For 15 days, as the media storm over the Niira Radia tapes raged around her, NDTV’s star-anchor Barkha Dutt opted to speak to the world through an official press release, an online essay, and a pre-recorded inquisition by print editors. Dutt declined to appear on a Karan Thapar show and in a Headlines Today debate,…
Tag Archives: Karan Thapar
Why Karan Thapar stopped haggling with God
Karan Thapar has a well-cultivated image of a tough, snarling, bulldog of a interviewer a la Jeremy Paxman. All the aggressive, relentless questioning and eyeball to eyeball gazing with the crooked and the wicked of the world might leave viewers wondering if the man has a heart at all. But the Devil’s Advocate has a…
What Raghav Bahl could learn from Samir Jain
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: Some time in the mid-20th century, the legendary New Yorker writer (and foodie) A.J. Liebling famously said, “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one“. For proof in the early 21st, he might like to take a look at Raghav Bahl. The founder, editor, controlling shareholder and managing…
From the desk of Shri Quick Gun Chidambaram
The Union home ministry under Palaniappan Chidambaram has been markedly different from that of his predecessor Shivraj Patil‘s. Gung-ho, proactive, media-savvy. The minister himself pops up in chosen English TV studios now and then. The home secretary G.K. Pillai dashes off corrections, clarifications and assorted complaints. Sometimes, Chidambaram himself shoots off a letter to the…
Jessica Lal verdict proof that Indian media works
The Supreme Court of India has upheld the life sentence awarded by the Delhi high court to Manu Sharma, the son of Congress leader and former Union minister Vinod Sharma, for killing Jessica Lal, who had declined to serve him a drink after the bar had closed in Delhi, in 1999. Manu Sharma’s counsel, the…
Since promises are meant to be broken…
… India’s premier television anchor Karan Thapar makes one in his Hindustan Times column: “This year I’m taking on a bigger challenge. I’ve decided to give up interrupting my guests. Instead, I shall let them waffle and drone on, regardless of what they’re saying and how off target they may be, till you, the audience,…
India’s greatest poet since the Bhakti movement?
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: As Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw showed, if you have to die, you must die somewhere in the vicinity of Delhi, so that the movers, shakers and brokers of the capital can easily assemble to “bid a tearful farewell”. If you write a book, you must write do so somewhere…
A fast, inswinging toe-crusher from a paceman
“There are a lot of newspapers I take seriously, but Friday Times is not one of them. It’s mind over matter. I don’t mind and they don’t matter.” —Pakistani cricketer turned politician Imran Khan in an interview with Karan Thapar
One rule for Modi, another rule for Chidu?
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: Saturday afternoons don’t figure highly on the radar screens of TV channels. Because they are all in the “hills” smoking cigars, eating caviar, and calculating how much richer the soaring valuations have made them in the week gone by, channel heads all believe this is the time when the…
Will paper tigers last longer than real ones?
In The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer says the last newspaper will be printed, sold, (hopefully) read and then crumpled and thrown into the dustbin sometime in the first quarter of the year of the lord 2043. In other words, even if this dire prognosis turns out to be true, paper tigers will roam the urban…
Did this man stand a chance with a future PM?
Death is a pretty grim business in Asian media. Unlike in Britain, where obituaries have been turned into a juicy art form, Asian tributes generally play it safe, spiking all the spice out of a false sense of deference. Last night, however, Karan Thapar, India’s premier television interviewer, who cut his teeth on Channel 4,…
IJR 