The Fourth Estate

My Articles

2005-04-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

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Some of my recent articles in The Economic Times, Corporate Dossier and Brand Equity

Profits Not A Right, It's A Privilege: Peter Senge Talks On His Model For Sustainable Growth, The Economic Times, Nov 21, 2005
The Alien Future: Peter Senge talks on business sustainability, Corporate Dossier, Dec 2, 2005

You're No. 1 Or You're Dead: He leads an organisation that has 1.2 million employees and a budget of Rs 40,000 crore. Corporate Dossier gets into the mind of General JJ Singh, Chief of the Indian Army, Corporate Dossier, September 16, 2005
Management Lessons From The Indian Army

Lights...Camera...Action: Unilever's president for Asia/Africa and HLL's chairman, Harish Manwani's Gameplan For The Region, Brand Equity, December 28, 2005
Last Samurai: Arun Adhikari prepares for his stint as chairman of Unilever Japan, Brand Equity, December 28, 2005

Strategy By Design: On why business managers will be better off learning from designers, Corporate Dossier, December 23, 2005

Been There Bought That: On how the rise in disposable income inn 2005 has impacted branding and marketing in India, The Economic Times, December 28, 2005

Perk Chops: India Inc Passes The FBT (Fringe Benefit Tax) Buck To Employees, The Economic Times, August 18, 2005

The Counting Crores: Are You Spending Too Much On Customers? Columbia Business School's Sunil Gupta Suggests A Way Calculate Market Cap From Customer Life Cycle Value, Brand Equity, August 10, 2005
Pick And Choose Your Customers

The Half-Life of an Indian CEO Has Never Been Shorter, The Economic Times, July 5, 2005

Sell Curry: Marketing Guru and Kellogg's Dean Dipak Jain Offers The New Mantras of Marketing, Brand Equity, July 6, 2005
Jain On The Indian Aviation Sector
Jain On Tomorrow's Industries
Custom(er)ise Brands To Stay Ahead, The Economic Times, July 6, 2005
Saturday Club: "Stone Age Man", Dipak Jain, The Economic Times, Dec 3, 2005

Beyond The Blue Mountain: Meet Ram Shriram — Silicon Valley's reclusive billionaire who invested in and hand-held Google Inc through its initial years, Corporate Dossier, June 10, 2005 Straight From The Gut : Shriram Shares His Secrets

The King's Gambit: Kumar Mangalam Birla completes 10 years at helm of AV Birla Group, Corporate Dossier, May 27, 2005
Lessons In Excellence: Management Lessons from KMB
People Management at AV Birla group
Change Management at AV Birla group
BK Birla speaks on his favourite grandson
Trivia on KMB

Kumar Mangalam Birla Speaks To ET About His Next Growth Flight And More, The Economic Times, May 16, 2005

Across The Board — The Changing Face of Independent Directors In India, Corporate Dossier, May 13, 2005
The New Faces

Bang For The Buck: How private equity is chaning India Inc, Corporate Dossier, Oct 28, 2005
Balancing Act

Matrix Reloaded: BCG has a new matrix for the 21st century company, transform into a networked organisation, says CEO Hans-Paul Buerkner, Corporate Dossier, September 30, 2005

Mortal Combat: Oracle's CFO, Charles Phillips has splurged $20 billion in acquiring 14 companies in as many months. What's on his mind?, Corporate Dossier, Jan 20, 2006

Family Matters: India Inc Has a New Set of Business Families And They Are All Professionals, Corporate Dossier, September 9, 2005
BoardGames: Who Are India Inc's First Families

Show Me The Money: Samuel Agastya Presents You A Dummies Guide To The World Of Private Equity & Venture Capitalists, Corporate Dossier, September 2, 2005

Travails Of A T-shirt: Professor of management, Pietra Rivoli analyses the impact og globalisation by tracking the life-cycle of a T-shirt, Corporate Dossier, Oct 21, 2005

King Of Clubs: Yunchun Lee used to be a member of the MIT Blackjack Team that raided Las Vegas in the nineties. Now, he is helping companies crack their customers' behaviour patterns, Corporate Dossier, Jan 13, 2006

In The Line Of Hire: External And Internal Communication Plays A Crucial Role In The Way Your Company Is Percieved By Talent. The Indian BPO Industry Has Learned It The Hard Way, Corporate Dossier, Aug 5, 2005

At DuPont, leading its research effort are people of Indian origin led by Uma Chowdhry, Corporate Dossier, July 1, 2005

The Eagle Has Landed: What's attarcting London-based ace lawyer Sarosh Zaiwalla to providing corporate arbitration services in India? Corporate Dossier, Jan 6, 2006

Diageo plans sourcing base in India, The Economic Times, The Economic Times, Nov 24, 2005

Ticket To Ride: Volvo has become synonymous with long-distance bus-travel in India. What drives this brand?, Brand Equity, July 13, 2005

Baby Blues: As Chinese major Lenovo takes over American icon IBM's PC business, leading the transformation is a sales & marketing duo that has its roots in another emerging economy — India, Brand Equity, June 22, 2005

Companies look for talent outside B-Schools, tap ISI, JNU and DSE: Mumbai Edition, Delhi Edition, The Economic Times, April 25, 2005

Devil's On His Way: India Inc and Superstition, Corporate Dossier, Jan 13m 2006

Mumbai Rains:
The Mumbai Disaster Leaves A Rs 3000 Crore Crater In The City's Commerce And Economy, The Economic Times, Aug 2, 2005
But At The BPOs Business Was As Usual
Maximum City: The Mumbai Disaster Provides A Unique Oppurtunity For India Inc To Share Knowledge On Disaster Management With The Government, Corporate Dossier, Aug 12, 2005
We The People: Infosys's Nandan Nilekani Shares His View On Urban Planning & Management

Corporate Dossier Hits The Road With The Indiana Jones of Finance, Jim Rogers, Jim Rogers, Corporate Dossier, April 8, 2005
Jim Rogers on India
Jim Rogers on China
Jim Rogers on the Dollar
Jim Rogers on the Euro
Jim Rogers on NGOs

Investment Biker, Corporate Dossier, March 25, 2005

Queen of Marts: Renuka Ramnath, ICICI Venture, Brand Equity, April 13, 2005

Starship Enterprise: Sultan of Socks, CY Pal, Renfro India, The Economic Times, Oct 22, 2005

Can Mocha Become a Cult Brand?, Brand Equity, June 1, 2005

The Buy Choice: Media Buyers Are A Pampered Lot, Brand Equity, Oct 5, 2005

Tops Of The Charts: Move Over Pokemon, Beyblades Is The Latest Craze Among Kids Which Marketers Are Trying To Leverage On, Brand Equity, July 27, 2005

DCB Revokes Job Offer To Over 40 B-school Students, The Economic Times, June 7, 2005

AV Birla Group Hires Senior Professionals, The Economic Times, April 19, 2005

Unilever picks senior HLL officials as innovasion heads in Asia, The Economic Times, Nov 17, 2004

Personnel Touch: Manpower joins hands with India's ABC Consultants, The Economic Times, Oct 5, 2005
Hunting Season: The changing dynamics of the search firm industry in India, Corporate Dossier, Oct 14, 2005

Shoppers Without Borders: Indian Retailers Adopt a Global Sourcing Strategy, Brand Equity, March 16, 2005

Tech IT To The Limit: Technical Evangelists, Corporate Dossier, April 1, 2005

From Samba to Sambar: What connects Brazil and India. We ask DuPont India chief Henrique Ubrig, September 23, 2005

Retail Module: Knocking On Heaven's Door: Brand Equity launches the Retail Module which takes an indepth look at the fledgeing organised retail sector in India, Brand Equity, June 22, 2005
Heard It On The Radio: How Can You Implement RFID In Your Retail Venture, Plus Retail Industry Numbers From China, Brand Equity, August 10, 2004

Business After 8: Rajat Jain, Corporate Dossier, Jan 13, 2006
Business After 8: Diwan Rahul Nanda, Corporate Dossier, April 29, 2005
Business After 8: Alok Kejriwal, Corporate Dossier, March 18, 2005
Business After 8: Anupam Mittal, Corporate Dossier, July 1, 2005

Lifestyle Has A New CEO, The Economic Times, February 22, 2005

More In Store: Subhiksha Charts An Expansion Plan, Brand Equity, March 2, 2005

Corner Room: Executive Movements Column, Corporate Dossier

Sunil Khera & Ashish Gupta, April 8, 2005
Siddharth Pai, March 18, 2005
Alok Vajpeyi, Raj Narayan, Sanjay Lamba, March 4, 2005
Anuratna Chadha, Munish Dayal, Sandeep Sahney, May 6, 2005
Alberto Montanari, Rajesh Srivastava, Subhash Bel, June 10, 2005

PS: Please click on the continuation link on top of the page to access the second part of the stories
All these articles along with their PDF copies can be accessed on the epaper

Article published in Knowledge@Wharton: Use of Technologhy in SME's, For Tech Vendors, Indian SMEs Are A Double Edged Sword — A large Market, Yet One That's Hard To Satisfy Download PDF

Some articles in Business Today

Articles in Media

PS: If you need the username or password for any of the sites mentioned above or have any query/suggestion/feedback, please drop me an email at dipayan.b [@] gmail.com

For my articles published before February 2005, visit www.economictimes.com and key in my name on the search box

Articles Classified According To Topics

2004-11-04T05:51:00.000-08:00

Beyond Business

You're No. 1 Or You're Dead: He leads an organisation that has 1.2 million employees and a budget of Rs 40,000 crore. Corporate Dossier gets into the mind of General JJ Singh, Chief of the Indian Army, Corporate Dossier, September 16, 2005
Management Lessons From The Indian Army

Marketing

The Counting Crores: Are You Spending Too Much On Customers? Columbia Business School's Sunil Gupta Suggests A Way Calculate Market Cap From Customer Life Cycle Value, Brand Equity, August 10, 2005
Pick And Choose Your Customers

Sell Curry: Marketing Guru and Kellogg's Dean Dipak Jain Offers The New Mantras of Marketing, Brand Equity, July 6, 2005
Jain On The Indian Aviation Sector
Jain On Tomorrow's Industries
Custom(er)ise Brands To Stay Ahead, The Economic Times, July 6, 2005

Ticket To Ride: Volvo has become synonymous with long-distance bus-travel in India. What drives this brand?, Brand Equity, July 13, 2005

Baby Blues: As Chinese major Lenovo takes over American icon IBM's PC business, leading the transformation is a sales & marketing duo that has its roots in another emerging economy — India, Brand Equity, June 22, 2005

Can Mocha Become a Cult Brand?, Brand Equity, June 1, 2005

Tops Of The Charts: Move Over Pokemon, Beyblades Is The Latest Craze Among Kids Which Marketers Are Trying To Leverage On, Brand Equity, July 27, 2005

The Buy Choice: Media Buyers Are A Pampered Lot, Brand Equity, Oct 5, 2005

Been There Bought That: On how the rise in disposable income inn 2005 has impacted branding and marketing in India, The Economic Times, December 28, 2005

Retail

Queen of Marts: Renuka Ramnath, ICICI Venture, Brand Equity, April 13, 2005

Shoppers Without Borders: Indian Retailers Adopt a Global Sourcing Strategy, Brand Equity, March 16, 2005

Retail Module: Knocking On Heaven's Door: Brand Equity launches the Retail Module which takes an indepth look at the fledgeing organised retail sector in India, Brand Equity, June 22, 2005
Heard It On The Radio: How Can You Implement RFID In Your Retail Venture, Plus Retail Industry Numbers From China, Brand Equity, August 10, 2004

More In Store: Subhiksha Charts An Expansion Plan, Brand Equity, March 2, 2005

Change Management & Corporate Restructuring

The King's Gambit: Kumar Mangalam Birla completes 10 years at helm of AV Birla Group, Corporate Dossier, May 27, 2005
Lessons In Excellence: Management Lessons from KMB People Management at AV Birla group
Change Management at AV Birla group
BK Birla speaks on his favourite grandson
Trivia on KMB

Kumar Mangalam Birla Speaks To ET About His Next Growth Flight And More, The Economic Times, May 16, 2005

Lights...Camera...Action: Unilever's president for Asia/Africa and HLL's chairman, Harish Manwani's Gameplan For The Region, Brand Equity, December 28, 2005
Last Samurai: Arun Adhikari prepares for his stint as chairman of Unilever Japan, Brand Equity, December 28, 2005

Strategy By Design: On why business managers will be better off learning from designers, Corporate Dossier, December 23, 2005

Matrix Reloaded: BCG has a new matrix for the 21st century company, transform into a networked organisation, says CEO Hans-Paul Buerkner, Corporate Dossier, September 30, 2005

The Alien Future: Peter Senge talks on how business sustainability, Corporate Dossier, Dec 2, 2005
Profits Not A Right, It's A Privilege: Peter Senge Talks On His Model For Sustainable Growth, The Economic Times, Nov 21, 2005

Diageo plans sourcing base in India, The Economic Times, The Economic Times, Nov 24, 2005

Starship Enterprise: Sultan of Socks, CY Pal, Renfro India, The Economic Times, Oct 22, 2005

Travails Of A T-shirt: Professor of management, Pietra Rivoli analyses the impact of globalisation by tracking the life cycle of a T-shirt, Corporate Dossier, Oct 21, 2005

Corporate Governance

Across The Board — The Changing Face of Independent Directors In India, Corporate Dossier, May 13, 2005 The New Faces

People Issues

Perk Chops: India Inc Passes The FBT (Fringe Benefit Tax) Buck To Employees, The Economic Times, August 18, 2005

The Half-Life of an Indian CEO Has Never Been Shorter, The Economic Times, July 5, 2005

In The Line Of Hire: External And Internal Communication Plays A Crucial Role In The Way Your Company Is Percieved By Talent. The Indian BPO Industry Has Learned It The Hard Way, Corporate Dossier, Aug 5, 2005

Companies look for talent outside B-Schools, tap ISI, JNU and DSE: Mumbai Edition, Delhi Edition, The Economic Times, April 25, 2005

DCB Revokes Job Offer To Over 40 B-school Students, The Economic Times, June 7, 2005

AV Birla Group Hires Senior Professionals, The Economic Times, April 19, 2005

Unilever picks senior HLL officials as innovasion heads in Asia, The Economic Times, Nov 17, 2004

Mortal Combat: Oracle's CFO, Charles Phillips has splurged $20 billion in acquiring 14 companies in as many months. What's on his mind?, Corporate Dossier, Jan 20, 2006

Tech IT To The Limit: Technical Evangelists, Corporate Dossier, April 1, 2005

Lifestyle Has A New CEO, The Economic Times, February 22, 2005

Personal Touch: Manpower joins hands with India's ABC Consultants, The Economic Times, Oct 5, 2005
Hunting Season: The changing dynamics of the search firm industry in India, Corporate Dossier, Oct 14, 2005

Family Matters: India Inc Has a New Set of Business Families And They Are All Professionals, Corporate Dossier, September 9, 2005
BoardGames: Who Are India Inc's First Families?

Corner Room: Executive Movements Column, Corporate Dossier Sunil Khera & Ashish Gupta, April 8, 2005 Siddharth Pai, March 18, 2005 Alok Vajpeyi, Raj Narayan, Sanjay Lamba, March 4, 2005 Anuratna Chadha, Munish Dayal, Sandeep Sahney, May 6, 2005 Alberto Montanari, Rajesh Srivastava, Subhash Bel, June 10, 2005

Trends in Finance

Beyond The Blue Mountain: Meet Ram Shriram — Silicon Valley's reclusive billionaire who invested in and hand-held Google Inc through its initial years, Corporate Dossier, June 10, 2005 Straight From The Gut : Shriram Shares His Secrets

Corporate Dossier Hits The Road With The Indiana Jones of Finance, Jim Rogers, Jim Rogers, Corporate Dossier, April 8, 2005
Jim Rogers on India Jim Rogers on China Jim Rogers on the Dollar Jim Rogers on the Euro Jim Rogers on NGOs

Investment Biker, Corporate Dossier, March 25, 2005

Show Me The Money: Samuel Agastya Presents You A Dummies Guide To The World Of Private Equity & Venture Capitalists, September 2, 2005

Bang For The Buck: How private equity is changing India Inc, Corporate Dossier, Oct 28, 2005 Balancing Act

Global Indians

At DuPont, leading its research effort are people of Indian origin led by Uma Chowdhry, Corporate Dossier, July 1, 2005

Saturday Club: "Stone Age Man", Dipak Jain, The Economic Times, Dec 3, 2005

The Eagle Has Landed: What's attarcting London-based ace lawyer Sarosh Zaiwalla to providing corporate arbitration services in India? Corporate Dossier, Jan 6, 2006

Miscellaneous

Mumbai Rains: The Mumbai Disaster Leaves A Rs 3000 Crore Crater In The City's Commerce And Economy, The Economic Times, Aug 2, 2005
But At The BPOs Business Was As Usual
Maximum City: The Mumbai Disaster Provides A Unique Oppurtunity For India Inc To Share Knowledge On Disaster Management With The Government, Corporate Dossier, Aug 12, 2005
We The People: Infosys's Nandan Nilekani Shares His View On Urban Planning & Management

King Of Clubs: Yunchun Lee used to be a member of the MIT Blackjack Team that raided Las Vegas in the nineties. Now, he is helping companies crack their customers' behaviour patterns, Corporate Dossier, Jan 13, 2006

From Samba to Sambar: What connects Brazil and India. We ask DuPont India chief Henrique Ubrig, September 23, 2005

Devil's On His Way: India Inc and Superstition, Corporate Dossier, Jan 13m 2006

Business After 8: Rajat Jain, Corporate Dossier, Jan 13, 2006
Business After 8: Diwan Rahul Nanda, Corporate Dossier, April 29, 2005
Business After 8: Alok Kejriwal, Corporate Dossier, March 18, 2005
Business After 8: Anupam Mittal, Corporate Dossier, July 1, 2005

PS: If you need the username or password for any of the sites mentioned above or have any query/suggestion/feedback, please drop me an email at dipayan.b [@] gmail.com

For my articles published before February 2005, visit www.economictimes.com and key in my name on the search box. Or else drop me an email on any of the above topics and I will send you text files of the articles.

People's Republic of Medialand

2004-11-04T05:22:00.000-08:00

Citizen Journalism

As newspapers struggle to retain the mindspace and eyeballs of readers from the increasing dominance of electronic media, the challenge for many is how do you get the audience more involved in your product? Interactive features is one way out but they aren't enough. Newspapers, mostly in Mumbai, have recently introduced sections where pictures sent by readers are published and in some cases they are even allowed to file a report on some recent developments. And we are not talking about Op-Ed pages and letters column, which are often counter-productive as some writers tend to dominate these sections.

It's still early days for citizen journalism in India, but its already an established trend abroad and newspapers in India will do good if they pick up the lessons already learnt in developed markets. The London bombings and BBC's smart use of viewers' reportage has already made headlines.

Of course there are challenges. From citizen journalists it can easily turn into citizen paparazzi. The Kareena Kapoor incident is still fresh in most people's mind. Factors like lack of accountability, code of ethics and responsibility, corner stones of tradinational journalism will be questioned, but there are ways and means to overcome these and rewrite rules.

Online companies as usual are at the forefront of these changes. Yahoo is betting on citizen journalism and podcasting seem to make business sense too.

So whats the next thing to think about. Methinks, its embedded readers... A dedicated set of readers who reads the newspapers every morning at their home and send in their feedback. Readers are hardly taken seriously by most journalists and stories are often written keeping in midn whether fellow journalists would like it. If journalists want their readers to take their newspaper seriously and not switch-over to other media channels, we need to give readers the hot seat in our though process. Time to hand over the charge back to where it belongs, the readers.

That's The Way To Be

The net may have failed to emerge as the ultimate tool for commerce, but chances are that it's going to change the way we percieve media and challenge the very notion of it. No, I am not saying that news portals are going to emerge as the biggest thing to happen in the last two years in medialand. It's the sheer participation the internet allows to various people that is going to redefine media. Extremely fragmented, hopelessly divergent and probably commercial unviable, the new media will be powered by the people who today consumes media as opposed to the conventional model where in a a select who sit in their newsrooms decide what millions ought to read and think.

I am talking about the burgeoning of the blogs, community sites, wikis, every thing that allows everyone to post and publish their views and opinion and share it with anyone who is concerned. It's the ultimate democratisation of the medialand, no longer dominated by a few media barons or paper tigers who force their view onto others. Everyone on this earth is going to have a say. Political movements may have failed to bring about people's republic, but the net is set to make media a truly people's way of expression. An individual expression like graphiti, long ignored and in some place considered illegal, can be shared with millions of netizens across places.

The US elections saw an unprecedented amount of coverage on the net. Anyone having any opinion shared it and put his/her views forward. I believe, more than blogs, wikis may well be the ones which will lead this. Wikipedia, an online enclyclopedia is open-source and you and I can go there and change the profile of a person and that implies millions can simultaneously change the content inorder to suit their views and leave it for passive readers to interpret it. Wikipedia became a battleground during the presidential elections as George Bush and Kerry's profiled where tinkered the maximum number of times.

Few questions which come to my mind now:

Twenty years from now, will a student of history go through websites/blogs/wikis to understand and research on a particular event or check out the old issues of the newspapers, magazines and traditional media?
What happens to censorship?
Will fanatics and megalomaniac manage to get a larger canvas to play on?
How is a tool like Google News going to affect traditional media? Does it pose a larger threat to the local newspapers or to the national newspapers?
Are these commercially viable and more importantly do these form of media need to be commercially viable in order to succeed?

Where do you stand?

Responsibility & Media

In a recent article in New York Times, a writer quoting a survey asks the question, "Do Newspapers Make Good News Look Bad?".

In India, most would agree that the media in general has a strong liberal bias, while a few publications have a more dangerous extreme-right bias. The rightwing is however very limited and most Indian publications are dominated by editors who have grown up in an educational and social environment that celebrated the cause of socialism. Quite naturally, there are very few publications that claim to have a libetarian outlook and it seems that in US too, leftist ideologues still dominate the media in more ways that one. The NYT story writes:

How can a nugget of news like the economy's addition of 308,000 new jobs in March - the biggest monthly gain in about four years - yield a report that The Associated Press labeled "Bond prices tumble on jobs data"? Bias, the researchers suspected.

In a new paper, Kevin A. Hassett and John R. Lott Jr., economists at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research organization in Washington, say they have discovered that economic reporters commit the same archetypal sin: slanting the news unequivocally in favor of the Democrats.

The two economists combed through 389 newspapers and A.P. reports contained in the LexisNexis database from January 1991 through May 2004, during the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. They picked out headlines about gross domestic product growth, unemployment, retail sales and orders of durable goods and classified the headlines' depiction of the economy as either positive, negative, neutral or mixed. Then they crunched some numbers.

The core question that crops up over here is whether newspaper editors should abstain from reflecting their political leanings in their paper and whether it should be limited just to the editorial pages. Any news can be interpreted in more than one way, and can newspapers, which subscribe to a high level of responsibility and ethics and enjoy an immense trust among its readers, be allowed to decide the way in which interpretation to make.

To answer this question, we need to know what exactly does our readers want? In an environment dominated by the electronic media, what is the exact role of newspapers that deliver news, which in most cases is 12 hours after the reader has watched it on the television. If readers have already got a fair grasp of the events from TV, does he want to read the same story again in a newspaper or does he look forward to analysis and opinions so that he can form his own opinion on the event? On the other hand, reporting any event without any interpretation or opinion can only attract readers who are learning about the news for the first time, which in these days, is quite unusual. So has the role of the newspaper changed from an information provider to that of an opinion-maker?

If that is the case, then newspapers must make their ideological leanings clear so that a reader can choose from various newspapers and select on with which he can clearly identify with. That's perfectly okay, as long as the slant is consistent and transparent. On the other hand, if the role of the newspaper is to provide unbiased information, efforts should be made to keep the main pages of the newspaper free of any bias.

While this may be a raging debate in US, in India a more core question of, 'what makes news?' needs to be decided.

Of Hangmen and Census

Over the past one-month or a little more than that, two events have shown the extent to which Indian media can go in order to grab their viewer's attention. People familiar with the Dhananjay-hanging case will remember Nata Mullick for a long time to come. For the uninitiated, Mullick was the hangman, a profession that he shares with his family, but an almost unused professional. His services were being called for after 12 years, i.e., the time when the last hanging took place in Calcutta.

While the heinous crime Dhananjay committed and the debate on whether capital punishment should be allowed at all was well reported in the media, what gained center-place before and after the hanging was Nata Mullick. Almost every media, and all most in every form - print, TV and online, covered extensively his interviews, the way he prepares for the hanging day (inclusive of such revolting details like the lenght and cost of the rope, that he uses banana split to smoothen the rope, that he drinks before he hangs...) in the media. He was almost treated as a hero. Intelligent Mullick started charging the media for interviews and now apparently has a PR firm to manage his publicity during the local Durga Puja festival. That he was a person of no consequence, can never become a role model for any one and that he deserves no more than a line in a story on the hanging, didn't concern anyone.

However, the results of the media-spotlight were immediate. At least three kids in West Bengal and one in far-off Maharashtra tried to emulate media's most talked about personality - Nata Mullick and in the act killed their friends. The second event is the more recent declaration of census data.

The Government recently released the 2001 census data and next thing to appear on the morning's newspapers and TV channels was the data classified on the basis of religion. The data showed (and which was subsequently corrected because the govt. choose to ignore certain parameters which it sets for itself and which distorted the final results) that while the rate of population growth of Hindus had declined and that of Muslims and Christians had increased. That these minorities make less than 20% and 4% of the population respectively and that the increase was of some basis points and couldn't make any difference to the demographic profile of the country in 20 years even if all Hindus stopped procreating, didn't matter. It became a hot political issue.

The media for its part safely ignored the other ways in which the data was organized. More relevant things like literacy, sex ratio, housing and healthcare were also made available but were given a pass. That the country, which these editors never stop from reminding, is prone to sectarian violence and some odd politicians make a living out of spreading hatred on the basis of religion, too didn't matter. The news was carried along with strange analysis of the trends and it soon became the topic of conversation among the majority and a topic of concern for the minorities.

In both cases, the events and the slant was very much newsworthy and is guaranteed to grab huge reader attention, who may also be interested in knowing such things. But where do we draw the line between responsibility and means that we use to grab our readers attraction? This never gets debated, at least in the Indian media space.

Billion Dollar Question

It's not very often that you get an opportunity to compare publications on an equal footing. Doing it comes with the risk of never achieving parity before giving a judgment. The Birla story however has thrown up a unique opportunity, quite similar to what a few media commentators did while tracking all American publications on 12th September 2002. However, in this case too, its impossible to compare all the newspapers but the window of oppurtunity lies in the case of magazines, though just three to be precise.

Three large and well established magazines - India Today, Business World (BW) and The Week - had the Birlas on their cover, last weekend. While readers may have by now experiencing a fatigue factor over the Birla coverage, I was merely enjoying reading the same story across the three magazines, and trust me, they were not quite the same. Coming up at least a week after the entire episode blew up, there was a level playing field and also a limited set of news and events for everyone to report, and so they did and but the men stood out from the boys.

Business World's coverage led by DN Mukerjea was by far the best. It had all the regular information, but it was the way it was written and the exact details, which made it, read like almost a thriller. And that's the way, I guess, it should be. Even small details like Lodha took out the will from a everyday-used plastic was mentioned, stuff readers will always remember along with the magazine.

India Today's coverage was a poor second. Just about okay with occasional mistakes, like it quoted two parts of the same will and said that they were two different versions and will be contested. The Week's coverage was, plain and simple, pathetic... you expect a very senior journo to write this kind of the story and in this case, if it was, then its really sad. I am presuming that it a job of a young rookie.

However, another reason why BW stands out is that it did ask the validity of the Rs 5000 crore (roughly a billion dollars) figure most people are quoting. It showed, and by correct means that it should be aroound Rs 550 crore, a more realistic figure. That's something none of the magazines and not even the newspapers seem to have explained and every one was going by their won crazy estimations, a trait often common with journos when they are chasing deadlines. TVS Shenoy however pointed this out on rediff long time back. And, by know, dear reader, if you claim to have got tired of reading on Birlas and will jump at anyone saying that you know enough about them, well, its time for some intersting trivia, which you may have missed.

Did you know that the Birlas were not always Birlas or that opium brought in the first big bucks for the Birlas? It's time to read ET!

Postscript: Quite expectedly Business Today too came up with an issue with the Birlas in cover. Though they got a week more, the story had the same amount of information and BW continues to be the best. However, again quite expectedly, BT also had a story on the other young scions in business families and the possible scenarios in those business families. However, a better story would have been on whether business families in India Inc have credible succession plans. Tough story, agreed, why didn't we do it? It requires good amount of resources, a whole lot of journos are required to get working on it to bring out the story before the issue dies down and BT has it. They should have taken the risk.

EAVESdropping

The appointment of Mythili Bhusnurmath as the Chief Editor of Financial Express (FE) has finally confirmed what many of us were suspecting. Women are making their presence felt in Indian journalism. She becomes the first chief editor of a major Indian publication who happens to be a woman.

Mythili was managing the editorial pages of The Economic Times (ET), prior to joining FE and replaces Sanjaya Baru, who took over as the media adviser to the prime minister. In India at least, newsrooms are increasingly having an equal number of women journos, and I am not talking about people in the desk. At least in Times of India group, women journalists are almost as many as men and the Mumbai Resident Editor of both ET and Times of India are women.

Though many would point out that it's just an aberration, and that most editors and bureau chiefs continue to be men, most will agree that at least among our generation, there are more women becoming journos than men and it's only a matter of time before Indian media houses becoming a truly diverse organisation. (A WACC study proves the point.)

Not an easy feat by any means, considering that while we journalists talk about transperancy, corporate governance, technology implementation and all the good things companies should follow, media organisations in most cases are the last to follow. At least when it comes to gender equaltites and work place diversity, we follow what we preach. So is it that when it comes to women in media, we in India are at a far better position than developed countries including US?

Our story on women in technology proved that, but unfortunately, I couldn't gather any good data to prove this particular point. However, a couple of interesting factoids about women journos in States did come up while I was searching on the emergence of women in journalism.

Born in 1864, Elizabeth Jane Cochran is considered to be the first woman investigative journalist. Her pen name was Nellie Bly and one of her claims to fame is that she broke Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg's record for traveling around the world in 80 days by more than a week. Older than Cochran, Ida Tarbell, is also considered one of the pioneers, but she started her career late and later became a celebrity in her own right. But there is something more interesting if you look at the character of Anne Royall, who made her mark in the 18th century.

I am not quite sure though, whether she can be called a journo, considering her ways and means of getting news. She actually interviewed US president John Quincy Adams sitting on his clothes as he bathed in the Potomac and refused to budge before he answered all her questions. She would tour the American South in a coach along with four slaves searching for gossip and news and published something called the "Paul Fry". So what does all this mean? Nothing much, news organisations are quite similar to any other organisation and benefits of diversity are common all across.

For now, journalism, at least broadcast journalism, is the career of choice among the women in India. Not just because Priety Zinta plays the role of a journo in the flick Lakshya or a few ads which feature journos, but a study conducted by Grey Cells, a division of ad agency Grey Worldwide, called Evesdropping actually pointed out that broadcast journo is the career of choice for the maximum number of young Indian girls (41% to be precise)!

India Matters

2004-11-04T04:50:00.000-08:00

Googling India

India for sure has arrived on the global scene. It's no longer the snake charmers and maharajas who form the centre-piece for any story on India. It's not even the socialists in India or the bad roads and dangers of getting a Delhi-belly which are the topics for any discussion in any foreign media. It's the IT industry, the economic potential, budding entrepreneurs which are the focus for most stories on India and here I must add that surprisingly some of them do go overboard at times. Any anti-outsourcing story has India as the centre-piece and most writers who mention China also try and make a cursory reference to India.

A good thumbrule I found out to check on which topics/names are most popular in the global media is doing a search on Google News. A search for China returns on an average 90,000 hits -roughly meaning that many unique stories across 4500 news sources mentioned the country in the last one month. India returns around 80,000 where as Singapore or even Korea is manages roughly in 20,000 articles. This method doesn't count the quality of exposure but just the quantity. Yeah, that may include a fair number of negative stories, but even then, India matters.
I came across one more indicator that may act as a thumbrule. The hoary Economist has a People section where it profiles people who have been in the news. Ofcourse, the selection of the people who are going to be featured must be going through a rigorous process (I presume this though going by own experiences in journalism, it might not be so). And in the last three weeks, three Indians have been featured consequitively. It started with Padmasree Warrior, Motorola's CTO, next was Azim Premji of Wipro and the last was Veerappan in the obituary column. Well, Veerappan is not of the same league, but Economist took the pains to note that an obscure person (by global standards), but a big newsmaker in India had died. Again, I am not debating on the quality of exposure, but that India matters.

North Of East

One of the key issues and this is something that has been close to my heart ever since my school days is the way, we as a country treat the North East. Almost anyone with a mongoloid features walking down the street is termed a 'chinki' - a nigger like term meaning that he/she comes from the China or somewhere further east.

It fails our collective imagination to accept that people of the mongoloid race inhabit a large part of the country. They may be far flung provinces (and here I just can't figure out which state is far flung and which is not) but all of us in so called 'mainland' India share a lot of common history and culture with states like Manipur, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and the rest. Two incidents proves my perception.
One was the entire controversy on whether the Armed Forces Special Act should be discontinued in Manipur. First of all, as a sovereign federal nation, why do we need to impose such draconian measures on one of our own provinces? And even if we assume that the government in Delhi is composed of fools and megalomaniacs, why didn't the civil society and so called NGOs and human right activists (who incidentally are photographed more in Page 3) take up this cause? We should hang our heads in shame on the fact that it needed a couple of brave women in Manipur to protest naked in order to draw attention to this problem. It was only then that it became front-page news and attracted cover pics. What happened to celebrity journos who fly down to Gujarat or Kashmir at every small incident, but didn't bother to even make a small stopover in the North East? Or do they apply the same reason that politicians do - North East doesn't send enough MPs to the parliament to matter; Kashmir, Gujarat, Bihar does.
The other incident was the serial bomb blast in Assam that killed over 50 people. Again it didn't make front-page headlines in plenty of newspapers across the country, including Times of India. Any incident like this, if it had happened in Bombay, would have generated reams and reams of newsprint and get prime-time coverage on national news networks for weeks. Does the life of an Assamese matter less than that of a Bombayite? Why do we turn a blind-eye to North-East and treat them as second-grade citizens? Probably as a nation, while we have been able to assimilate the Dravidian race with the Aryan, we have failed to do so with the Mongloid. And then after all this, we squirm at the fact that US is a racist country and racism just doesn't exist in India!

State Of The States

The recent India Today survey called State of States, ranks Indian states on various parameters. Interestingly, it once again supports the fact that smaller regions are always better governed. Though the magazine doesn't seem to appreciate this point (this time, unlike last year, they had separate rankings for big and small states), it comes out pretty clearly. Smaller states like Pondicherry, Goa and Delhi seem to perform much better than larger states.
Even among the big states, its Punjab and Kerela which lead the list, where as UP and Bihar are at the very end. Utranchal, which was separated from UP recently fares much better than the parent state. Last year, when there was a combined ranking, Goa was the topper.
This underscores the point that smaller administrative regions are better managed. Looking at an international perspective, Singapore experienced higher rates of growth once it broke away from Malaysia. Smaller regions like Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan performed much better than mainland China. Therefore, does the solution for achieving high growth rates in India, lie in creating a thousand Singapores or at least a thousand Delhis or Gurgaons across the country?
However, the counter argument is that creation of smaller states increases government expenditure. Its true, but its more because of the fact that the current fad of carving out smaller states generates from political demands. A new state means a whole new set of politicians can become MLAs and ministers and that increases government spending.
Politics shouldn't dictate such measures, its economics which should. Another interesting perspective, which the survey threw up, was the good performance of the states in the North East, a region that is often ignored. Mizoram and Sikkim top the charts in health, education and law and even with a treacherous terrain, Sikkim's 70% of households have access to tap water. No mean achievement by any means. It's the same for all the other states. And once again, the largest state Assam, lags behind in the North East. That's on all counts, including the fact that only 9% of households in Assam have access to tap water.

The Unknown Ideal

2004-09-16T01:16:00.000-07:00

Why Indians Hate Capitalism?

There is no social system more rational, benevolent, or just than laissez-faire or free-market capitalism; no social system which can bring to man as much freedom, prosperity, and peace as free market capitalism; and ironically, even with socialism in its death throes all over the world, there is no social system which is still more misunderstood than free-market capitalism. This ignorance has lead well-meaning people to believe that capitalism is the system of exploitation, monopoly, and class warfare. Yet without exception, all accusations that are made against capitalism rest upon a flawed moral theory or an economic fallacy, or in other words, to condemn capitalism is to misrepresent capitalism.
Most of us realize the importance of the separation of church and state: the institution which leaves people free to form and act upon their own values without the threat of others imposing their own values upon them through aid of the government. What most people do not understand, however, is that the separation of economics and state -- laissez-faire capitalism -- is just as important for human prosperity as is the separation of church and state. Put simply, the vast majority of mankind is wholly ignorant of the life-serving nature of capitalism and, as a consequence, ignorant of the solutions to modern day politico-economic problems.
The concept of free-markets was first introduced in an economic perspective by Adam Smith in his seminal work Wealth of Nations. This remarkable book was published in 1776, at a time when the power of free trade and competition as stimulants to innovation and progress was scarcely understood. Governments granted monopolies and gave subsidies to protect their own merchants, farmers and manufacturers against 'unfair' competition. The guilds operated stern local cartels: artisans of one town were prevented from traveling to another to find work. Local and national laws forbade the use of new, laborsaving machinery.
And, not surprisingly to us today, poverty was accepted as the common, natural, and inevitable lot of most people.
Adam Smith railed against this restrictive, regulated, 'mercantilist' system, and showed convincingly how the principles of free trade, competition, and choice would spur economic development, reduce poverty, and precipitate the social and moral improvement of humankind. To illustrate his concepts, he scoured the world for examples that remain just as vivid today: from the diamond mines of Golconda to the price of Chinese silver in Peru; from the fisheries of Holland to the plight of Irish prostitutes in London. And so persuasive were his arguments that they not only provided the world with a new understanding of the wealth-creating process; they laid the intellectual foundation for the great era of free trade and economic expansion that dominated the Nineteenth Century.
Adam Smith and later day free-marketers argue that maximum general good can be achieved by allowing the market to take care of itself and hence the absence of government interference is desirable. To explain this Smith used his famous metaphor: " It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest."The individual intends only his own gain but is led by 'an invisible hand' to promote the general good. It is this famous image of invisible hand that perform complex operations of market forces, just like the division of labor to bring great benefit to society and raise the standard of living. Here again the benefit is not planned. Buyers and sellers in the market are motivated purely by self-interest but they serve the general interest without having intended it. It is this portrayal of the natural process, which is central to the concept of free-markets. The division of labor and the workings of the market constitute between them the main causes of the wealth of nations. Both are natural, unplanned, and best left alone to proceed without political interference.
Contrary to popular perception the concept of free markets has been prevalent in India since time immemorial. Hindus first discovered the morality of the market in just two words 'shubh laabh' or 'profits are auspicious'. Profits augur well for society, they found. They said man pursued four ends: dharma, artha, kama, moksha. The doctrine of four ends of Man says that we pursue both dharma as well as artha and we wish to live moral lives while we pursue wealth. This suggests that Hindus considered the market to be an enforcer of morality; something that Henry Hazlitt uncovered only some decades back in his path-breaking 'The Foundations of Morality'. Hazlitt showed how markets promote the core of all morality: good manners.It is also interesting that Prophet Mohammad was a free trader. Islam, equally, is morality of the market. We can happily co-exist in a free market.
Unfortunately our statist parties, even those that are avowedly Hindu, have not understood this. The denial of the economic principle is completely against Hinduism, which assumes that all people are quite capable of pursuing their own artha. There is yet no political party that has recanted the failed Nehruvian economic ideology, which emphasized planning over market determination of economic variables. It was about equality, not efficiency; the state over individual enterprise; subsidy programmes and affirmative action, not building capability; dependence on bureaucracy and not participative efforts of the people.
Even today there is no political party, which is passionately committed to an efficient and competitive Indian economy, in all sectors. There is no commitment that government is an incapable owner, controller and manager of business. Jobs are to be preserved at any cost to the country. Prices are not seen as signals that encourage or discourage production and consumption. Government interference with the price mechanism through administered prices, price controls, movement restrictions on goods, changing tax rates, subsidies, cross-subsidies is easily condoned. Support to vested interests, among rich farmers, the creamy layer of small-scale units, or urban workers are unquestioned. Government is still regarded as the most competent to decide what is right for farmers, investors, pensioners, stock markets, the sick or those who seek education. All positions with authority, however specialized, are filled from among administrators. All these against the principles of free markets and to the detriment of our country. The idiosyncrasies reaches its height when we trust the government which cannot produce even simple things like cement or bicycles efficiently to provide such a complex and far reaching thing as education.
The problem of socialism is of performance, not of faith. If socialism had worked we would all be socialists today. It was the noblest vision that man ever had - to build a compassionate society, which would sweep away poverty and oppression. Alas, every time it was tried it led to statism and oppression. That evidence is no longer in dispute.
A series of controlled experiments were conducted in the last fifty years on a scale that is the envy of every social scientist. Germany, Korea, Vietnam and China were sawed into two and capitalism was installed in one part and socialism in the other. In every case the capitalist part not only out-produced the non-capitalist one, but it also delivered freedom and opportunity.
Free trade has always acted as a catalyst for growth and this can be substantiated by the growth experiences of countries like South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and others. Noted economists like Jagdish Bhagwati, Anne Krueger, Ian Little, T N Srinivasan have taken the view that outward orientation and pro-market policies were the primary forces behind the stellar performance of these economies. These authors generally downplay the role of interventionist policies and argue that export subsidies neutralized the anti-trade bias introduced by import barriers, yielding domestic relative prices that more or less correspond to world prices.
The hollowness of the arguments put forward by anti-trade lobbies was best revealed during the Seattle round talks of WTO where protesters against globalization and free markets indulged in violent riots and disrupted the meeting to the detriment of developing countries. While developed countries protestors argued that free market would favor the of Third World low wage laborers and hence threaten their employability, Third World workers or rather their leaders also feel that globalization shall be a threat to their job security too. These paradoxical arguments best reveal the unfounded fear and misinformation that surrounds the concept of free- trade.
Contrary to popular perception the concept to free trade faces maximum opposition from developed countries. Entities like European Union and the USA have shown little enthusiasm for freer trade, for the developed world today survives on what Joan Robinson used to call the age of 'neo-mercantilism'. In fact, the national egoism of market-based systems is clearly seen in the sphere of international trade. Strong farmer lobbies and arbitrary use of anti-dumping clauses against developing countries exports has acted as major hindrances in the practice of free trade.
Trade is the very first economic activity known to man: take this, give me that. The ability to trade is almost instinctive to human nature Man is Homo economics. None of Gods' other creatures possess this remarkable facility. Their lives lack economics. Denying man this basic right is probably the biggest sin. Under a division of labor capitalist society, by rearranging the physical world in such a way so as values which did not previously exist now do, wealth is created. For example, if I put two potatoes in the ground and cultivate five, three new potatoes have been created not only at the expense of anyone else, but also actually to the benefit of others who want a potato and are willing to trade for it. Thus, under capitalism, one man's economic gain is another man's economic gain.
In India our politicians and 'economists' have failed to understand this basic truth. Indians prosper everywhere save in India itself. We have world famous trading communities, but have very few Indian (by residence) industrialists. The reason for this may be our inability to give our own businessmen the incentive to do business. Our politicians never believed in the ability of the common men. They undermined the poor by giving them a bagful of subsidies and put a dozen bureaucrats to see over the distribution, but never gave them a chance to earn for themselves.
The license raj has played havoc with the common men. You need a dozen clearances to run a rickshaw in Delhi and twenty seven licenses to open a school! Our socialist state has taught us that being rich is sin and being poor is glorious. That's why we are still in this Third World. Its time we change. Time we curtail the government's power to decide what is good for us. Time government shifts from manufacturing bread and scooters to providing good roads so that we can ourselves produce and buy what we need. Time government shifts from producing to provisioning for manufacture of economic good(s).The first major reform should be a change over from policies of interventionism to increasing relevance on the free market and the free pricing system." - Prof. B R Shenoy, 1966.

Most Interesting Part :- If you wish to start a political party with these liberal ideas you cannot . It is banned under Section 29A of Representation Of Peoples Act. In India a political party must have socialist ideals ... And still we call ourselves the largest democracy! Its time friends we start deciding what is good for ourselves, time we start acting.

One of my first articles, this appeared in Presidency College Annual Magazine, 2002. Presidency College, Calcutta has always been known for its strong leftist-leanings, but this article was very well received by my friends and well-appreciated by my professors

Bookworm

2004-08-09T03:31:00.000-07:00

Funnily Enough

2004-08-07T02:44:00.000-07:00

Beggars May Be Billionaires

They make you feel miserable when they knock on your car window, cling to foreigners and in general give the city a bad name. I have made it a point not to give any money to the beggars. I don't know why, but I used to think that most of them are able bodied and wondered why they didn't work. Now there seems to be an answer.
A survey by Bombay-based NGO, Social Development Centre on the beggars in the city has thrown up the startling results. The survey says that on average beggars in Mumbai earn Rs 300 a day! Talk about poverty lines? Many journalists do not start their career at that salary. What's more startling is that there is one beggar family in Khar which earns Rs 1000 a day.
The survey even states that while money making is easiest on the roads between Juhu and Bandra, on Tuesdays the best sopt is the Siddhivinayak, Wednesdays are good at St Michael’s Church and Mahalaxmi and Thrusdays are cool at Haji Ali!
Apparently there are whole cartels, which fight to keep their territories! Make sure you do not donate money to any beggars, not even those that look the most miserable. Give them food, that's what I do. If you give them money, you are not just encouraging them not to work, but sustaining a menace.
PS: When a beggar once caught a friend of mine and said "bhagwan tera dua karega" (God will bless you), he had retorted, "He has blessed me enough, ask Him to bless you instead". That we thought was a smart aleck comment and we all enjoyed it. Now it seems that the joke was on him!

Method In Madness

Floods are good, they help poor people catch fish and eat it. Any comment like this seems not just ridiculous, to most of us its criminal. The fact that Bikar's de facto King Lalu Prasad Yadav made it, makes it even more outrageous. In fact anything that has come out from Lalu, starting from the introduction of kulhars (earthen pots) in railway canteens to his slapping of railway offcials in full glare of television cameras seems rediculous, if not pure madness.
So why does Lalu do it? More importantly, even after doing this, almost in a clearly planned way, how come does he get the people's mandate everytime. The fact is Lalu is the supreme God when it comes to making the medium the media. Consider this, in the ruarl hinterland of Bihar, where Lalu comes from and derives power from, flood is a perennial occurance. Most people take it on their stride, they have been facing it for generations. And the son of the soil, too must have faced similar situations and he knows for a fact that villagers actually find it the best time to catch fish. The luxury of eating fish in normal times is limited to the rich who own the ponds. Whatever the hardships, this may be the only boon admist the bad times.
Or for the matter, most poor Biharis are often harassed by railway officials while travelling, invariably without tickets. To see that their messiah can actually slap those railway officials is almost unbelievable and ego boosting for them. To his constituency, these are the things which make Lalu dear, or why else does he get elected every time?
It's a fact that we have arrived at a juncture where tow Indias seprately exist. One, the middle class urban and semi-urban, aspiring-to-be-developed India and the other, the rural hinterland, where farmers are untouched by saas-bahu serials, India Shining campaings and where they commit suicide because they cannot pay the debt. And it's not the lifestyle that differs, the value system, definations of good and bad, and the way opinion is formed are entirely different. For us to appreciate Lalu's antics is almost impossible, simply because we staying in cities can never appreciate the way he realtes to his rural constituency. It's not just a lesson for politicians, every media manager and communication expert should try and derive lessons from it.
This by no means justifies Lalu's statement or logic, but it is does show the reason behind such a statement and why it often makes sense, things that often eludes us. Talking of floods. The hostage crisis in Iraq which involves three Indians being held hostage seems to hog media attention. The fact that more that more than 1000 people have died in North and East India, including 641 in Bihar alone seems to have escaped our collective conscience. Is it becuase it's easier for the media to report on Iraq rather than cross the ravines in Bihar or across Bharmaputra? Shekhar Gupta has posed an interesting question of how this obsession with the Iraqi crisis can be damaging for the nation. Not just politicans should take note of this even journalists too should make note of it. In the IC 714 Khandahar hijack case, the media should be equally held responsible for the way the nation dealt with the crisis and the way we succumbed to the terrorists.

The Defending Game

This entire game of one "great leader" justifying another's stupid action took a new turn today. Bill Clinton, who is already hankering for any kind of publicity for his new book, defended British PM Tony Blair's decision to go forward with the Iraq war. Now it seems that atleast at one point Blair too made headlines justifying Bill Clinton on the decision to bomb Iraq (much before the Second Gulf War) amid allegations that Clinton is doing it to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal... Time to pay back or some stupid gimmickry to fool the people?

Back Of The Book

2004-07-29T05:30:00.000-07:00

Multiple Musings

2004-07-29T04:18:00.000-07:00

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

2004-07-14T06:37:00.001-07:00

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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