It’s a classic cock-up. On Sunday, April 14, PB Srinivas, the Mohammad Rafi of the South, passed away. And the media stepped in with their obits. Press Trust of India wrote an obituary of PB Srinivas which was published on the newspaper’s website. Only problem, the PTI reporter – whose report IE had replicated – had confused the 82-year-old PB Srinivas with the contemporary Tamil film singer Srinivas.

According to the latter half of the obituary – “His (PB Srinivas) first foray into playback singing began with the song ‘Sorgam Enbathu Namakku’ with Swarnalatha from the movie ‘Nammavar’, composed by Mahesh. It went on to become a runaway hit. He had also sung in ‘Minsaara Kanavu’ with A R Rahman for ‘Maana Madurai’. Then came ‘En Uyire’ in Mani Ratnam’s ‘Uyire…’ (the Tamil version of ‘Dil Se’).”

Impressive? Not really. Since, both assertions were wrong.

To make matters worse, the mention of ‘Sorgam Enbathu Namakku’ was lifted from the Wikipedia entry on contemporary singer Srinivas. The sentence that took the cake, though, was at the very end – “His other hits in Hindi included ‘Kaisi Hai Yeh’ from ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ and ‘Zindagi’ from the film ‘Yuvvraaj’. Srinivas was a close associate to Rahman from the very first day they got introduced”.

Fact – PB Srinivas had nothing to do with any of these contemporary Hindi films. Indeed, his professional relationship with Bollywood was negligible and with A R Rahman minimal.

The article has drawn around 82 comments till now. Many of them scathing but these ones particularly so:

The confusion wasn’t relegated to just IE and PTI’s reporting and spilled over to the commenters as well. One of the commenters said that the reporter had mistaken PB Srinvas for U Srinivas. Wrong, said a follow-up comment. U Srinivas was a mandolin player and not a singer!

Another one called ‘gsid’ wrote “even if the indian express journalist/PTI journalist is going to do a copy paste job from wikipedia, atleast copy the right content.” Now it’s bad enough that IE did a cut-paste job without checking facts, but it had the option of correcting it on its website. Or so you’d think.

As one commenter pointed out:

Finally, 17 hours later, someone at IE logged onto their own website and read the article, realised their folly and corrected the news report. By which time, it had already been shared on Twitter and Facebook.

They did post an apology stating that the previous article was incorrect, but no mention was made of why facts hadn’t been cross-checked. A little lax for a news organisation. And yet another example of why you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.