Celebrating Mediocrity

IPL (and all its associated fun - Tharoor-Modi et al) is over for now... and the media, it seems, is now short of stories... So what do we do? Take up a non-issue, spice it up from the human angle and serve it to the unsuspecting public...

Some chappie manages to get a call from IIMA at 80 %ile... hmmm... Must be on basis of reservation... and then fails to clear the interaction rounds... poor luck... Now that's a run of the mill kind of incident that happens every year, right? so what's so special about it? fails me... but apparently not the eyes of some reporter working for a tabloid (run by a leading newspaper)... The story is picked up and the kid is splashed all across the front page... not once... but on two consecutive days... WOW!

What I fail to understand is this... 80% is not a big deal in CAT... okay, so the chap is from a socio-economically backward class (my assumption based on the story put out by the newspaper) ... so what... there are literally hundreds of such students... and this chap did not manage to clear his interview... so did hundreds of others... so what it is that makes him front page news?

why do we celebrate mediocrity? Why do we tend to sympathize with the under dog? No odes are sung to the hundreds of middle/upper-middle/upper class kids who cracked these tough entrance exams and other related selection procedures and made it to the highest echelons of education in our country... Rather, nothing less is expected of them...

Then why devote so much valuable (?) print space to someone who failed to achieve something?

Beats me...