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The English language may have originated in England, but it took our own desi Bollywood publicist Dale Bhagwagar from India to point out a mistake in one of Britian’s most respected publications The Independent.
And what did the British publication do? It promptly corrected its English.
With the worldwide outage of WhatsApp for a few hours today, the UK-based Independent carried a news report on its website. During the same time, Bollywood PR guru Dale Bhagwagar posted about the outage on social media and then went on Google to check out the latest on it.
To his surprise, he spotted a headline on Independent’s site which seemed incorrect to him. The headline went: ‘WhatsApp down: Messaging app not working as people unable to chat to friends.’
Dale immediately sort the article on the media house’s Twitter handle and messaged it, “Dear @Independent, UK, Your headline says, “…chat to friends.” It should be ‘chat with friends.’
The publicist knew he was correct, so he took a snapshot of the article and waited for Independent to answer. The publication did not respond, but quickly corrected the language in its headline, after which Dale shared the self-explanatory snapshots on his social media.
The PR specialist smiles as he says, “We Indians learnt our English from the British. So it was good fun getting their English corrected.” But he rues that Independent did not even bother to reply with a simple thank you. “So much for British etiquette,” Dale quips as he winks.
For the record, currently edited by Christian Broughton, Independent is one of the first major publications in the world, which has intelligently shifted gears from being a print newspaper to being a digital online edition.
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