When IIT-Kgp undergrad Sushil Arora’s father Sunil Arora, now in his mid-fifties, expressed a desire to become tech savvy, Sushil gave his father some useful tips like reading newspapers online, using Skype instead of traditional phones and so forth. Sushil also taught his father how to open a browser on his newly bought iPad and access the Times of India website to catch up with national news.

Sushil soon realized that the ToI website devotes a considerable amount of space to tidbits like “oops moments of Bollywood actresses”, “Hottest Tennis stars”, “20 tips for a great date”, “Untold secrets of Big-Boss 7 inmates” and so on. Wanting to shield his dad from such smutty content, Sushil, a tech-savvy Computer Science student, decided to enable AdBlock and NetNanny censorship filters to block content that smacked of porn.

However, to his dismay, typing the URL for ToI returned a blank page after the filters were enabled. In his own words, “The first time I applied adBlock and NetNanny concurrently on the TOI website, I saw a blank page. I thought my browser was cached and refreshed it but still a blank page appeared! Refreshed again but same result. I closed the browser and reopened it. Still a blank page. Now exasperated, I restarted the system but to no avail. I then disabled adBlock and voila, half the page was up! I wondered what’s up with the other half and removed NetNanny filter and damn, the entire page got loaded to show a dozen ads amid some new items like ‘6 things women notice about men’, ‘Sana Saeed’s hot photos’ and so on”.

Many other surfers have reported similar experiences with content control software and ToI. When asked about this, a Times reporter, under the condition of anonymity, told The UnReal Times that such issues crop up on non-newsy days by which he meant days when Narendra Modi does not say anything and also UPA leaders do not say anything about him. “That day”, he said, “there was nothing to report about Namo. No one spoke about 2002 riots. No politician from any party condemned it. To make matters worse, we did not receive any ‘plants’ from Ahmed Patel either about what Sonia was unhappy about. So we had no option other than filling up space with lifestyle news such as ‘what women need’ and ‘hot in forties’.”

Later, Sushil’s dad lambasted the IIT student for trying to be holier than thou in blocking ToI’s adult content. “Why do you I think I wanted to access ToI website on my iPad in the first place? If I had really wanted to read news before going to sleep, I would have gone to The Hindu’s site, no? Why is Sushil behaving like my dad?” barked the senior Arora.