Passionate About India

While year after year, strange economists keep getting the Nobel Prize for Economics for equally strange and meaningless impractical formulas, the man who has been redefining traditional economics and taking it back to where it should belong – the people, especially the poor – has been denied the same and given the Nobel for Peace instead. Though it is irritating, yet, perhaps we could try to find a deeper meaning and rejoice. At a point of time when Muslims are being looked at with suspicion, it sends a clear message to the world – that if you want to have peace, you’ve got to remove the massive poverty that still exists in the world by empowering the poor, especially women... I don’t think there can be a better message for global peace at a point where perhaps the biggest clash of civilizations – that between the Muslims and the Christians – is erupting across the globe.The erstwhile Professor of Chittagong University is a great example of a man who does believe in walking the talk.....

For me it’s simply unbelievable. No doubt, in our firm, we have always accepted personal and professional failures with a sense of challenge (they have always helped us learn and achieve greater heights). But it is for the first time that we are celebrating our failure... Yes, after going for a record-breaking first issue print run of over one lakh copies, over the last ten days we have been celebrating our failure to meet the market demand (of all the five editions) of the first two issues of The Sunday Indian!!! And believe me that’s great news. No, I don’t mean business-wise alone... it is great news for Indians on the whole.When we set out to start our media venture a year-and-a-half back, people from the world of media warned us. They said we weren’t media barons or industrialists. We were academicians and the best that academicians and intellectuals could take out were journals. Going to the market with mainstream magazines wasn’t our cup of tea. MBAs are meant for managing thing...

First things first. I saw Lage Raho Munnabhai and enjoyed it totally. I was in splits almost throughout the movie and even had tears in my eyes just before the interval... and I am glad that the silly myth about sequels not working got broken twice over this year itself (earlier with Krrish), for, a good film works – sequel or no sequel. Further, I promise I am not one of those with an extremist bent, who want the film out of the halls for insulting the father of the nation. Every filmmaker has a right to express his version of ideologies or (even for the sake of commercial viability/comic relief) use Gandhi the way they want to, in – one can only pray – an aesthetic manner. If Rang De Basanti used the legends of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad to arouse patriotic feelings in a revolutionary manner, Lage Raho does try its bit to espouse the merits of Gandhism in a light-hearted manner (I hope the filmmakers originally had that as an aim, apart from the intelligent and successful a...

Sunday will never be the same again for the Indian! Nine months of hard work, five languages – viz English, Hindi, Bangla (a tribute to my father Malay Chaudhuri’s commitment to Bengal), Tamil & Gujarati – a team of 68 editorial (with Sharad Gupta & Vijay Simha leading them), design and production stalwarts, one Sutanu Guru and one Satyajit Datta... Add to it Abhimanyu’s sales team, which tirelessly worked and told us that we can go ahead without worrying about revenue streams, Siddarth’s passion for quantifiable results, Prasoon’s intellectual support, Prashanto’s intelligent compromise (in toning down his lifestyle team’s language in order to make it easier to understand) and A.Sandeep’s quiet confidence (that he will step in, in the last 7 days and have it rolling, come what may!)... And you have a product that I can confidently say is absolutely world class! World class in terms of contents, world class in terms of analytical abilities, world class in terms of commitment to...