The mysterious case of the photo-shopped Jayalalithaa portraits

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The News Minute| February 18, 2015| 5.00 pm IST In Tamil Nadu, political loyalties are usually on proud public display by functionaries and politicians of different parties. Considering the ruling party, almost every single picture taken at meetings chaired by ministers has a prominent Jayalalithaa portrait on display in it. This in spite of the small detail that Jayalalithaa is no longer the Chief Minister of the state, but is being called the 'People's CM'. See this one Or this On Monday, however, certain events and their aftermath at the Chennai left many in the press puzzled, a Tamil paper reported. Rajendra Balaji, the Minister for Information and Special Programme Implementation had conducted a meeting at the Secretariat discussing the distribution of freebies amongst public, a meeting which was attended by other officials. As per procedure, after the meeting details and pictures taken at the event were sent out to the press. A picture that had Balaji in the frame along with other officials, it also featured two portraits in the foreground - one of AIADMK founder, MGR and current chief, Jayalalithaa. However, what turned interesting was that a few hours after the first photo was sent and appeared in Tamil newspapers that evening, the same picture was resent to all press. When closely inspected and compared to the first, as explained in Dinakaran, a Tamil newspaper, in the second photo , the portrait of MGR had been cleanly photoshopped out of the picture. Now looking again at both pictures - not only has someone gone to great lengths just to erase MGR out of the picture, even an innocent-looking official behind the two pictures has suddenly vanished into thin air. Some serious photo-shopping skills at work, one must appreciate. However, whoever has photo-shopped the ‘mistake’ out of the frame has forgotten to realise that the portraits have been quite strategically placed - on top of an open file. Not only was the second picture an attempt at rectifying a mistake (no one knows what mistake), the first itself is a serious lesson at ‘how not to photoshop a portrait on to an open file a minister is reading and send it to the who’s who of Tamil press’. It looks like a simple case of a picture being clicked without Amma in the background. Considering that, however, why MGR’s picture was photo-shopped out remains a mystery. Probably, photo-shopping is one art best left to professionals. Tweet

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