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Journalism of Courage
Bong-Bashing, Basu Style
Jyoti Basu may be the poster-boy for Bengalis the world over, but he doesn’t appear to think too highly of them. The long-serving West Bengal Chief Minister ripped into his community at a Calcutta function organised by the industrial group owned by Kajal Sengupta — controversial for the lucrative contracts his company has been getting from Basu’s government. Instead of giving the hacks some leads on that, Basu indulged in some Bengali-bashing.“Bengalis are generally averse to hard work, so they always look for jobs after they complete studies,” he told the audience. He then recounted the story of his rendezvous with the legendary scientist, P. C. Ray. “Once he showed me the little shops along a Calcutta main road and told me how people came from outside the city and set up shop, while Bengali young men looked for jobs,” Basu recalled. He told the audience how G. D. Birla once told his father that Bengalis were intelligent people, but were far from industrious. Seasonednewshounds couldn’t help noticing the irony: a Marxist quoting a Marwari to prove a point against Bengalis.
Media Means Money, Too
If, for the briefest of moments, Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha thought he was presiding over a meeting of industry leaders and not media luminaries at his North Block office in New Delhi on Friday, he wasn’t to blame. The poor man, as part of his transparency drive, had called a meeting of opinion-makers to get their views on what needed to be done about the Budget, the fiscal deficit, subsidies, and larger issues like that. This was the group, he told the hacks, that he would listen to closely, as they clearly had no axes to grind. No journalist, for example, would suggest that the import duty on PTA be raised while that on DMT be reduced — something that clearly must have been done by industry leaders at their tete-a-tete with Sinha a few days prior to this. But to the FM’s surprise, one of the assembled editors (actually, a manager who doubles as one) spoke atlength of how the anti-dumping duty mechanism for newsprint was flawed. Sinha, clearly, had spoken too soon.
Science for Students
The Government may not have done much beyond giving the scientific community a new slogan, Jai Vigyan, but there are some who are taking the message out there. Far removed from the post-Pokharan fallout, the country’s eminent men of science have gone into a huddle for a new mission. Of making some of the most intriguing subjects accessible to students.Young IIT graduate Shekhar Phatak’s multimedia studio in Pune is playing host to some of the best brains, as he goes about the business of publishing the books and making them available at an affordable cost to students nationwide. Here, you can see Govind Swarup, the man who conceptualised the world’s largest radio telescope at Narayangaon, leafing through books to make information accessible, even as astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar has taken time off gazing at galaxies to adapt astronomical mysteries into stories forchildren.
Masala Offer
Uncle Chipps is anything but avuncular, or so mothers in Mumbai are discovering. The chips manufacturer may have changed the flavours to that of papri chat, but it is anything but swadeshi in its choice of free posters and postcards, those collectibles that your little one so loves to flaunt. So, if you want a Pamela Anderson-lookalike clad in the barest minimum of clothes, a mudbathing Juhi Chawla, or a skimpily-dressed Madonna, it’s not the latest issue of a girlie magazine that you need to go to, but a packet of Uncle Chipps. For those who think size does matter, there’s an even more generous offer: four postcards will earn a mega poster. Now, if that has not kicked up a row in the land of the original policeman of moral, Pramod Navalkar, there could be only two reasons: one, Navalkar really prefers the swadeshi chips; two, his children are grown-up.
Buy One, Get Another Free
If you’re better known to your friends as God, you cannot but be expectedto do things differently. Alyque Padamsee, advertising guru, impresario, husband of Sharon Prabhakar, and media adviser at large, has also discovered that there can be 25 hours in a day. Which is how he has found time to write his memoirs, A Double Life, to be launched with a live performance at Mumbai’s Nehru Centre on Tuesday by, yes, you guessed it, his wife. As Sharon croons numbers from, yes, you guessed it again, Evita, characters from many of the ads Alyque has created will be telling the audience about his other life as theatre man. No wonder then, the invite to the launch shows Alyque’s face split into two: one half showing him as Jinnah (the part he played in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, clean-shaven with hair neatly combed back) and the other, the trademark ad-man with carefully-tousled hair and goatee. Buy Alyque, and get to hear Sharon sing free.
