It's payback time!

Hindu Muslim clashes be damned…for a while. For now, the fun and focus is the Hindu TOI war! Boy, is the Maha Vishnu of Mount Road taking the Times of India for a roaring ride or what.

No one expected The Hindu to react the way they did. Agreed the TOI sledged The Hindu first. The Hindu, surprisingly, reacted by making a few changes to their paper - content, style, presentation etc., something I even talked about here earlier.

But I didn’t expect The Hindu to come out with a hard-hitting campaign to retaliate TOI’s sledge. Damn; here is a brand that had never even advertised once in their 135+ year lifetime; far less taking a competitor head on.

Should The Hindu have reacted like this? Have they reacted right? And what next?

Before I continue, a few caveats are in order. I subscribe to both the papers. Though I admit I read The Hindu first. I am not a big fan of this paper anymore. I think it is left leaning, anti-BJP and Jayalalitha and losing its neutrality a bit, and shows a soft corner for Congress though not much of late. But when it comes to quality, writing style, use of the English language and depth of coverage, The Hindu stands tall and unrivaled. TOI is not even a shadow of an English paper, far less being comparable to The Hindu. Truth be told, TOI is at best a glorified vernacular; a daily film magazine; and a dignified porn pamphlet.

So, one day, the TOI takes on The Hindu accusing it of putting the readers to sleep – by their choice of news, the lush language they use and their aversion towards anything sensational. The Hindu reacted by adding a few new genre of supplements, adding a certain kinds of news that they had never covered earlier and eased their headlines a wee bit, without dilution of its famed richness.

And then, has come this Hindu Kolaveri!

My initial reaction, when told The Hindu has come out with a series of ads to counter TOI, was ‘disbelief’ and ‘why did they?’ I still believe The Hindu shouldn’t have even legitimized TOI with a retort. Maybe The Hindu’s research, assuming they did one, led them to believe seeds of suspicion being planted in the minds of young adults by the TOI campaign. Maybe The Hindu decided to react – lest they lose a whole generation of new readers who would end up growing with TOI. So, yes The Hindu probably was justified partly, am still reluctant to be whole hearted here, to take on TOI.

That aside, the choice of target audience for The Hindu’s campaign, I should say, was bang on. Young adults – who are increasingly being gleaned away by sensationalism and trivia at the cost of sense and knowledge. One could see a distinct degradation of the English language in the mouths of the young, the lack of depth of knowledge in their heads and a misunderstanding of what’s important for their jobs, careers and lives. I am the least bit being philosophical or judgmental. I am only worried these traits would affect the young adults’ chances of survival in these competitive times.

And therein lay the crux of The Hindu’s campaign. It is talking to a generation that’s growing up soaking nuisance masquerading as news and nonsense dressed up as current affairs, and choosing a paper that glorifies it. The Hindu’s campaign has been spot on. Readers of TOI are losers and hollow!

But then, one of the cardinal mistakes of marketing is to tell the target he or she is wrong. Even worse, term them idiots. The Hindu campaign, in a blatant way, does just that. Would that intimidate the TOI reader?

But then, I don’t think this Hindu campaign aims at weaning away the TOI reader. Maybe it shouldn’t either. The TOI audience is different from the Hindu’s. But what Hindu’s campaign does, and what I think The Hindu should continue to do, is to put the fear of God among the undecided and paint a picture in their minds the perils of preferring a newspaper that personifies hollowness and utter lack of depth. If that can be achieved, a whole new generation of users would feel cool and sensible to pick The Hindu. That would arrest the growth of TOI in the South. Which incidentally is where I think this campaign would have most of its effect. I doubt if the North, where The Hindu has been traditionally weak at best and non-existent at worst, would ever witness a shift in preferences.

Now what next? For starters, I expect TOI to take The Hindu to the court. The viewer could easily pick up the dumb characters in the ads mouthing ‘TIMES OF INDIA’; the beep sounds notwithstanding. It’s for the courts to decide if this can be termed disparagement.

And TOI will react. After all it’s the largest English daily. They might resort to statistics – how they are the largest newspaper, how they grown the most among the youth, how the who’s who is reading it etc. Such a campaign would be hopelessly weak to say the least. TOI, true to its true sensational style, would try and hit The Hindu below the belt. That’s the only place the TOI can ever be good at!

Also note that everyone in the ad voices TOI. So TOI can come out with a campaign quoting that and saying how they are the No.1 brand among the 18 to 35 or whatever. Feeble response, if it were to be.

At the end of the day, The Hindu has been provoked and woken up. As the old Tamil saying goes: The wrath of the quiet sadhu when awakened will shake the forest.

This Sadhu has gone one step further: He has brutally raped TOI and thrown it into the gutter, where it rightly belongs. And I love it!