My thoughts on Rediff and Aajtak - Part 1!

Its about 4 :15 AM in this part of US, and since I have been suffering from insomnia as a side-effect of my allergy medication, I thought I'll browse something on the Internet and keep myself interested. While looking at a few sites on entertainment and Bollywood movies, I eventually stumbled upon Rediff.com. After reading a few articles here-n-there, I knew I had to blog my anger and irritation about rediff. Not the way rediff readers do it on a day-to-day basis, but in a civilized yet constructive manner.

So anyone who has visited the rediff site knows one thing for sure....its pure moronic crap and one hell of a bad portal if not anything else. Rediff doesn't care about the news they publish, or the language they use and let's not get started on their discussion board. Here's a statement from one of the news articles published in rediff news today..."The officers were stopped by a group of persons allegedly led by Ayaz Qazi who allegedly thrashed them.

Qazi, however, said he was his son is unnecessarily dragged into the controversy. "It is a well planned conspiracy against me," he said and demanded an impartial inquiry into the incident".

Is it just me, or is the language really, really bad? And rediff calls itself the No.1 Indian News Portal. I mean come-on. Is this the best we can do?

If one goes to the home page of rediff, it looks like a horrible scrap book kept by a person suffering from short-term memory loss. There is absolutely no order or system of presenting news, or ads for that matter. I'm not an Internet web portal genius of any kind, but I know rediff has a bad web-site design. And almost always you will see one of the main stories on the home page about the entertainment industry whether it is Bollywood and/or Hollywood (yes...we do keep track of Britney Spears shaving her head, Oscars nominees and winners, etc). And as if all of this crap wasn't enough rediff even lets the readers post their comments on all articles in the “Discussion Board”. Mostly, these comments turn into racist controversies between North Indians-South Indians, Gays-Straights, Amitabh fans-Rajnikanth fans (this is not covered under North Indian-South Indian topics, because some North Indians do like Idly/Sambar but hate Rajnikanth and vice-versa), BJP supporters-Congress supporters, and the insane list is endless.

Most of the times you feel like you are listening to some people who have no clue about what they are talking, and are standing around a roadside T-shop in the rural villages of India. The icing on the cake is that sometimes (actually most of the times) you can see the reader comments have vulgar language in the "Discussion Board" or for that matter no connection to the actual article. For instance, in a recent article on Pandit Shivkumar Sharma and Zakir Hussains concert in NYC there were some really kiddish cheap comments by some idiot who is a wannabe gay Indian American living in India I guess. Baseline, I think its time rediff makes one of the two changes. One, just become a totally entertainment based portal with no need for other news, and make the web-site rated R (for readers 18 and above) and charge a subscription fee (this should scare away all of the crowd). Two, and I really think this will be the better option, change its name to www.ScrapAboutCrapIff.com - World's first ever negative ranked (-1) web portal and move on (I would still keep the subscription fee and keep it for readers 18 and above).

I'll save my rantings on Aajtak for part 2 of this post!