Dear TOI,

I have been following your battle with yourself; with gentle nudges from Deepika Padukone. Your responses to her response paint a picture of a woefully out-of-touch media house digging its own grave one shovelful at a time. This is unacceptably inefficient, so I thought I’d draft one final letter on your behalf that you can use and stop committing suicide by shooting yourself in the foot one toe at a time and commit hara-kiri the way it was meant to be done – with a single, clean swing of the blade.
You may also consider the following to be my formal application for the post of managing editor of the Bombay Times.

Dear Deepika,

We Are The Times of India. The biggest name in the world of media. We own the Filmfare brand too and the awards happen at our whim. We say this because pretty girls like you have probably heard of Filmfare even if you haven’t heard of The Times Of India because some still believe the rumour that newspapers have smart people writing about important things like governance and current affairs. We are doing our best to dispel that notion in spite of the likes of you getting in our way.

You may also know us as Delhi’s leading English daily (no matter what evidence anyone else might present) and the paper that doesn’t care whose death we’re reporting as long as it gives us an opportunity to plug BMW – a luxury brand of cars that adds immeasurably to the quality of one’s life, available in pleasing colours and luxury features unmatched by any other. (See what we did there?)

We wouldn’t really expect you to know either of those things because, let’s face it, when we think of Deepika Padukone, we don’t think of a bookworm or a news buff – we think of just one thing: well, two actually. In fact, when you responded to our piece appreciating your assets, our first response was “Which friend of Deepika was on a news site?!” and our second response was “Suck it Hindustan Times, we got more readers than you” and our THIRD response was this:

If only we’d issued THIS clarification earlier, all of this would probably have ended then and there and our esteemed managing editor wouldn’t have had to waste her time writing ANOTHER response and could have instead moved on to objectifying some other actress equally deserving of our attention.

What you’re doing by hogging all our attention Deepika, is holding the careers of other actresses back – YOU, and not us, are the one holding women back from achieving their true potential.

Your misplaced outrage towards us resulted in us getting plenty of flak for “distasteful coverage”. These are charges I can categorically refute! Even when we carry entire pieces featuring upskirt shots of panty-less celebrities we ALWAYS pixelate when we “zoom into a woman’s vagina or show her nipples”. After all, our entertainment content is clearly meant to be informative and not just masturbation fodder for men too scared to have anything more scandalous in their browser history. We are the paragon of journalistic integrity. You, on the other hand, only further objectify women with every passing movie and photo-shoot you do. The damage you have done to the women’s movement is disastrous, and something we will chronicle in next week’s piece “OMG: Deepika’s ass in HNY is out of this world!”

You also talked about us not zooming in on men’s crotches. You have to understand Deepika, there’s a reason we zoom in on your cleavage and not on Salman’s crotch – the reason is simple –when it comes to the Indian male’s crotch, research suggests that the situation down there isn’t the most flattering, so we zoom in on their abs instead. You see Deepika, where you see sexist conspiracy, we see a chance to help Bollywood.

Let’s be honest Deepika. You’re upset that we attempted to profit off of your breasts and we understand that it hurts. We are similarly upset that the support and publicity generated by your outrage has resulted in your profiting off of us profiting off of your breasts. So technically we’re even and you really need to let this go.

Regds,

TOI

P.S: Dear TOI, let me know if I get the job.