Back Of The Book

Multiple Musings

We Are Living In A Fascinating Time

A 'feel-good' kind of news reached my inbox this morning. An Economist Intelligence Unit report states that the global economy is going to grow at 4.9% this year. That will be the highest in the last twenty years. The US economy is expected to grow at the same pace, a tough act for such a large and developed economy and so will Japan, after all most 14 years. The last year saw an unprecedented optimism in the Indian economy. The last quarter the economy grew by 8.4%. All this comes after the gloomy years since 2000 and this was the largest quaterly growth since the 1980s. Now this optimism will be shared by the entire world.
We are living in a fascinating period and it throws up immense possibilities not just for the economy but for us, young professionals. We (age bracket of 19-25) now make 45% of the nation's population. Its a young nation and while professionally it means more competition, it also means that we are part of a new nation, we can rebuild our nation's future.
Its the budget day, and while there are plenty of doomsday sayers, pointing at the presence of the Left in the government, I trust Chidambaram and Manmohan Singh will deliver and go forward with the reforms. Its going to be a unique day the newsroom at The Economic Times. Good amount of planning has gone into the budget issue. We will be doubling the number of pages as well as the number of copies we will sell tomorrow. The editor sent in a letter saying that there is absolutely no scope for any mistakes (as if for the editions he expects us to leave some opportunities for making mistakes). The ET team will be getting two or three hours to analyze and interpret Chidambaram's speech and a small mistake in interpretation and analysis can be disastrous for a company or for an entire sector.
The nation looks up to ET and its going to be a fascinating day at work too.

Yours Truly

Dipayan Baishya, 24
Correspondent, The Economic Times

Tucked in a secluded corner in the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University is a rock called “Parthasarathy Rock”. Apparently, it’s the highest natural point in Delhi and gives a spectacular view of what a writer once described as the “City of Djinns”. It was three week since Dipayan had joined the master’s programme in economics at the university and sitting at the rock on a breezy night, it was time for some introspection. The university had celebrity professors, had been a jumping pad for aspiring bureaucrats or for those who wanted to get the right recommendations for enrolling at the Ivy League universities in United States and most importantly it had an inspiring campus. At the same time, it was a world of its own - lethargic, secluded, almost like a cocoon where few seemed to care about the paradigm shift-taking place in economy, business, international relations and society in general. Commies filled the campus and most of the faculty and the students seemed to be still doped in the ideals of socialism. Change was almost blasphemous and most preferred to bask in the soft glory of “intellectualism”.

Next morning armed with a few articles written for The Statesman and college magazines, Dipayan started to make the rounds at the offices of business publications. Journalism was probably the best way to know the world around, reasoned Dipayan, and a degree in economics from Presidency College, Calcutta, was probably a good background to convince an editor to hire him. By August 2002, he was sent as a trainee reporter to the Bombay bureau of Business Today, the most-read business fortnightly in the country. “Learn on the job and expect no one to spoon-feed you”, was the brief from the editor and for almost two years at Business Today, Dipayan was learning about business in the financial capital of the country and covering almost everything that might be of interest to a reader. Mainly into writing features and analyzing new developments, an absence of watertight compartments (called beats in journalism) gave him an opportunity to interact with the best brains in Indian Inc and at the same time specialize in the subjects that were of interest to him.

More than anything else, his stint at Business Today was a learning experience. Starting off with writing for the trends section, Dipayan has contributed articles for every section of the magazine, including, management, personal finance and back of the book and has over a hundred articles to his credit. He has also written for a few special editions and cover stories of the magazine.

Dipayan now works with The Economic Times, the second largest business daily in the world and is based out of Bombay. He is part of a small editorial team that brings out Corporate Dossier, a weekly supplement on management and strategy as well as Brand Equity, a weekly supplement on advertising and marketing. Apart from contributing stories, Dipayan is now busy learning layout designing and production. He is also involved in developing and writing for a couple of columns in Corporate Dossier. Occasionally, he also writes for the main paper, Media – a Hong Kong-based media magazine and has also contributed an article to Knowledge@ Wharton. Business and entrepreneurial history, contemporary history, international relations and politics are some areas, which are of interest to Dipayan. He was associated with Centre for Civil Society – a libertarian think tank and while at college co-founded a youth-based NGO, Right Now and developed content for schoolcircle.com. Still quite young in the profession, Dipayan is eager to learn and further develop his skills in journalism and in the field of media.

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