On thursdays I usually do not miss the column called “Via Media” on Telegraph. It is a post-mortem of sorts on the media and related issues. Last Thurday had an unsual piece about two identical articles that appeared on 23rd April 2004 in two city editions of the Times of India….Mumbai times and the Calcutta Times and with the same headline “Sex and the City”. The topic on discussion was “rage of infidelity in the two cities”. Supposedly the text was identical except for the names of the people mentioned inside and their places of residence. So Raghav the South Kolkata boy mouthed the very same lines that Ryan a South Mumbai boy did. I managed to lay my hands on the Calcutta Times, but the Mumbai Times report is either (sadly) missing on the TOI web archives or I should have looked harder (which i guess is the case). Talk about bulk production. For more fun read on here.

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