I’m really sorry for the generic title above – but this is so appalling that it perhaps deserves some amount of generalization. And for the fact that it has been live since 9:30pm on Sunday, despite being shared as a rude joke by one of the persons involved, and many others online. That is more to do with how media websites are handled these days.
Noted singer PB Sreenivas passed away yesterday. He was a personal favorite of mine and has a superb repertoire of songs in all South India languages, plus Hindi.
Indian Express decided to do an obituary for the man and opted for PTI’s version (God knows where else this obituary has appeared, given that PTI is a wire service).
There are two things seriously wrong with this obituary.
One, it uses sentences verbatim from Wikipedia. This is just plain lazy and pointless.
Two, it is less about the singer who died yesterday and more about another singer who is hale and hearty in Chennai right now – yes, less about PB Sreenivas and more about Singer Srinivas!
Do note – there is a difference in spelling between both the seemingly similarly named singers. And still, someone in PTI thought it is completely ok to check both the singers’ wikipedia pages, and do a mash up in the name of an obituary.
Consider this – the 2nd paragraph says that Srinivas (sic) started singing in 1955, while paragraph 5 starts with, ‘his first foray into playback singing…’ and cites the Tamil film Nammavar that was released in 1994. In 1994, the actual PB Sreenivas would have been 64 years old.
Post this, I can’t even dissect this article without cringing multiple times, so I won’t even bother. It is that bad!
I’m just so, so glad that they got at least the photo right.
Here is the online link of the obituary – it could die a gruesome death, taking along with it someone’s job at PTI, soon.
And here it is, in a screenshot captured form, for posteri… nah, posterior’s sake. And the Wikipedia profiles of PB Sreenivas and Singer Srinivas.
As many others have pointed out, this news, being sourced from a wire agency like PTI, is out in many other media websites too! Here’s the news in Daily Bhaskar and Outlook.