A couple of weeks ago, there was a news article in the Times of India (ToI) about a suitcase found abandoned at the Nagapattinam bus-stand. In this day & age of terrorist attacks, this naturally evoked fear / suspicion & the cops were called, who upon opening the suitcase found the body of a 5-year old boy.
A day later, ToI reported that the kid was identified to be a boy missing from Chennai, whose parents were one Jayakumar & Ananthalakshmi, who from the names sounded to me like a Tamilian couple. There was also a snap of the kid - so cute. Found it really tough to believe how someone can have the heart to kill kids.
Cops unravel the mystery and find that the boy was killed by his father's paramour, who was miffed that he was not marrying her as promised and had also asked her to undergo two abortions resulting from their affair. It was her way of taking revenge on him. Hmm.
The Deccan Chronicle (DC) also had similar content as the ToI that I read at office. Both being more of tabloids than newspapers, all the necessary ingredients were present to add spice to the whole story. The woman was known to the father before marriage, they had an affair, he got married to someone else, had 2 kids, then meets her after a long time, gets her a job in his company, she gains the confidence of the whole family, they continue their clandestine affair etc etc.
Yesterday while doing some weekend cleaning, I chance upon a copy of the Malayalam daily "Malayala Manorama" (MM) lying at home, bought my by in-laws who were in town the week this incident happened. The front-page screams the following headline,
"Malayali balan-e konnu pettiyil-aakki, sthree arrest-il"
which translates to "Malayali kid murdered and stuffed in a suitcase; woman arrested".
Huh! Inspite of following the news fin 2 different English newspapers, I never saw DC/ToI mention any Malayali connection. It seems the kid's parents are from Kerala. Anyway, for DC & ToI, both English newspapers, the readership is pretty diverse and it does not really matter to them as to which state the boy/parents belong to. But MM caters specifically to the Malayali readership and guess this extra info matters to their readership, which shows in the way they packaged the same news so differently from their English counterparts.
P.S. : A couple of days after this incident happened, on my way home, I was listening to this radio-show by Bosskey, which is about playing a line-up of movie songs with some comic one-liners interspersed. Normally I like his comedy, but that day he chose to make humour out of this murder, which was not in good taste IMO.
