Passionate About India

We, at Planman Media, have been always very appreciative and excited about any policy that has ever made an attempt to bring in any substantial change in the state of Indian education – especially in primary education. Be it the annual budget or discreet policy decisions, education has always been our primary area of focus and inspection. There are two reasons for the same. Firstly, the returns on investment (in terms of societal dividends) on primary education, including intangibles, are very high; and secondly, knowing the fact that the returns are high, it is the very same primary education which has been subjected to perpetual political negligence and budgetary ignorance over the years. But then, with the introduction of the Right to Education bill (on April 01, 2010) the table seems to be finally turning. This act, at least on paper, holds the promise to deliver free and compulsory education to one and all, till the age of 14, across the nation. On the face of it, I feel too exci...

I needn’t tell our readers how proud we are at Planman Media about our magazines. All of you who have followed my editorial pieces would almost think that we are too arrogant and have a high degree of superiority complex... But I want to confess. While we are very proud that there’s hardly any media house in the country that is capable of giving a more intellectual and incisive analysis of committed news that matters to the country, there is one media house which has too often beaten us with their analysis. And yes, that’s the TOI group. Too often, when we have thought we have an original idea and plan to put it on our cover, we’ve seen, the very next day, the same in the front page of The Times of India - the most recent one being our Aazamgarh story. What was amazing was not that they covered it – everyone covered it – but that the kind of first hand statistics they had in their story showed that that it was not journalism for the heck of it... It was intellectual journalism with com...

On the 2nd of October last year, when we launched The Sunday Indian with five editions in English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Gujarati, we had thought that this was the best we could have pulled off and that we shouldn’t think of anything more, at least for the next two to three years! Within 6 months of the launch of Business & Economy – our first media venture – we launched 4Ps Business and Marketing; and within a year of that, we offered The Sunday Indian; and recently, the Indian PC Magazine. After five language editions of The Sunday Indian, we had to look beyond. So here we are today, launching 8 additional editions of The Sunday Indian in Urdu, Malayalam, Telugu, Assamese, Marathi, Kannad, Oriya and Punjabi, along with this special issue on the hundred most controversial Indians of the last hundred years! That makes it 13 editions in all... by far the highest number of editions for any news weekly in the country (the next highest is 6 editions of the leading news weekly of In...

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...