The big, booming voice of Daler Mehndi, the superb sufi and bhangra singer, no longer rocks pubs, clubs and dinner parties. Bollywood has moved on to his brother Mika Singh, and Daler’s own legal tangles with alleged human trafficking have cast a dark shadow over him. But, Holi Hai! In an interview to Seemi Pasha of…
Tag Archives: Pritish Nandy
Former ‘Science Today’ editor Mukul Sharma, the prose and puzzle whiz who found Satyajit Ray’s kisses “unconvincing” and counted the golden flecks in Rakhee’s eyes, is no more.
Indian Journalism Review records with regret the passing of Mukul Sharma, the former editor of Science Today magazine (and its later version 2001), who wrote the scintillating “Mind Sport” column in now-defunct Illustrated Weekly of India. He was 69. Mukul Sharma, who lived in Gurgaon, near Delhi, was previously married to the film maker Aparna Sen. The…
When an editor draws a cartoon, it’s news
Indian print editors have done book reviews (Sham Lal, Times of India), film reviews (Vinod Mehta, Debonair), food reviews (Vir Sanghvi, Hindustan Times), music reviews (Chandan Mitra, TOI, Pioneer, The Sunday Observer; Sanjoy Narayan, Hindustan Times), elephant polo reviews (Suman Dubey, India Today) etc, but few have done cartoons. When The Telegraph, Calcutta, was launched…
A twist in ET’s masthead ahead of elections
Back in the early 1990s, the Ambanis sought to take on the then market-leader The Economic Times with a newspaper which promised more than business. It was titled at different times as the the Business & Political Observer (under Prem Shankar Jha‘s editorship) and as the Observer of Business and Politics (under Pritish Nandy). But…
Prabhu Chawla, Pritish Nandy & Modi 87:13
Narendra Modi‘s detractors (and drumbeaters) went into overdrive recently when The Times of India reported that 46% of the Gujarat chief minister’s one million Twitter followers were “fake”, 41% were “inactive”, and only 13% were “good”. TOI used a newly launched internet website to check fakers on Twitter to arrive at the numbers. Status People…
When Samir served a thali, Vineet served a scoop
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: As it approaches its dosquicentennial, India’s biggest English language newspaper, The Times of India, truly deserved a meticulous biography to tell the world on “what goes on inside this amazing media machine”. Sadly, Bachi Karkaria‘s Behind the Times (Times Books, 325 pages) is not that. Poorly structured, poorly sourced and…
Bhopal, Raajkumar Keswani & Pablo Bartholomew
The farcical judgment in the Bhopal gas tragedy case has come—25 years and 6 months after the accident. We in the media pat ourselves on the back for securing justice in middle-class, urban, people-like-us stories like Jessica Lal, Sanjeev Nanda and Ruchika Girhotra. Will the TV stations get into a similar activist mode on behalf…
Do “anonymous people” not count for media?
Death—ordinary, unglamourous, “smalltown” death—increasingly catches the glitzy, big-city English media on the wrong foot. Unlike the “26/11” siege of Bombay, in which almost as many people were killed as in the Mangalore air crash, you do not find TV and print journalists falling over each other to catch the “first flight” to the spot. Or,…
The difference between 386 and 23 is 363 words
How does the mainstream English media in India report the alleged transgressions of one of its own? S.N.M. Abdi, the Calcutta-based journalist who broke the “Bhagalpur Blindings” story in 1979-80 (in which police blinded 31 undertrials by pouring acid into their eyes) for M.J. Akbar‘s Sunday magazine, and now works for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Hong…
IJR 