Editor Missing by RUBEN BANERJEE

Author:RUBEN BANERJEE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2022-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

AN INLOOK

THE DOUBLE-SPREAD ADVERTISEMENT LOOKED AWESOME. IT proudly announced Outlook’s marquee annual event, the Outlook SpeakOut, to be held in Delhi in two days’ time. The theme was ‘women empowerment’, and it exhorted women to resist any pushback and reclaim the advances they had made in India in the face of deep-rooted patriarchy. Calling on all women to rejoice over the strides they had made, the advertisement also showcased an impressive line-up of speakers – southern film star and politician Khushboo Sundar, actresses Kubbra Sait, Shefali Shah and Kirti Kulhari, Paralympian Deepa Malik and the then Indian Mahila Congress chief, Sushmita Dev, among others. The chief guest was to be the then Union Minister of Women and Child Development and Textiles, and the advertisement had her photograph displayed prominently at the top of the right-hand page. But there was a major problem. Underneath her photograph and above her designation where it should have said ‘Smriti Irani’, it simply said: SMT. IDIOT – all in caps.

My eyes popped, and my heart skipped several beats as the advertisement was presented to me that Thursday afternoon. It was about two hours after the magazine – on being printed in the wee hours – had reached our office and my desk. I had flipped through the pages, checking all the editorial content, but had not bothered to check the advertisements. In any case, the same advertisement about the Outlook event had been carried in at least two previous issues of the magazine without any problem. This time, someone in the editorial team chanced to look at the advertisement and froze. Gathering his thoughts after the initial shock, he came running down to the floor where I sat. He laid open the advertisement in front of me, and I couldn’t believe what I saw.

We were stunned and speechless, not knowing how to react. Our own annual event was just two days away, and we, in our advertisement in the latest issue of the magazine, had called the Union minister ‘Smt Idiot’. It blanked me out completely for a while. When I came to my senses, I picked up the magazine and ran across to Indranil’s room. He was in a meeting, but literally fell off his seat when I showed him the advertisement.

Having spent decades in the media, I knew a thing or two about printers’ devils. Mistakes happen – some serious and some that can be brushed off as entertaining. For example, a newspaper in Hyderabad had the practice of stating ‘By Our Staff Reporter’ underneath the story headline. The headlines were in bigger fonts and ‘By Our Staff Reporter’ invariably in a much smaller font size. But one day, something went wrong, and both the headline and the credit line for a report on the front page appeared in the same font size. It read: ‘Girl raped in city by our staff reporter’.

Such bloopers, though rare, were not entirely uncommon, and I have in my career come across mistakes such as a headline proclaiming, ‘Blind student invited to watch Republic Day Parade in Delhi’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.