The Real Story Behind the "6.6" Earthquake in Delhi

I swear I was going to shut up. I thought I'll just let it pass and cut some sorry slack for media's sake. But they didn't let me.

Did you see how TOI blamed twitter for creating all the ruckus over the disappointingly low intensity earthquake in New Delhi on September 6, 2011?

Hmm? This is kind of interesting because the same Times of India reported the event as :

 

That's right, folks. Not just the TOI, but every major news-outlet racked up their hyperbolic engines to delightfully report the quake as 6.6 without cross-checking and not once forgetting to sell cell-phone plans and ceiling fans during the commercial breaks. And, it was a bummer to realize that the quake was a mild 4.2 and hardly caused any damage. Naturally, the sudden loss of solid business out of celebrating a debacle with some disaster porn because of scientific facts can be frustrating. On top of that, getting pranked by twitter? God! that must be embarrassing. No wonder, TOI tried to set the record straight by desperately blaming the culprit.

But, it's more personal than you think. Look what I found at http://twitter.com/#!/timesofindia:

So, what TOI has done here is blame twitter for enabling it to tweet. That's as lame as  blaming mommy earth's gravitational forces for slipping over a banana peel.

Besides, what's the big deal? Come on, guys. Can't you enjoy a friendly prank anymore? Like a "Just for laughs" kind of thing. Say what you want about us common people, but we do have a healthy sense of humor and can take a prank in a right spirit. We tune back to your same shitty programming and websites even though you are mostly excited about something that doesn't concern 99.9999% of us like a celebrity's lack of clothing choices during her vacation or the courageous struggle of a local mining business tycoon in buying his 4th Mercedes Benz or how suspiciously friendly can a scamming politician get with his family dog's brother. We will always continue to elect those same people even though they wink about creating jobs, providing support to farmers, improving infrastructure and awarding reservations to self-certified bathroom singers. In fact, we are so good that we can jolly well enjoy the same prank for 200 years straight without getting bored. So, just take it easy.

Ok, gang. Here's the real real-story behind the 6.6 magnitude unless you want to believe the "official" reasons: A couple of young reporters in a haste of wanting to be the first to report started asking the people around what they felt like and in order to meet the industry standards of news-worthy sensationalism, they jacked it up to 6.6 on the Richter scale. Simple as that.

Check out our research team's filing reports from undisclosed sources:

This blog post was jointly written by FLAWSOPHY and long-time collaborator, GTOOSPHERE.

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