Dull Saturday

Saturday papers aren't much of a read. The Hindu's front-page is a big yawn. It has a four-column piece on the judgment by a Salem Court in the 'Dharmapuri bus burning case'. The Hindu also has an excellent editorial on the judgment and how the ruling government of the time tried to delay the judicial process. It also has a five-page 'bottom' on a 2,500 crore car unit set to come up on the outskirts of Hyderabad. The story makes for dull reading though. And, the Old Maid of Anna Salai simply cannot rid itself of the habit of using long, convoluted sentences. Sample this lead sentence in Siddarth Varadarajan's story, which is incidentally, the paper's first-lead: "With major differences persisting on lifetime fuel guarantees for safeguarded reactors, the reprocessing of spent fuel and a reference to a future Indian nuclear test as a condition for the United States nuclear co-operation, India has drafted its own 14-clause version of the crucial bilateral nuclear agreement with the U.S. which will be handed over to American officials in Washington next Monday by Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon." Get it? Punctuation be damned--can you get it at one go?
The Hindu is perhaps the only paper that seemed to carry o report (on p.5) of three young men stalking a group of girls in the wee hours of Thursday night and brandishing a revolver to boot! They followed them all the way from BanjaraHills to Sainikpuri in a Skoda!
The TOI has a more interesting first-lead (A.P. pips B'lore in Biocon deal) on Bio-con setting up a 1000 crore unit near Visakhapatnam, (and how Karnataka was edged out by A.P. in the race...).
The TOI has an interesting 'bottom' though--

'Centre loses minority loan fight'. It says that the RBI and the other banks shot down the Centre's proposal to reserve a hare of loans for members of minority communities on the grounds that 'lending practices are based on the borrower's creditworthiness and not the person's caste or creed.'

But the rest of the paper isn't very newsy, if you ask me. The Munsif isn't much of a read. The DC has a very boring front-page and the rest of the newspaper matches the front-page for newsiness. Bhagwan's Singh's story on the Dharmapuri Case judgment got pushed into the third page.
Andhra Jyoti has a good exclusive report on its front page--hoe honest IPS officers get the boot for being 'sincere' and cites two examples--D.T.Naik and Charu Sinha.

PS. Get off the couch today -- You Bad-Boy!
Couch potato image courtesy