With nearly 60% of India reputedly being under 25 years of age—in other words, with three out of five Indians having been born after 1985—it stands to reason that the 35th anniversary of the declaration of Emergency by the Indira Gandhi government should have come and gone without creating a ripple. That, and the fact…
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Discreet inquiries after the publication showed…
A front-page mea culpa in The Times of India, Bangalore, to the vice-president of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA), K. Govindraj. Govindraj had hit the headlines in June 2006 when he was reported as having allegedly molested a masseuse at the Commonwealth games in Melbourne. Image: courtesy The Times of India Read the original report…
English news channels have 0.4% viewership!
Cynics and critics of the media cannot stop bad-mouthing the English news channels and their shrieking, shouting, table-thumping, finger-wagging anchors. Talking heads move heaven, earth and everything else in between to appear on them. Advertisers drop everything else to flock to them. Yet…. Yet, is this all very futile? Using data collated by the television…
How an editor christened a Pierre Cardin model
Dileep Padgaonkar, The Times of India‘s former editor who made the revealing claim that he held the “second-most important job in the country” after the prime minister, is back in the paper, handling the opinion page. Padgaonkar writes in The Sunday Times of India of the small role he played (as the paper’s Paris correspondent…
Why media houses must maintain a proper library
The library has become an endangered section in Indian media houses in the age of the internet—and in a business culture populated by philistines that frowns upon the concept of a “newspaper of record”. But India’s original newspaper of record, The Hindu, has just shown the invaluable role a well-maintained archive can play in shaping…
Paparazzi pic of Bollywood babe sans makeup
If Indian journalism is uniformly second-rate, you ain’t seen nothing yet, Aakarbhai. Let Kanchan Gupta of The Pioneer tell you a story: “The popular Gujarati newspaper Sandesh had an interesting story about aspiring journalists who appeared for this year’s entrance test for the media course offered by Saurashtra University. “I have no idea about the…
Ramnath Goenka: Courage of the 2 o’clock kind
India’s foremost jurist, Fali S. Nariman, on India’s bulldog of a publisher, Ramnath Goenka of the undivided Indian Express, in his just-published memoirs Before Memory Fades*: “Ramnath Goenka was founder and managing editor of the The Indian Express, and he had, what Napoleon called, courage of “the two o’ clock-in-the-morning-kind”—unprepared courage that is necessary to…
The curious case of Zakir Naik & Shekhar Gupta
The gentleman on the right of the frame wants India to be ruled by Shariat laws. He recommends death for homosexuals. He supports Osama bin Laden if he is “fighting the enemies of Islam”. He says revealing clothes make women more susceptible to rape. Yet, the gentleman on the left, Shekhar Gupta, introduced him as…
Has R.K. Laxman drawn his last cartoon?
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: A question mark hangs over India’s most famous exclamation mark after a further slip in health of Rasipuram Krishnaswami Laxman, the iconic cartoonist of The Times of India. The 86-year-old Laxman, who has drawn cartoons for ToI for 63 years, has been airlifted to Bombay, reportedly after suffering a “mild…
‘Indian journalism is regularly second-rate’
Indian media doesn’t know. That is the conclusion that has been reached by Aakar Patel, formerly of Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, Mid-Day and Divya Bhaskar, as he tears into the Indian media in a column in Lounge, the Saturday supplement of the business daily Mint. Indian journalists do not know how to ask questions. Indian…
‘Tehelka’ announces its school of journalism
The Times of India, The Indian Express, Malayala Manorama, The Pioneer, Aaj Tak, NDTV… all have set up journalism schools. Now, Tehelka joins the club. Also read: Outlook magazine ranking of top-10 J-schools-2010 Hindustan Times‘ ranking of top-10 J-schools—2010 Hindustan Times‘ ranking of top-10 J-schools—2008
Yet another ranking of India’s best J-schools
Another day, another ranking of India’s top-10 institutes of mass communication. This time from Outlook* magazine’s annual ranking of India’s best professional colleges, conducted by the market research agency MDRA. * Disclosures apply Also read: Hindustan Times‘ ranking of top-10 J-schools—2010 Hindustan Times‘ ranking of top-10 J-schools—2008
How media kept Bhopal’s quest for justice alive
The Bhopal Gas Tragedy—not the 1984 one but the 2010 repeat—had everything going for it to be quickly consigned to the deepest crevices of our consciousness. A ridiculously long overdue verdict, a farcical sentence, poor (mostly Muslim) victims in a non-metropolitan city, the short memory of the public. And then the fact that 1984 happened…
The K-word, the P-word, the G-word, the A-word
The ghosts of Jammu & Kashmir seem to repeatedly haunt the BJP Rajya Sabha member and editor-in-chief of The Pioneer, the very erudite Chandan Mitra. Over a decade ago, the journalist-activist Kuldip Nayar, then a member of the upper house, moved a privilege motion for an overly enthusiastic editorial that questioned Nayar’s patriotism. In February…
Journalism can’t be taught, but it can be learned
It’s that time of the year again, when magazines and newspapers publish a ranking of professional colleges. Today’s Hindustan Times runs the top-10 mass communication institutes, as ranked by the market research agency C-fore. * All I really need to know, I learned in kindergarten Image: courtesy Hindustan Times Also read: India’s ten best communication…
‘Vijaya Next’ editor Deepak Thimaya resigns?
PRITAM SENGUPTA in New Delhi and PALINI R. SWAMY in Bangalore write: Vijaya Next, the weekly Kannada newspaper launched by The Times of India group for the “upwardly mobile Kannadiga population”, is said to be looking for a new editor, just three weeks after the paper hit the stands. Sources at Times House on Bahadur…
Why (perhaps) BJP sent Chandan Mitra to RS
Chandan Mitra, the editor-in-chief of The Pioneer, has been elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha for a second term, this time as a nominee of the BJP. In a piece in his paper, Mitra once again addresses the conflict of interest in being the editor of a paper and an active politician. “While it is…
Is the writing on the wall for magazines?!
At Mukesh Ambani‘s Reliance TimeOut store, a direction to buyers to not browse magazines gets slightly contorted.
Penguin sacks ex-Gentleman, David Davidar
David Davidar, the former magazine journalist who rose to become publisher of such stellar Indian literary names as Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Khushwant Singh and Shobha De, has been sacked from Penguin Canada following charges of sexual harassment. Davidar, 52, part of the team at the now defunct monthly, Gentleman launched by Minhaz…
Quick, what does shloka 17/15 of the Gita say?
The Times of India‘s weekend supplement on contemporary and new-age spirituality, The Speaking Tree, a pet-project of bosswoman Indu Jain, is inviting applications for the post of assistant editor. Qualifications: MA or PhD in comparative religion or theology. Also read: You’ve read the column, now read the paper When a newspaper recites Bhagwad Gita to…
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