How to handle the media: A lesson in eight parts -- by the 49ers

The San Francisco 49ers had a torrid time today trying to distance themselves from their former public relations director's attempts at adding pep to the team's media orientation program. In an in-house video that was leaked out to the San Francisco Chronicle, the man goes through eight pieces of instruction on handling media and on adapting to the different strokes of the city. One of the episodes featured a poor sketch with tasteless stereotyping of a Chinese man in Chinatown slurring and mispronouncing his syllables. The reason such characterisations are offensive is not only because they are incorrect but also because they inexcusably project these fictitious inadequacies of a few onto an entire community to the point that any person belonging to that community comes to be associated with them. Stereotypes as a comical device are cheap, tawdry and seldom draw much applause from a general audience. At the same time, the video was not intended for one. It was purely locker-room material that was never intended to be a public statement of the team though it is a separate matter as to whether it could be tolerated even as private expression.

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No smoking in the corridors

Many are skeptically viewing the new law announced by the mustachioed Dr Anbumani Ramadoss whose eyes are so unfairly shifty in the mugshot in the Indian Express article but they miss the big picture in Dr Ramadoss' refreshingly original idea. By banning smoking in movies by hoodlums and gangsters who have guns that tend to go off every time they bat an eyelid, Dr Ramadoss hopes to convince teenagers in public schools in Dehradun and Kodaikanal -- the boys with brilliantine in their hair and condoms in their pockets and the girls in Catholic uniforms the kind that the Shiv Sena would find self-incriminating; all with impressionable minds and wallets stuffed with twice Dr Ramadoss' annual gross compensation -- that using tobacco products under influence of these actors is detrimental to their health. Dr Ramadoss hopes that once actors stop smoking on screen and restrict themselves only to singing duets, jumping off bridges upon being spurned, talking dirty with their women counterparts, leering at cleavage in buses, skipping out of classes to exercise their inadequacies on the streets and combing their hair in front of women's boutiques, they will have so much more of an invigorative and positive effect on society. The act of smoking as an evil, as Dr Anbumani Ramadoss enlightens us with his saintly wisdom, is far more deleterious to the youth of the country than either rape or murder for as the doctor would exhort us with his cold and prevailing sense of pragmatism, smoking is tantamount to murdering a million others in addition to killing oneself whereas a rape or a murder would affect only a single entity. Dr Ramadoss, who is "a graduate in Modern Medicine" (as opposed to Tantric) and "has also done Macro-economic course at the London School of Economics" (oh, what do the Oxonians and those from Cambridge know about the value of an education even if it is from the LSE, as the patronising Sir Appleby and Bernard Woolley would constantly chafe the Minister with?) as his succinct biography at the Central Council for Research in Homeopathy (Tantric or Modern Medicine?) informs us, has finally thrown down the gauntlet to the entertainment industry in Bombay and it is up to them to see the light of day and the moral superiority of Dr Ramadoss' idea -- not to mention his distinguished and impeccable credentials -- and come round to the goverment's necessary imposition and curbs on their much vaunted "artistic freedom". Besides, with all the artistic freedom that they had hitherto, the best they could come up with was numerologically challenged movies like Taal, Kal Ho Naa Ho, Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham, directors like Subash Ghai, Karan Johar and Sooraj Barjatya and actors like Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor.

49ers' in-house training video

Dr Ramadoss and his smoking ban

No screening of tobacco products in movies and serials

Aamir Khan supplicates with Dr Ramadoss

Anger at Indian film smoking ban

Dr Ramadoss' dynamic biography

December 2004 - March 2005

October 2004 - November 2004

July 2004 - September 2004

May 2004 - June 2004

April 2004

January 2004 - March 2004