Anita Pratap, the Bangalore University journalism student whose byline—when bylines still had value—adorned Sunday and India Today magazines, Time and CNN, is in the news. Pratap, reputedly the first journalist to interview Velupillai Prabhakaran, when he lived in Chennai in 1985, features in Methagu (His Excellency), a biopic on the slain supremo of the Liberation…
Tag Archives: Sunday
When Aveek Sarkar and Vir Sanghvi met a scandal-ridden Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, they could ask 208 questions and supplementaries, including one, ahem, on #NewIndia. That is called an “interview”, Narendra Modi and PMO please note.
*** “In the first year of his prime ministership, Rajiv Gandhi was easily accessible to the press and gave candid, free-wheeling interviews. By the second year the candour was beginning to wear thin. And by the time the scandals surrounding his friends and the regime surfaced, he had retreated into his shell.” Thus begins…
The ‘Sunday’ magazine sub-editor who secretly cooked her way to become the best known Indian chef in the world, after Gaggan Anand (if you believe food critics, that is)
In the Hindustan Times magazine supplement, Brunch, the food writer Vir Sanghvi writes about Asma Khan, the former Sunday magazine journalist whose hashtag could well be #SubKaChaatSubKaVikas. (Sunday, launched by the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group, is now defunct. M.J. Akbar was its first editor.) Writes Sanghvi: “It is a funny feeling when a colleague from decades…
In Ernakulam, this is Anita Pratap reporting for…
Former Tehelka, India Today and Headlines Today journalist Ashish Khetan is to be the Aam Aadmi Party’s candidate from the New Delhi constituency, continuing the fledgling party’s strange infatuation with journalists. But from deep south, there is news that AAP may field a blast from the past, Anita Pratap. The former Time, CNN, Indian Express,…
How a BVB journalism course shaped a writer
Shashi Deshpande, the Bangalore-based short story writer and novelist, on how journalism shaped her writing, in the Indian Express magazine on Sundays, Eye: Do you remember how your writing career began? And how you became a journalist? I was working as a trainee with the Onlooker when a colleague asked me, ‘Why don’t you write…
Bangalore reporter who became a ‘RAW agent’
In Lounge, the weekend section of the business paper Mint, the columnist Aakar Patel doffs his hat to Prakash Belawadi, the Bangalore engineer who became an Indian Express reporter, who became a magazine correspondent, who became a television chat show host, who launched a journalism school, who launched a weekly newspaper… Who made a national-award…
Salman Khurshid, India Today & Sunday Guardian
Salman Khurshid, the Oxford-educated Union law minister, has taken the India Today group to court in Delhi, Bombay, Lucknow and London claiming damages of Rs 243 crore following Aaj Tak‘s sting operation that accused the trust run by his wife, former Sunday magazine journalist Louise Khurshid nee Fernandes, of a discrepancy of Rs 71 lakh.…
Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses & India Today
The launch of Salman Rushdie‘s memoirs, Joseph Anton, written in third person, has seen a flurry of TV interviews, and profiles, reviews and soft stories in the newspapers. Hindustan Times runs this short excerpt from the book which chronicles how The Satanic Verses ended up getting banned in India: On the day he received the…
Tiger Pataudi’s parting shot for the media
A day after the passing of Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, The Telegraph has reprinted a 1995 interview with the former cricket captain, who also did a stint as editor of Sportsworld, the now-defunct magazine from the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group that owns The Telegraph. The interviewer is Salman Khurshid, the current Union law minister, whose…
Rajeev Shukla: from reporter to minister of state
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from Delhi: Rajeev Shukla, the journalist who began his career as a lowly reporter in the Hindi daily Northern India Patrika in Kanpur in 1978 before turning to politics in 2000, is to become a minister in the Manmohan Singh government this evening. The 52-year-old will be the minister of State in charge…
‘The most prolific journalist of our times’
Khushwant Singh on his Illustrated Weekly of India protege M.J. Akbar, in The Telegraph, Calcutta, the “unputdownable” Calcutta paper founded by Akbar in 1982: “M.J. Akbar must be the most prolific journalist of our times. He heads the editorial board of India Today, edits The Sunday Guardian financed by Ram Jethmalani, and writes for many…
Vir Sanghvi “suspends” Hindustan Times column
Vir Sanghvi‘s weekly Hindustan Times column Counterpoint will not appear from next Sunday, after tapes of his alleged conversations with the lobbyist Niira Radia surfaced in Outlook* and Open magazines last week. The column which will appear tomorrow, 28 November 2010, will be his last, although Sanghvi claims on his website, a) that he is…
‘Perhaps, it is time for missionary journalists’
In a week in which the Hindustan Times front-paged the story of children eating silica-laced mud not far from Allahabad, and 76 soldiers were ambushed by Maoists in poverty-stricken Dantewada, the former Sunday magazine and India Today correspondent Madhu Jain laments the loss of “missionary journalism” in her DNA column. “The words of my boss…
Who, why, when, how, where, what, what the…
The new, redesigned Newsweek has had plenty of what can only be mildly termed “negative fan following”. The designer Juan Antonio Giner wrote recently that it was time to “forget Newsweek“. “It’s irrelevant. Awful design. Cheap opinions. No reporting. No news. No quality. No necessary content. And… a newsroom of hundreds. For what? Fat newsroom…
IJR 