Mishaps when editing..!
Robert Clements
Thursday, November 03, 2011 - Apart from writing this column there are also three magazines I am the editor off and very often while putting an article together I nearly fall off my chair with the howlers and bloomers that the reporters and sub- editors send me.
Lots of newspapers have had such bloomers in their pages: In Bombay a local newspaper carried a report: A young wife while drawing water from a well, slipped and fell. Cries of alarm brought a lorry driver who was passing by. He immediately ‘drove’ into the well and rescued her!Poor housewife! From an All India Tourist Guide: About 160 kilometres from Calcutta is Santi Niketan which attracts a lot of scholars from all over the world.
It is good to see classical Indian dancing and samples of other performing ‘rats’! Some years ago the government did exchange a bunch of terrorists for a plane load of passengers at Kandahar, but I never realized it was a national habit till I read a news item in the Times which read, ‘the police said that a case of murder cum dacoity had been registered and efforts were on to ‘trade’ the suspects.’ I was a little perturbed till I was told later by the kind editor, that the police had still not been able to ‘trace’ the dacoits!
And from Goa, a report in the Navhind Times: ‘The dead body of a hotel worker was found ‘living’ near the Church square!’ Locals in Goa boast about miracles that have happened in this once colony of Portugal, but this I’m sure must have excited a lot of pilgrims till the paper corrected the mistake the next day: Sorry readers, the body was quite dead and only ‘lying’ in the square! And in the south came this news item from a very established newspaper that had many women activists up in arms till the conservative editor in proper dhoti and kurta mentioned even ‘we make mistakes!’ The item appearing in the Classifieds section innocently said, ‘Wanted science graduates for selling engineering hardware and stenographers!’ Imagine selling stenographers! Quite a tall order huh?
English is a hard to please mistress and we slaves who have decided to woo, use and sell her wares have to be careful all the time. I’d like to end with one that seems strangely too close to the truth for comfort: ‘The Maharashtra government said that sugar will be supplied on a ‘fist’ come first basis! Was that a mistake or the truth about muscle power, I wonder..!
—Email:bobsbanter@gmail.com
Lots of newspapers have had such bloomers in their pages: In Bombay a local newspaper carried a report: A young wife while drawing water from a well, slipped and fell. Cries of alarm brought a lorry driver who was passing by. He immediately ‘drove’ into the well and rescued her!Poor housewife! From an All India Tourist Guide: About 160 kilometres from Calcutta is Santi Niketan which attracts a lot of scholars from all over the world.
It is good to see classical Indian dancing and samples of other performing ‘rats’! Some years ago the government did exchange a bunch of terrorists for a plane load of passengers at Kandahar, but I never realized it was a national habit till I read a news item in the Times which read, ‘the police said that a case of murder cum dacoity had been registered and efforts were on to ‘trade’ the suspects.’ I was a little perturbed till I was told later by the kind editor, that the police had still not been able to ‘trace’ the dacoits!
And from Goa, a report in the Navhind Times: ‘The dead body of a hotel worker was found ‘living’ near the Church square!’ Locals in Goa boast about miracles that have happened in this once colony of Portugal, but this I’m sure must have excited a lot of pilgrims till the paper corrected the mistake the next day: Sorry readers, the body was quite dead and only ‘lying’ in the square! And in the south came this news item from a very established newspaper that had many women activists up in arms till the conservative editor in proper dhoti and kurta mentioned even ‘we make mistakes!’ The item appearing in the Classifieds section innocently said, ‘Wanted science graduates for selling engineering hardware and stenographers!’ Imagine selling stenographers! Quite a tall order huh?
English is a hard to please mistress and we slaves who have decided to woo, use and sell her wares have to be careful all the time. I’d like to end with one that seems strangely too close to the truth for comfort: ‘The Maharashtra government said that sugar will be supplied on a ‘fist’ come first basis! Was that a mistake or the truth about muscle power, I wonder..!
—Email:bobsbanter@gmail.com
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