sans serif records the passing away of Sabina Sehgal Saikia, the resident food writer of The Times of India, in the terror attack on The Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay. She was 45 years old. Her body was among the 100 recovered on Saturday, almost 60 hours after the hostage drama began, on the sixth…
Monthly Archives: November 2008
TOI food critic still missing in Taj terror attack
Sabina Sehgal Saikia, the resident food critic of India’s largest selling English newspaper The Times of India, is still missing, 48 hours after the hostage crisis began at The Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay. Delhi-based Sabina was in Bombay for the wedding reception of fellow Times editor Bachi Karkaria‘s son on Wednesday. She returned to…
Ban ‘live’ reporting of hostage rescue missions?
“Several foreign nationals are trapped in the Taj Hotel Mahal” “The top management of a multinational corporation was meeting…” “Terrorists are suspected to be on the 9th floor…” “NSG troops are about to have arrived in Mumbai…” “NSG commandos have entered the Hotel…” Some of the information telecast live by all news channels on yesterday’s…
Behind a very successful face there is a woman
Prannoy Roy‘s NDTV (New Delhi Television) turned 20 years old yesterday, and the channel’s best known face used the occasion to pay a rich and heart-warming tribute to its least known one: co-founder and life partner, Radhika Roy, with a clip from The World This Week, which made its debut as a half-hour show on…
India’s northeast is a graveyard for journalists
Over two dozen journalists have been killed in India’s northeastern states by separatist militants, and coal and timber mafia, since 1992. The worsening situation this week which saw two journos in Assam and Manipur meet their end, resulted in India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh call for added protection. But local observers feel that this is…
Ted Turner on the future of papers, magazines
Is the relentless torrent of breaking news—on television, through the internet, on the mobile phone, etc—making newspapers and magazines irrelevant? Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, answers the age-old question from reader Kristina Popski in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the latest issue of Time magazine: “No. I think it has made people more interested in news…
American professor killed in Indian road accident
sans serif announces with regret the passing away of Brent Hurd, a Fulbright scholar and visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media (IIJNM) in a road accident on the outskirts of Bangalore, on Sunday. He was 38 years old. Prof Hurd, who was riding a bicycle back to the institute campus…
You are what you eat. So is your photography.
What do photojournalists eat while on the job? The New Yorker has an audio slide show. Illustration: courtesy MIT Listen here: Tea and wallaby
The Queen on why she hates women interviewers
Helen Mirren, the British actress who won the Oscar for playing The Queen, on why she likes to be interviewed by male reporters, in The Sunday Times magazine: “I prefer male journalists because there’s a streak of female journalism—the bitches—who are mean-spirited and nasty because you are another woman and want to make you feel…
Fouler? Fullare? Fullo? Foiled?
2008 India Press Photo award winning picture
This picture, of inmates at a home for the aged in Bangalore sharing their room with a recently deceased resident, shot by Selvaprakash L. on 13 May 2007, has won the India Press Photo award of the Ramnath Goenka Foundation. Selvaprakash, 30, formerly of the Tamil dailies Dinamalar and Dinakaran, is now with DNA. Photograph:…
‘Media hysteria turning a whole nation neurotic’
The Kannada writer and thinker, Prof U.R. Anantha Murthy, on the Indian media’s role in whipping up “mass hysteria” through its breathless coverage of the recent terror attacks and the arrest of the suspects behind them: “When any arrest is made for suspected terrorism, you invariably hear a Muslim name. Then you are told that…
The old man and the sea of news and views
M.K. VIDYARANYA captures a senior citizen catching up with the news on the beaches of the former French colony of Pondicherry.
IJR 