New Indian Rupee Symbol And Times Of India Media Hoax

2010-07-31T00:30:00.001-07:00

New Indian Rupee Symbol

This month Indian government had announced the winner of the New Indian Rupee symbol competition.

But one thing which stuck my mind was that the winner D Udaya Kumar`s design was not among the top five design which were published in the Indian news papers and the Indian news channels had run special SMS contests for the following few days to chose the best out of top five designs.

Doing my own investigation regarding this matter I stumble over some shocking information which I intend to share with you out here.

From airing irrelevant masala content in the name of breaking news to publishing stories that visibly misleads and distorts the truth, the media has done all that a number of times over the years without much ado. But here we are talking about one of the most disgraceful media faux passes of recent times by print giants, The Times of India, in the context of an issue as relevant as that of choosing the potential designs for the new Indian currency symbols.

Times of India in an article, on the 24th of June, 2010 claimed that the designs they are publishing happen to be the ones from which the new Indian rupee sign would be selected by the cabinet.

By doing further investigation, I found a Rediff.com article dated 24th of June, 2010 according to which this news had led to immediate confusion and humiliation for the Indian currency symbol top five finalists.

The chosen finalists Nondita Correa-Mehrotra, Shibin KK, Hitesh Padmashali, Udaya Kumar, made their statement in that they had found no similarity between their short listed ideas and the ones published by the Times of India.

Udaya Kumar, one of the controversial finalists (and later on declared as a winner of Indian Rupee Symbol design competition) was surprised to see the designs, which were not the finalized ones in the newspaper and other websites today.

He added: "It was very disappointing to see those designs as the short listed entries. The media reports have created a lot of confusion"

The next very obvious question that arises after reading all this is from where did the Times of India obtain their chosen five for the Indian new rupee symbol.

Well, down the rabbit hole the fake rupee design nominations traveled their way from the web pages of economic times that held their very own competition for the new Indian rupee symbol last year in 2009.

This media house chose the final 5 from the short listed 19 self designed symbols by their own ET designers through elimination and voting by its online readers and claimed that one among them was destined to be the new rupee design.

And after one year Times of India had published their own top five designs, which their ET’s team of designers had designed, labeled as official top five finalist design.

TOI had been well reputed for deleting or altering the comments on its website in the name of moderating the comments which fail to match their own interest and agenda.

This time they started publishing baseless and self cooked story regarding an issue of such national sensitivity. This is clearly damaging the Indian designer’s image and making dough about their talent around the world.

This can be considered as irresponsible and a rueful media hoax that have proven that how terribly misleading and embarrassing a media voice can turn into .

It is about time the media learn to understand that the weapon they use at free will might prove fatal for them.

This shameful incident had also exposed that Indian electronic media is just a repeater and they don't have their own eyes and neither do they care to investigate the news prior to broadcasting it and reason behind this kind of attitude is that they are running 24x7 news entertainment.