(These) Times (In) India

I remember a time when my father used to encourage me to read snippets from the Times of India to improve my English. Now that I'm a father, I intend to do the same thing but apparently to improve English through negation. Here is an example of journalism that is at best careless and at worst....well "non-journalistic".

Even though I would regard my current grasp of English as reasonably good, how did I get here? A good command of any language requires going beyond the school textbooks. Much to my parents' disappointment I never was an avid reader of books without pictures. However as a kid I partially made up for that impediment with voracious reading of newspapers. My mother tells me it started with making me underline specific letters in a clipping, followed by reading and explaining headlines and later in life, writing newspaper clipping to improve my handwriting. Those newspaper clippings helped me more in spelling, grammar and creative writing than probably anything else. As a Maharashtrian whose grasp of Marathi leaves a lot to be desired, four years of Maharashtra Times while studying in Mumbai did wonders! For a kid like me who does not catch the reading fever, what hope is there today of such avenues? (If the errors in the above news item weren't obvious, they are twofold: (1) the headline and the first paragraph span an entire generation (2) The portion of the news item that is actually relevant to the headline is almost as long as the headline.)

Is the above case a symptom of mere carelessness in typing, or a more serious case of not caring about quality? This is not the only instance by any means: the above example bears sad testimony to the decline of one of the most respected English dailies in India. I also happen to belong to the "X->Y" generation, i.e. transiting from the X to the Y generation. As a professor, this is what I get in an email from a student: "Professor, can i cum to ur office at 3?". Call me cynical, but the previous generations that saved money by curbing words in a telegram were better off than the SMS generation. It is disturbing to see how callously students respond to concerns that their emails, letters and even resumes have typographical and grammatical errors. And (gulp!), all this despite having spell-checkers!

While I often become self-righteous about current times, since when did language become "accommodating and democratic"? What's next: maybe 2+2=5 will get you partial credit because more people remember the song than mathematics?