A case of media self-censorship

Dr Shenoy says he named the company and its MD ; it was the newspaper that withheld the names. . . A newspaper has the prerogative to edit any article. . .to make more sense of it or for reasons of space, editorial policy norms,or to address judicial or libel implications. And media is also known to have exercised their prerogative to play favorites or not hurt their advertising interests.Whatever the reason, the newspaper succeeded in watering down the story. . .More. . .

Ab Kahan, asks Lalu

it was Lalu who was on the move, not the TV-wallahs who set up shop at the channel studio, interviewing people who came their way. . .More. . .

Writers and Their Creative Quirks

Neil Gaiman says, "As far as I am concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning." In an interview, he observed, "All my life I've felt that I was getting away with something because I was just making things up and writing it down.". . .More. . .

B2B with K : Train ride to Zahedan

The train was packed with Baluchi and Pathan families equipped with kitchen utensils and often goats and sheep. They preferred to squat on the floor and use the seats for their cargo of pots and pans. A sort of grim hostility pervaded our carriage; perhaps I was imagining it. Quetta held its own compelling terrors. A wild West town, I imagined , populated by an ungovernable constituency of gun totting warlords and their entourage. . .More . . .

Pratham: some thoughts

With its website in place Pratham could develop online networking with like-minded individuals and agencies. Speaking of involvement of others, Pratham could look out for online contact with young professionals with volunteer spirit. I know of Mr S L Manjunath and his Infosys team involved in SOFTEN initiative. . .More. . .

Remember Manjunath ?

Happy Birthday Manju. You will go on living in our hearts!!. . .Details. . .

The great merger story

One of the things that a reporter can do these days before putting out stories is browse the web, collect better information and then say what they need to say in print, online and on TV. Not so in the CNN-IBN case. The reporter makes a sweeping statement that AI-IA will be Asia's biggest Airline when merged into a single entity. . .More. . .

The Mysore labour crunch

Local construction workers, they say, come from families that own farmland on the city outskirts. With a phenomenal rise in the price of agriculture land (an acre can fetch anything from Rs.30 to 90 lakhs) quite a few construction workers have made a minor fortune by disposing of their land. . .More. . .

B2B: A saturation point ?

Change the name of this blog to ‘ramblers park’. The account of 1960s nostalgic journey through NW frontier has reached the saturation limit, says a commenter in my previous post. Far from it, my friend.. I thought we had just begun. . .More. . .

B2B:Kini in Pakistan, in transit

I remember boarding a local shuttle train service to Lahore’s grand station and having to pay for it using our depleting £3 of foreign exchange. . . headed straight for the coffee house which we had heard was a haven of Pakistani intelligentsia, writers and poets and hacks and political rabble rousers. . .had a major surprise in store for us. . . The station master, a larger than life Pathan was pleased to see two Indians and unceremoniously invited us to stay with him and partake of his hospitality. We were to spend two days with him enjoying fine home cooked rich Punjabi cuisine. . .More. . .

B2B: Kini hits a speed-breaker

'We took a 2 days 2 nights train from Quetta to Zahedan in Iran . The tickets were bought for us by a stranger, the station master of Lahore mainline station who put us up, fed us, took us around and gave us a surprise by putting us on this train'. . .More. . .

B2B with K: Clueless in Germany, a tale of two visits

Brian had learnt his first lesson in organising overland tours; that you can’t count on a German in Germany to speak English with an Englishman. I felt somewhat indispensable, and flattered by Germany’s preferential treatment towards a desi. . .More. . .

A bit nostalgic - "Mile sur mera tuhara..."

Mile Sur Mera Thumhaara... tho Suur Bane Hamhaara.. was one unique video by prasar bharathi, which showed the unity among diversity of our great country India. Watching this video would sure touch some nostalgia into our minds .. Watch video. . .

Mother Teresa and the ‘me, me, me’ culture

For Alpion, celebrity culture is a modern form of religion and Mother Teresa was the ultimate religious celebrity of the modern era. . .The Indian media took an interest in her from the early 1950s. . .Here was a white, Western, Roman Catholic nun showing compassion and providing support for those typically impoverished and abandoned by the old class-conscious and caste-ridden Indian society. Mother Teresa was used to highlight the new, tolerant and welcoming India that was imagined to be born from independence and the separation from Pakistan in 1947. . .More. . .

B2B with K : Name Dropping On Friends

There was the perpetual love hate relationship with the elders of the tribe; Francis Souza who was enviously successful in London, Laxman Pai in Paris, and K.S Kulakarni lording it over Triveni, a modern New Delhi elite gallery funded by the government. The elders never paid Anarkali a visit. . .More. . .

So what's new in Bangkok ?

A few things to note for an Indian traveller coming in on a passenger Airline. if you are coming into BKK, go to the "Visa on arrival" counter first before going to the Immigrations desks. You'd have to fork out Thai Baht 1,000 for the visa fees and you'd need to fill up a form and stick a photograph of yourself on the form. . .More. . .

From my scrapbook-1

In its early days news played very little part in BBC’s thinking. As the story goes, one night an announcer said: ”This is the BBC. There is no news tonight. . .More. . .

Mundane story behind a media scoop

As reporter on late night duty (also called the mortuary beat) it was Mr Nageswaran’s job to make late-night calls to all city police stations, followed by a visit to the General Hospital mortuary. . . More. . .

B2B with K: Leaving London, home-bound

Right ho, then,’ was all that my friend Sushil Nangia said as he saw me off outside Waterloo Station on that May morning in 1967. I was leaving London for good, and had chosen to do it overland in a 12-seater van, with six others – two men, three women and a girl child. . . More. . .

Firaq: Poet of the totality of love

Some days before his death, an interviewer asked what he thought of the statement that many considered him the greatest Urdu poet after Ghalib.” His reply was, “How can I say anything different from what others say about me?” . . .More. . .

Locating a Mysore HAM

I quickly changed clothes - out came my bicycle - onto it I hopped - pedalling away - eyes glued to the road - NO - to the SKY. Why sky? If it was raining near Muthanna's house - all I had to do was locate the area where it was raining and I would have the territory of Muthanna's residence. . . More. . .

Was Md.Thuglaq really a fool ?

The Sultan was infuriated by his subjects of Delhi, who used to write abuses on a piece of paper and managed to throw the same in his palace. They were in fact annoyed by some of his policies. . . . The Sultan came to the conclusion to punish the ‘guilty’ people and he invented such a novel idea for the same. . .More. . .

A Tamil writer on her granddad

The reputation he had with all his grandkids was that of a stern person who had firm beliefs about the status of women, and their place in our households. In his reckoning a woman’s place was firmly in the kitchen. . .More. . .

Nettige Hogi

Ask for directions, the locals often joke, and the response you will get is, “Nettige hogi”: “go straight”. . . these directions are, at best, wishful thinking. . . . have lived half my life in Bangalore and the other half observing it from various points West. It's fifteen years since I was last in Bangalore. It's so long, in fact, that even the city has found the time to change its name. . . More. . .

Train to Pakistan

Some one had kindly paid for two train tickets from Delhi to Wagah border with Pakistan, from where we assumed we would commence relying on the goodwill of passing lorries and cars to take us deeper and deeper in to our journey and nearer to our destination - London. We were just not prepared for what was in store for us at the India–Pakistan border. . .Read more. . .

Autobiography of an ordinary man

“Why should only the rich and famous be allowed to write autobiographies?” He reckons he is unlikely to be rich or famous anytime soon, anyways, and, by inference, he could not write his bio. So Mr Shenoy chose to blog it, his autobiography...More...

Kabul Express in The Hippy, Happier Days

For those who have seen the movie I would like to say that my Kabul visit (in May 1967) predated that of John Abraham and Arshad Warsi by nearly four decades. In the movie they were featured as media men on assignment in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban regime. During my trip I was a journalist in between jobs, heading home after three years in England...More...

India will overcome, says who?

The Edward Luce prescription:Improve education, strengthen liberal democracy, develop a coherent energy strategy and radically revise the transport system before the country’s car population swells from 40 million today to an expected 200 million by 2030 and brings the entire country to a chocking standstill...More...

Curries in the West

...twelve day trip in a 12 seater minibus from London to India via Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran and frighteningly Afghanistan. Those were the days of India Man tours using sturdy if much used Volkswagon mini buses for this journey. We are awaiting a fuller version...More...

B2B with K : Of crossover book and a cross-country trip

You don’t hear of people doing this sort of thing nowadays. . perhaps because thumbing lifts no longer works... Car owners do not trust strangers with backpacks. Cross-country roads are no longer safe for hitch-hikers; and more countries would refuse Indians transit visa today than they did in the sixties...More

Keep smiling...(an IT girl on life in training)

When I returned to class there was a huge gang of my friends standing beside me and said, Ramya u gotta move to Hyderabad for your stream training. I felt really bad, I never wanted to miss Mysore. It was such a nice campus and people there are very kind and all my friends are there and the training there was very good...More...

Hacks and Headlines

Rashme Sehgal's first novel is not just a heady mixture of political and sexual power games, It is an insider view of the way the fourth estate operates in India, ideally placed in New Delhi where all the power broking goes on behind closed doors...Read on...

Deepa Mehta's Water : A washout

It is not as if no film had been made in India on socially-sanctioned cruelty to child widows. I recall a Kannada film - Phaniyamma - made over two decades ago that handled the plight of our women in such circumstances, with sympathy and sensitivity. The film, themed on widow remarriage, and daring for its time, was based on a book by M K Indira ...More...

B2B: Why did you return to India?

I had forgotten that you returned to India overland in a 12 seater minibus – a daring thing to do, considering you were walking on the wild side in Afghanistan where the warlords habitually kidnapped European travellers ...More...