul would have been better since he surely understands technology more than this Saxena.

Anonymous said...

Pankaj Paul was very polite, and that was the only good thing about him. He was the kind of man who would smile and smile and then put a knife into your back. Perhaps he was just saving his job, perhaps he was doing just his masters' bidding. But he was no editor, that's all. The editor, as an institution, is dead actually. How many strong editors can you name at present? Shekhar Gupta, MJ Akbar (alas, without a paper!), Chandan Mitra... In fact, you won't even know the names of editors of of other big papers. Pankaj was just a puppet who could not do anything with the paper, so started his little romance with sports and sports woman.

Anonymous said...

Polite or rude Paul cant have any sympathy because he screwed the paper with great incompetence and indifference, effortlessly while still pretending to be in charge of the situation. He was openly laughed at because of his inability to understand anything about news and his open affair with a whore in sports section, but to give him credit for guts he never stopped it in public. Only at the end of his days here he stopped this woman from spending half a day at his cabin. He plotted against senior editors in HT because his incompetence showed them up as much better. People who have seen his mails say that he and Sports Woman were undermining many senior people. If the editor of a big paper starts screwing his staff literally and figuratively, then the paper can go to the dogs and that is what is happening to HT now. HT will long rue the day it decided to hire foreign bred editors.