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Guest Blog 14 – Anand C

Good students are good students in the Indian education system, regardless of how well others perform. You get “first class” if you have 60%. Simple!

However in the American educational system you could get a ‘B’ if you got 60% and half the class scored higher than you. On the flip side, you could get less than 40% and still get a ‘B’ if most of the class is behind you. The key to decide which side of the ‘bump in the bell curve’ one sits on is which class you get compared to!

If Mani Ratnam’s Aayitha Ezhuthu is analyzed a la the Indian education system (i.e., by itself, not in comparison with his past films), he would get a great grade – commercially and critically speaking. Most current reviews though seem biased in one form or another by the “relative grading” syndrome.

What do you think?

Guest Blog 13 – Anand C

I’ve wondered how news is prioritized and given preference and how they choose what is repeated again and again on 24-hour news channels. (Case in point: The same weekend that Britney Spears went through her “one-day” wedding in Las Vegas, NASA’s Rover landed had its historic Mars landing. It’s anybody’s guess as to which of the two got all the ink).

One of my friends (a professional in the print industry) seems to know why. According to him, the pocket guide to determine what is news consists of two high-level guidelines:

1. Someone died.
2. Someone got rich.

Evidently, degrees of separation from these two guidelines determines how much “human interest” a story has. Sounds morbid but true…

UPDATE: The NEWS being advertised as a ‘show’ is more scary. What happens when bad news is being delivered about a company that is sponsoring that segment? Also, news anchors create brands around themselves for being trustworthy. Now, who does the audience trust and more importantly, hold accountable – the TV network or the announcer? -a.