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Goodbye 2008 |
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By: Midday Team |
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Date:
2008-12-31 |
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Place: Bangalore |
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OK, so 2008 wasn't such a great year. Terror, crime, recession... maybe that's why journalism thrived. We look back at some of the stories that MiD DAY reporters broke and of the changes they managed to bring in (there, we tried to put that as modestly as we could)
Aarushi case
Even as the press and police were fumbling for clues in the sensational Aarushi murder case, MiD DAY reported that it was Krishna, along with domestic help, Rajkumar, who murdered the girl when she tried to resist their attempt to rape her. The report was based on their narcoanalysis test.
Kannada actor Sudeep paid Rs 2.5 lakh to the family of a man, said to have been killed by his motorbike. And that, after reading a MiD DAY report about how Shivananjaiah was killed on July 12, when Sudeep's allegedly drunk driver crashed his Yamaha Cruz into him. Sudeep also said the bike was the driver's, not his.
When techie Meghana Subedar surfaced after going missing for 6 months, we realised that loss of memory is not so uncommon. A visit to Auto Raja's Home of Hope unearthed stories of lives in limbo, that left us unnerved, sympathetic and yes, even depressed. And to think we were complaining of that sinus.
While the media in Bangalore (and the world, for that matter) was looking at the spanking new Bengaluru International Airport (BIA) with awe or merely complaining about the long ride to the airport, we decided to do things differently. One reporter flew to Chennai while the other took a bus. And, guess what? The high-flyer took 7 hours and the bus-rider just 40 minutes more.
For eight years, Al-Ameen College of Pharmacy had been conducting classes for its post-graduate students in space earmarked for a post-operative care unit at Victoria Hospital. But a report in MiD DAY had the college packing and making way for a critical, life-saving wing.
And then, there was Vijaynagar MLA
M Krishnappa who locked up a public park to store construction material and get a free resting place for his pedigreed dogs. But the locks were broken after we broke the story and the park thrown open to the public
once again.
Out, out
A series of articles in MiD DAY, exposing a multi-crore fraud involving the exchange of expensive sites for cheap ones alerted the government. And many heads rolled, including that of BDA commissioner Shankaralinge Gowda and secretary Rajashekar. |
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