A magazine in 14 languages? Everyone even slightly serious about media – the seniors in the fraternity included – had genuinely laughed when we had bounced the idea off them! They gave tens of reasons why the idea was not worth it and why the same would not be successful. The reasons given were very logical ones though. We don’t want to undermine anyone’s intelligence or reasoning; but they were totally right in their own ways and were not trying to pull me down. They were trying to be helpful... it was just that our definition of success differed from their definition. As our magazine The Sunday Indian completes five years, I can say that financially, we haven’t yet become successful – so all of them were right. We started breaking even as a media house only one month ago, after about seven years of struggle. It has not been an easy journey.
But financial success was never our benchmark of success. For me, personally, success is always a competition with self-imposed standards of excellence. And if I am convinced that excellence has been achieved, then I go into the market and fight it out against all odds. Thus, we have always believed in striving for world class and then going all out to market it. We have failed when the product failed to live up to the expected standards; but then, we’ve reworked and bounced back. Our institute fought out and won against the biggest of established names despite being tagged rank outsiders! Our movies did the same! And now our media house is doing the same!
Losing or winning is not success. Success is the courage to undertake great journeys. And this has been our toughest, and therefore greatest journey! Personally, I loved being called a guy who knew nothing about media; even being told that our media venture was a joke! And all this by very senior people I respect a lot, even today. Again, the gentlemen who said these things didn’t know what we had set out to achieve. So they were right in their own ways. We did know less about media – especially the dirt in it. Truthfully, I didn’t know anything about media the way others knew. For me, media has always been a vehicle to take a message to the larger masses – something that is not told by those who want to maintain status quo in the name of media. The discussions and debates in accented English that we were having inside the walls of IIPM classrooms, we wanted to take to those who were outside the classrooms in their mother tongue languages. Inside the classrooms, we teach around sixty students in one go; through media, we could reach out to six lakhs! And hopefully one day, sixty crores.
Read more
But financial success was never our benchmark of success. For me, personally, success is always a competition with self-imposed standards of excellence. And if I am convinced that excellence has been achieved, then I go into the market and fight it out against all odds. Thus, we have always believed in striving for world class and then going all out to market it. We have failed when the product failed to live up to the expected standards; but then, we’ve reworked and bounced back. Our institute fought out and won against the biggest of established names despite being tagged rank outsiders! Our movies did the same! And now our media house is doing the same!
Losing or winning is not success. Success is the courage to undertake great journeys. And this has been our toughest, and therefore greatest journey! Personally, I loved being called a guy who knew nothing about media; even being told that our media venture was a joke! And all this by very senior people I respect a lot, even today. Again, the gentlemen who said these things didn’t know what we had set out to achieve. So they were right in their own ways. We did know less about media – especially the dirt in it. Truthfully, I didn’t know anything about media the way others knew. For me, media has always been a vehicle to take a message to the larger masses – something that is not told by those who want to maintain status quo in the name of media. The discussions and debates in accented English that we were having inside the walls of IIPM classrooms, we wanted to take to those who were outside the classrooms in their mother tongue languages. Inside the classrooms, we teach around sixty students in one go; through media, we could reach out to six lakhs! And hopefully one day, sixty crores.
Read more
Comments
we cannot blame them they do it sometimes due to affection or experience made them to do that but never ignore what your heart says......
Best of luck Sir
Keep it up sir.. congrats