There are two tried and tested formulas for commissioning reviews in the shockingly incestuous bordello of Indian books that has now spread its wings into Indian journalism. The supposedly dignified formula is to get an author’s friend or associate to do the unctuous needful (say a Khushwant Singh to “review” a David Davidar) so that…
Tag Archives: Stardust
Enter: The queen bee of Bombay film journalists
Anju Mahendroo (in picture), the colourful actress who once boasted of an off-field partnership with cricket legend Gary Sobers, is to play the role of the gossip columnist Devyani Chaubal in The Dirty Picture, based on southern sleaze queen Silk Smitha‘s life. Devyani Chaubal wrote the saucy Frankly Speaking column in the now-defunct film magazine…
Vir Sanghvi & Barkha Dutt: “We were targeted”
Society, the monthly lifestyle magazine of the Magna group owned by Nari Hira, has a cover story on Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt in its January 2011 issue. For the first time, the two journalists most affected by the Niira Radia tapes, appear on the same platform. In his 3-page interview, Sanghvi states: “I am…
The media, the message, and the messengers
The Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy‘s 31-page, 19,556-word essay “Walking with the comrades” in Outlook magazine*, has produced a fast and succinct response from the journalistic Twitterati after Tuesday’s dastardly ambush of paramilitary forces by said comrades. From top, NDTV English group editor Barkha Dutt, Pioneer senior editor Kanchan Gupta, Indian Express columnist Tavleen…
Jug Suraiya takes on the mighty Big B
The reverberations of Amitabh Bachchan‘s blog comments on the Academy Award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire are now being felt in the “cesspool” of Indian journalism. In his reaction to the movie, Bachchan wrote in January: “If SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let…
Vir Sanghvi lashes out at Mint “censorship”
It’s all happening at Mint, the business daily launched by the Hindustan Times barely two years ago. Founder-editor Raju Narisetti left under a cloud of rumours at the turn of the year. And now, star-columnist Vir Sanghvi, a former editor of HT, has ended his column in Lounge, the Saturday magazine of Mint, with a…
Wife-beater? Freeloader? Menace to society?
Restaurants are now suing newspapers for bad reviews claiming “defamation” and loss of business. But how should authors respond to bad reviews? Should they just be thankful for the publicity? Should they get into a slanging match with the reviewer and hope for the best? Should they, as Shobhaa De, the author of “Superstar India”…
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