Akshay Kumar's mango PR in the Times of India goes wrong: 'Sudama' owns acres of farmland

Every so often a newspaper story comes along that reads less like journalism and more like a checklist dictated over the phone. A recent Times of India item about Akshay Kumar is a near-perfect specimen.

The setup: Kumar, currently shooting Joker, is gorging on mangoes hand-delivered by his childhood buddy Ravi Karle, a farmer from Devgad in Maharashtra. The two studied together at Don Bosco in Matunga over 36 years ago; Karle's mother taught Kumar Marathi; the star got emotional meeting her on the sets. Touching stuff — and every beat of it lands exactly where a PR team would place it. Fitness freak (but of course he can't resist mangoes). Obedient toward his old teacher. Still in touch with his roots. Loves mangoes. To keep it authentic, everything is attributed to a "source" rather than the star's publicists.

Then comes the Krishna-Sudama framing — the poor childhood friend visiting the now-mighty king — and the story trips over its own premise. Because this Sudama, the humble farmer, apparently owns hundreds of acres of farmland. That makes Karle quite possibly the first poor man in literary history with a vast agricultural estate.

The piece may or may not have been placed by anyone; newspapers would never admit it either way. But when the humble-farmer anecdote requires a landowner to play the pauper, the story stops being about mangoes and starts being about how easily the form of a human-interest story can be rented. Enjoy.