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: Time
J-POD || Podcast || “Facebook’s deals with newsrooms, big editors’ proximity to its execs has prevented Indian media from investigating its BJP bias” || Kunal Purohit on ‘WSJ’ and ‘Time’ revelations
20 years ago, “Web 2.0” ushered in social media. It was free, it was fast, it was fun. Anybody with a phone could take part, and almost everyone did. It instantly connected friends, families, communities. Major political events like the ‘Arab Spring’ in Egypt briefly showed the potential of interactive, user-generated content to be a…
156 stories, eight editorials, and five cartoons over 15 days: how ‘Dainik Jagran’ kept up the constant Islamophobic dog-whistling on ‘Tabhlighi Jamaat’, as if India would be free from #Coronavirus if only…
The communalisation of the #Coronavirus pandemic in the media, just when the humanitarian crisis sparked by Narendra Modi‘s imposition of the 21-day “lockdown” with a 4-hour notice on March 25 was taking shape, is much too much of a coincidence. As the sight and plight of thousands of migrants walking back home from the big cities…
When Narendra Modi told an impressionable journalist that his glasses cost only a few hundred rupees; that he wore a simple Indian watch; that he got his clothes stitched from the same tailor each time
After eight, maybe nine, years of carefully coiffured image management, there is nearly nothing about Narendra Modi‘s expensive wardrobe that is debatable. Anybody blessed with even just one functional eye can see that he changes his clothes virtually hour of the day, rarely ever repeating colours. Anybody who can type a question in a search-engine…
Screenshots, thumb drives, sat phones, OB vans, and all the fancy footwork that fine reporters are using to get their stories out to counter the “propaganda blitzkrieg” on Kashmir
Three days on, the first reports are coming in of the situation on the ground in Kashmir, after New Delhi imposed a blanket clampdown on landline, mobile and internet services, before revoking #Article370 in the Valley. The Telegraph‘s Sankarshan Thakur (above) has a diary of the run-up to the “lockdown”—jargon for a brutal suppression for…
Unused to real journalists meeting him without questions pre-scripted by the PMO, a defensive Narendra Modi mentions ‘The Indian Express’ ten times in his interview with ‘The Indian Express’
*** Prime minister Narendra Modi‘s interview with The Indian Express has been totally overshadowed by Time magazine calling him “Divider-in-Chief” on its cover, and the NewsNation TV “interview” in which he reveals how he fooled Pakistan’s radars by going in for the air strike in Balakot on a cloudy night. But the Express interview with…
How ‘Arab News’, the mouthpiece of the ‘House of Saud’, is covering crown prince MBS’s visit to India and Pakistan as clouds of blood hang over the subcontinent
Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman‘s visit to Pakistan and India (and China) couldn’t have been more timely, against the backdrop of the suicide bomber attack in Kashmir, which killed over 40 Indian paramilitary force personnel on Valentine’s Day. And, indeed, against the even more grisly, blood-curdling backdrop of the MBS administration’s role in the…
“Since Shujaat Bukhari’s murder we have been dying a little everyday, slowly and bitterly. Did his killers celebrate? Did they get what they took away from us?”
Shujaat Bukhari, the longtime Kashmir correspondent of The Hindu and Frontline, who launched Rising Kashmir, was assassinated in Srinagar, in June 2018. In the Sunday magazine section of The Hindu, his wife Tehmeena Bukhari, a doctor, writes of her and the family’s trauma. *** “Since his murder — unsolved to this day — we have been…
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,…
Just between You and Me, a ‘Time’ special
What goes around comes around in the world of magazines*. Six years ago, Time magazine hailed you, yes You, as the person of the year: “You control the information age. Welcome to your world.” In circa 2013, it bemoans the “Me, Me, Me” generation addicted to phones, tabs and notebooks: “Millennials are lazy, entitled…
V.N. Subba Rao: a ‘shishya’ remembers his Guru
There are few more misleading terms in Indian journalism than the phrase “national media”. Only those who flit around in the rarefied circles of Delhi and Bombay, rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty, qualify; everyone else is “upcountry”. Only the bold-faced names from big English media houses are supposed to be national; everyone else…
Time, Sandesh and the six degrees of separation
As the row over Time magazine’s “Underachiever” cover line on prime minister Manmohan Singh engulfs primetime news, Mail Today cartoonist R. Prasad cuts through the post-colonial clutter. New York Times‘ India website IndiaInk has a gallery of past magazine covers on India, while Rediff compiles a slideshow of previous Time covers on Indians. Meanwhile, Prasad…
So many reporters, so little info on Sonia Gandhi?
Nothing has exposed the hollowness of so-called “political reporting” in New Delhi, and the fragilility of editorial spines of newspapers and TV stations across the country, than the Congress president Sonia Gandhi‘s illness. Hundreds of correspondents cover the grand old party; tens of editors claim to be on on first-name terms with its who’s who;…
Jug Suraiya on MJ, SJ, Giri, Monu & Mamma T
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from Delhi: Books about The Times of India are like city buses. There isn’t one for years, and then two come along around the same time. And on both occasions, punsters imported from Calcutta are the ones steering the wheel. Bachi Karkaria came out with Behind the Times, “a poorly structured, poorly…
Why Aravind Adiga prefers to be unemployed
Aravind Adiga, the Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger, has a new novel out, Last Man in Tower. In an interview with Yogesh Vajpeyi of The Sunday Standard, Adiga, a former correspondent of Time magazine in India, is asked the question. Any plans of reverting to journalism? No, I’m quite happy being unemployed. Why…
Without you, where would we in the media be?
In 2006, Time magazine declared that the person of the year was you, yes, you—a smart way of acknowledging the rise of Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace and other crowd-sourced media avenues in the internet era. In 2011, Web18, the internet arm of Raghav Bahl‘s Network18, which has launched a heavily promoted website called First Post—an assemblage…
Yet, they won’t print pix of dead US soldiers
The cover of the 9 August 2010 issue of Time magazine. For a change, all four editions—US, Europe, Asia and South Pacific—have the same cover story. Time‘s choice is doubtless provocative, one reason journalism exists. Yet, such eagerness and such a desire to provoke isn’t visible on home turf, where a quixotic self-censorship kicks into…
Legendary photojournalist T.S. Satyan dead
sans serif records with deep and profound regret the passing away of the legendary photo-journalist Tamabarahalli Subramanya Satyanarayana Iyer better known as T.S. Satyan in Mysore this afternoon. Mr Satyan was five days away from his 86th birthday. He is survived by his wife Nagarathna, children, grandchildren and a City (and a profession) he dearly…
‘India’s best lensmen don’t come from media’
The celebrated lensman Prashant Panjiar has captured “the visual landscape of India at the cusp of change” for his solo exhibition Pan India, to be held in New Delhi from September 25 to October 5 under the auspeices of Tasveer, the art and photo gallery. In an interview with the Sunday Express, Panjiar, a former…
‘I never learned a thing when I was talking’
“There’s something I learned long ago: I never learned a thing when I was talking,” says Larry King, host of CNN’s Larry King Live, answering readers’ queries in Time. Q: Whom do you most want to interview that you haven’t yet? A: Fidel Castro certainly. Always wanted to interview a Pope. Any Pope. And J.D.…
IJR 