Anant's blog: Santosh Desai endangers Medianet

Santosh Desai’s column in The Times of India is always a great read. I missed it yesterday, thanks to the newspapers not being delivered by the time I left home. Luckily, Vishakha Singh, now on her way out of employment and into entrepreneurship, drew my attention to Santosh’s piece, The revolution inside a pill. 

Vishakha did not call regarding the insightfulness of the piece or the felicity of the language. She wondered (tongue in cheek, I think, I think) whether the column was a plug for the amazing morning-after pill, the i-pill (personally, I prefer Alka Seltzers, or, in their absence, two Crocins).
 
Santosh mentions the i-pill by name twelve times (count ’em; I did). So what’s the problem, when the whole column is about the i-pill and the revolution it’s going to usher in?
 
The problem is that the column appears in The Times of India, the publication that just hates to name brands unless absolutely necessary or unless paid so to do. For example, a photo caption could easily read: ‘Model with friends at the launch of a luxury perfume at a Bandra hotel’. 

So how come they allowed the i-pill to be mentioned as many as twelve times in a single article?
 
i-ask. i-wait with bated breath.