ALTHOUGH INDIA’S MEDIA and particularly the press, has earned a global reputation for its independence and fearless reportage, it has its downside. For one, it’s infested with insecure, perhaps even paranoid, media moguls and journalists down the line who pretend other news channels and newspapers don’t exist. Moreover, the Indian media has justifiably acquired the reputation for pontification to the extent that when it comes to following its sermonising with the smallest action, the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.
A case in point are the proprietors of the commendably liberal Chennai-based daily The Hindu,which with its daily circulation of 1.5 million dominates peninsular India like a colossus, and is reportedly in the pink of (financial) health. In a well-phrased lead edit (October 13) welcoming the award of the Nobel Peace Prize 2014 to Pakistani and Indian child rights activists Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, the editors rue that child rights and education “the prerequisite of development and peace in our times” have been widely disregarded in post-independence India’s national development effort. It’s the responsibility of nations to “provide the means of formal education, leisure, safety, and care for all children”, says the editorial.
But the yawning chasm between preaching and practice of The Hindu was revealed when the editors of EducationWorld — established to promote child rights and QEFA (quality education for all) — visited N. Ram, chairman of Kasturi & Sons Ltd, in the imposing offices of the company over a decade ago. Perhaps peninsular India’s premier newspaper group could lend a helping hand to EW by signing a commercial agreement to distribute this publication? The suggestion was dismissed out of hand by Ram, who was more interested in the personal history of EW’s charming managing editor.
One hopes The Hindu editorial under reference will awake this quintessential Cadillac communist to acknowledge that there’s nothing wrong in cooperating with other news publications in the cause of providing formal education, leisure, safety and care for all children.
MBA (Politics)
AN EXCELLENT IDEA WHICH is certain to revive the reportedly sagging bottomlines of the country’s 4,500 B-schools, is to offer courses on how to succeed in electoral politics. The monotonous regularity with which Gandhi follows Gandhi, Munde Munde and Shinde Shinde into Parliament and state legislative assemblies, and the alacrity with which each generation doubles the value of its wealth and assets indicates that politics is the most fast-track career option in contemporary India.
According to the Association for Democratic Reforms’ website of winners of the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections, Rahul Gandhi, MP (Congress) for Amethi, who has engaged in no other vocation and not very successfully in politics, has accumulated assets valued at Rs.9.40 crore; Shyama Charan Gupta, MP (BJP) for Allahabad Rs.47.28 crore and Muttamsetti Srinivasa Rao, MP (TDP) for Ankapalle who also has a pending criminal case against him and whose education qualification is described as illiterate, has a net worth of Rs.21.32 crore. Few ‘successful’ professionals — your editor included — can boast an approximation of these assets after decades of sweat and labour in their chosen vocations.
The reality that electoral politics in post-independence India has become a closed family business, offers B-schools an excellent opportunity to formally educate, skill and train ambitious and upwardly mobile youth to whom pocket boroughs of established political families are no-go zones, on ways and means to climb the greasy pole to political fame and fortune.
Like business management, politics can be transformed into a science, broken into discrete lesson plans and taught to aspirants. Surely, learned B-school academics can develop a syllabus and transform it into a curriculum. A school for scoundrels is in the national interest inasmuch as it may produce efficient scoundrels.
Proved right
EVERY MAN IS A PIECE OF THE continent, a part of the main. If a clod of earth is washed away by the sea, the continent is the less. Any man’s death diminishes us, if we are involved with mankind. So philosophised renaissance poet John Donne (1572-1631).
Thus news of the death in Manipal (Karnataka) on October 9 of M.V. Kamath, former foreign correspondent and editor of India’s first mass circulation magazine The Illustrated Weekly of India, and later prolific newspaper columnist, is a loss to the subcontinent. Your editor became acquainted with Kamath in the 1980s when he succeeded the late Khushwant Singh — who coincidently passed away a few months ago at the ripe age of 99 — as editor of the Weekly. Unfortunately at that time, Kamath was an object of scorn in the bitchy world of journalism where there are no friends, only acquaintances, for failing to maintain the momentum of the olde world Weekly, which was overwhelmed by India Today, Sunday and an avalanche of new genre magazines which debuted at the end of the 19-month internal Emergency.
After the much-lamented demise of the Weekly in the eighties, Kamath entered a productive period as a columnist and was among the first journos to perceive some merit in the uber nationalist, and revivalist agenda of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
This provoked a mountain of vilification heaped upon him by the journalist fraternity then dominated by Nehruvian liberals, including your correspondent who often ridiculed him for his majoritarian views.
But when your editor went out on a limb and filed a writ petition in the Bombay high court against the dangerous Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray for instigating the Bombay communal riots of 1992-93, our ideological differences notwithstanding, Kamath publicly supported me. I continued to dispute with him and maintained that the Indian electorate would never endorse the communally divisive agenda of the BJP. At the fag end of his life, he was proved right.