BLEAK OUTLOOK?

I started reading Outlook magazine sometime in the mid 90’s. At that time it was a refreshing change from the dominant India Today. During those days Outlook had a breath of fresh air as they were trying to establish a foothold in the market. The fact that they gave attractive gifts for subscription plans was one of the reasons why I subscribed to Outlook. Somewhere down the line they started drifting away and these days have started dishing out utter crap. Outlook (part of the Rajan Raheja Group) have been pioneers in their own way as they entered new segments like Personal Finance (Outlook Money, used to be called Intelligent Investor earlier) and Travel & Leisure (Outlook Traveller) which never existed earlier.

The latest issue of Outlook has a cover story on the last 10 years of Indian cinema. Hindi cinema in particular has been experimenting with a wide variety of themes (skinny flicks, serious ones like Black & My Brother Nikhil, crossover movies etc). I decided to read the section on Tamil cinema. S Anand of Outlook’s Chennai Bureau had received lot of flak from the Blogosphere for his recent article, which talked about older heroes holding sway in Tamil cinema.


In his latest article titled “Politics Tamil Cinema Eshtyle” S Anand has gone one step further and done some stupid analysis on the casteist basis on which Tamil movies are made. I’m sure Anand is writing such controversial stuff just to help Outlook achieve higher sales. I never expected somebody to dissect a hit movie like Kadhal in this manner. I guess Balaji Shaktivel (director of Kadhal) deserves to be treated in a better manner. Majority of the movies will be based on “rich girl meets poor boy” theme and if Anand is asked to comment on this he can write reams about the backgrounds of the hero and heroine. After reading this article I came to know that Manirathnam’s Roja had an anti-Muslim bias.

Anand’s verbal diarrhea doesn’t stop here. He goes on to say that Manirathnam movies run only in A centres and they don’t have much substance. Although this could be true, doesn’t he know that A centres have more number of urban / educated people and hence they are likely to support movies with substance. Anand says that Alaipayudhey couple (Madhavan & Shalini) move into an unfinished building decked with Fab India furnishings. Why is he giving free publicity to Fab India? Looks like Anand wanted to settle some scores with Manirathnam and hence used this as a forum to do that.

The only place where Anand scores is with his reference to Vijay’s limited acting abilities. Anand winds up by saying that “Tamil cinema remains an embarrassment confined to Tamilnadu”. If this is the ground reality why did Anand write 3 pages about Tamil cinema?

Request to Outlook - Chennai is home to lot of good journalists. I hope you can pick somebody from this bunch. Even some bloggers might be interested in the job.

PS: I continue to read Outlook because their online edition is free :-)