Samir’s success

The TOI Story: How a newspaper changed the rules of the game by Sangita P. Menon Malhan; Harper Collins; Price: Rs.350; 261 pp

Of the four great estates of post-independence India — legislature, executive, judiciary and the press — the one that has most substantially fulfilled the expectations of the founding fathers of the Constitution is the press, aka the media (after the advent of 24x7 television news channels). With Parliament repeatedly disrupted by quasi-literates (one-third of whom have serious criminal charges filed against them), the executive destroyed by criminality and corruption, the judiciary rendered dysfunctional by archaic procedural codes and the law’s agonising delay, the media is the only estate manning the gates against the unholy coalition of lawless politici-ans, rogue businessmen and lumpen elements within Indian society.

According to Sangita P. Menon Malhan, a former journalist of the Times of India, Mid-Day and The Statesman turned author, the transformation of the media industry  began in the 1980s with the rise to preeminence of Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd (BCCL), the holding company of the Times of India, Economic Times and several magazines. BCCL, under its dynamic publisher/proprietor Samir Jain, “was the first to break the rules” of news publishing and transform the media into the powerful fourth estate of the republic which it is today.

Unfortunately although well-written and perhaps even riveting, this history of the blossoming of BCCL under Jain’s leadership into a news media publishing powerhouse and the rise of Times of India (estb.1838)  from the grande dame of Bori Bunder to the world’s most widely read  broadsheet daily with The Economic Times (estb. 1961) as the #2 worldwide business daily (after the Wall Street Journal), starts on a false note.

The plain truth is that the transformation of the news publishing business began in the immediate aftermath of the internal Emergency imposed by the late prime minister Indira Gandhi and the resounding defeat of her Congress party in the historic general election of early 1977. At the time, following the end of a harsh regime of censorship imposed upon the media, an unprecedented magazine boom erupted within the country, with the almost simultaneous launch of India Today, Sunday and Business India. Piloted by hitherto unknown publishers and editors, these publications were the “first to break the rules of the game”, and refashion the staid and dull news media publishing world focused on crooked politicians, whose acts of commission and omission during the Emergency were extensively exposed by the new magazines. Thoro-ughly compromised for cravenly supporting the Congress and its spoilt brat Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency (a fact about which the author is totally silent), ToI and Samir Jain didn’t “break the rules” for over a decade thereafter.

However, there is no doubt that Samir was perhaps the first newspaper proprietor to discern the importance of building media brands and derive profit and value from them. As Malhan accurately recounts, until the mid 1980s newspapers were essentially publications of official record, dutifully reporting the typically banal pronouncements and pontifications of politicians. Around this time, Samir inducted fresh blood into BCCL, notably Pritish Nandy and Pradeep Guha who staged the spectacular ToI sesquicentennial (150 years) bash, lighting up the Victoria Terminus train station and transforming it into an art gallery, and ferrying hundreds of guests in horse-drawn carriages from the ToI office opposite the terminus to banquet halls in the specially lit up Taj Mahal hotel, for a champagne dinner.

In 1985, when Samir began to exercise authority within BCCL, the company’s sales revenue was Rs.73.5 crore and net profit Rs.1.2 crore. In 2010-11, the revenue derived from the 14 editions of ToI with a circulation of 4.5 million, The Economic Times (circulation: 800,000) and several  magazines, rose to Rs.4,749.3 crore, and the company earned a massive  pre-tax profit of Rs.1,489.2 crore. These are numbers unimaginable by any Indian news media publishing house. Undoubtedly Jain has transformed BCCL — which has since ventured into television — into a globally-respected media conglomerate after snatching control of its publications from business agnostic editors and journalists. By doing so, he has not only succeeded in making the ToI group profitable and with a strong identity, but has also put editors in the shade to an extent that most people have no idea who the incumbent editors of ToI and ET are, while everybody knows Samir Jain is the publisher.

Although Malhan’s narrative of a historical epoch in India’s newspaper publishing industry has produced an informative page-turner, she over-hypes Samir Jain as a great innovator, when in reality he was a shrewd and assiduous student with the genius for quickly applying his learning. The over-playing of Jain is clearly demonstrated in the chapter titled ‘The Pink Panther’ which traces the evolution of the Economic Times into the country’s #1 business daily. The fact is that the reorientation of ET from a boring economics newspaper into a business daily was driven by the dramatic debut of Business India (estb.1978) followed by Businessworld (1981) which became overnight successes.

However to Malhan’s credit, she squarely confronts the question of whether BCCL has peaked and failed to build upon Samir Jain’s success of the past three decades. BCCL’s late entry into television and cinema is speculated upon as is the hyper-commercialisation of the company’s newspapers, particularly Jain’s unwarranted yield to the temptation of paid news and private treaties (boosting shady companies with positive coverage and free advertising in exchange for equity stakes), which according to a rival (anonymous) newspaper proprietor has “weakened the editorial product as an entity”. Aveek Sarkar, the proprietor-CEO of the competitive Ananda Bazar Patrika group, is also quoted as saying that Jain is “fighting the wrong battle with the wrong people” and should be competing with Rupert Murdoch’s Star, Zee and Sony — big names in multi-media — rather than focusing on the print medium which is in terminal decline.

The final verdict: an excellent corporate history — curiously unpublicised — providing deep and invaluable insights into the development and future prospects of the most robust estate of this faltering republic.

Dilip Thakore

Poignant drama

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri; Random House; Price: Rs.499; 340 pp

Pultizer prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri’s second novel after The Namesake and two compi-lations of short stories, has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013, whose winner will be annou-nced before this issue of EW is out.

The novel which has received mixed reviews, spans four generations of the middle-class Mitra family of Tollygunge, living in a modest home, in a quiet enclave overlooking two ponds and “a lowland spanning a few acres”. Leading nondescript lives on the periphery of Calcutta’s colonial Tollygunge Club amid shacks of refugees from East Bengal, the Mitras try to make sense of death and separation, unexplained realities and haunting memories, while tenuously connected to other lives in Rhode Island and California.

The plot centres around two brothers — Subhash and Udayan — bonded by their childhood experiences, and supportive of each other despite their widely divergent personalities. The drifting apart begins during the impressionable college years when the extrovert Udayan gets caught up in the vortex of revolutionary Marxist-Leninist politics sweeping across Bengal in the wake of the Naxalite movement of the 1960s. More reticent and cautious, Subhash focusses on getting a university scholarship for a passage to the new world, which will liberate him from the confines of his drab, middle-class Kolkata existence.

Subhash wins the scholarship, and settles down to life as a graduate student in Rhode Island, a location that Lahiri often revisits as a writer the same way that she returns time and again to her Indian locales. He learns through Udayan’s letters about his marriage with Gauri, a philosophy student of Presidency College, his humdrum life as a school teacher and tutor, the modest expectations of his parents and the extension of their home. But there is uncanny silence about the political violence raging in Bengal in the late 1960s and 70s. Udayan’s sudden and violent death — shot at point blank range by the police looking for Maoists in the lowland adjoining their home — prompts Subhash to return to Calcutta.

Back home, Subhash is confronted with the grief of his parents shattered by Udayan’s death, but unaccommodating in their hostility towards Gauri, his brother’s widow who is pregnant with his child. The only solution for Subhash is to marry Gauri himself, and become a surrogate father to his brother’s daughter. Thus Bela is born in a home far removed from the traditional family establishment in Tollygunge. Things don’t work out as planned and Udayan’s traumatic death overshadows the tripartite relationship involving persons closest to him.

Subhash bonds closely with Bela, but inexplicably Gauri drifts away from both of them. When he returns with Bela to Rhode Island after a visit to Calcutta to perform the last rites of his father, they find that Gauri, who had meanwhile acquired a Ph D in philosophy, has abandoned them and is living alone in California as an academic.

Abandoned by her mother, Bela tries to put together the broken pieces of her life and come to terms with her adolescence. Subhash hovers on the periphery, concerned but reluctant to intrude into her privacy, and suffering from guilt that Bela is unaware that she is Udayan’s daughter. Lahiri sensitively explores the human psyche, and fathoms the depths of emotions aroused when conventional human relationships disintegrate.

Every character in the novel has a separate story to tell, narrated in sparse prose with the tragedies which shape the lives of the main protagonists as surp-rising as their outcomes.

In the last section of the novel 40 years later when Gauri finally visits Calcutta, the lowland is usurped by builders. Udayan’s memorial tablet no longer marks their family home with its environs changed beyond recognition. Subhash finally decides to sell the house and divorce Gauri.

Lahiri’s poignant human drama bares the personal and societal pain of disruption, social transformation and exile. In a young, independent India attempting to come to terms with inequality and poverty, the change propagated by the Naxalites was aggressive and violent,  mouthing a borrowed ideology which targeted class enemies and the administration. Though the political fervour of the sixties is much diluted in the novel, the ethics of such violence intrigues the author, who uses Udayan’s tragic death in the beginning to document failure which catalyses guilt and uncertainty. Fragments of political and personal histories are evoked incessantly as reminders of ideologies, relationships, physical spaces haunted by memory and overwhelmed by time.

Jayati Gupta