Mumbai Mirror has done it again. Back in May, a silly little gossip item on the paper had falsely stated that Buzzfeed Editor Rega Jha was Congress leader Sanjay Jha’s daughter.
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ContributeToday, seemingly in an attempt to beat other papers to reporting on the Olympic champion PV Sindhu, it ran with this.
Perfect example on how to turn an innocuous quote into a saas-bahu serial dialogue.
The story is supposed to be an exclusive interview with P Gopichand’s wife PVV Lakshmi, who is a national badminton champion herself. What Lakshmi was really trying to say was that she would have benefitted as a sportsperson if she had someone like Gopichand as her coach: “Sindhu is special because she has Gopi for support. He is her biggest asset. I am not saying because he is my husband but because of the commitment the coach has shown for her. I have no regrets in my career but If I had had a coach as committed as Gopi is, I would have done very well.”
We aren’t really surprised at the headline, though. Mirror’s article starts thus: “She is not the proverbial woman behind a successful man who tells him how wrong he has been.”
Proverbial woman in the warped worlds of the writer and the copy editor, perhaps.
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