This is India Today's party

It is hard now to explain to people how different Indian journalism was before the advent of India Today.

Most of it was shoddily written (with the exception of the editorial pages of newspapers) and overly focused on politics. The only alternative to the political mainstream was film gossip.

 

Ever since Stardust hit the stands, newspaper proprietors figured out that even people who did not go to the movies loved reading gossip about film stars. So, no matter how incongruous it seemed, even otherwise serious newspapers would carry gossip columns speculating about Rajesh Khanna’s love life or discussing Rekha’s affairs. Nobody thought this was at all odd!

 

   I started writing for India Today in 1976, when I was 19, and one of the first things Aroon Purie taught me was to ignore the rest of the Indian newspaper/magazine industry. If we were going to achieve anything of consequence then we had to benchmark ourselves against international publications. He got us all into the habit of reading international magazines (I still can’t kick that habit) arguing that these were the standards we should aspire to and telling us that as journalism evolved, it was the foreign publications that would show us the way forward.

 

   “Read! You must read”, I remember him telling me in the tiny Connaught Place office that India Today then occupied. “Every single thing I have learned about journalism has come from reading. I don’t understand why Indian journalists don’t read more!''

 

   And so we read. And we read. And we looked for new ways to tackle stories. We gave ourselves an international perspective. We pretended that we were not trapped in Emergency-era India but were citizens of the world, filing stories as we would if we worked in London and New York.

 

   It didn’t always work. The first cover story I wrote for India Today (in the winter of 1976/7, I think) was on the crisis in the textile industry. It was hardly gripping stuff and I struggled to stay awake while researching the story. But, in a sense, it was good training because the challenge was to make something so intrinsically boring accessible to the general reader.

 

   Plus, we couldn’t bluff our way through. Aroon insisted that nearly every para contained a figure, so no saying “the industry is in decline”. Instead we had to write “revenues have fallen from Rs. 600 crore last year to Rs. 550 crores this year.” At the time, we teased him about this passion for numbers, telling him that because he was a qualified accountant, he was needlessly obsessed with figures. It took me years to appreciate how important this discipline (always back up your assertions with facts and figures) is in all quality journalism.

 

   But yes, we were still, like the rest of India in that era, much too insular. Five years after the break-up of the Beatles, George Harrison arrived in Bombay. He had never spoken about the breakup or about the contemporary music scene. Along with a colleague, I stalked him with flattering little notes slipped under the door of his suite at the Bombay Taj (“love 33½, your new album” or “what a great solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps…..”) before he finally agreed to a long interview, as far as I know, one of the few he had given after the breakup of The Beatles. (In that pre-internet era, stars knew that whatever they said in Bombay would never be read in London so they were more willing to be candid far away from home.).

 

   In the interview, Harrison let fly, tearing into his old band ( well, into Paul McCartney mainly) and into the contemporary music scene, sneering about his rivals, (“David Bowie should make up his mind what sex he is before trying to play music” or “Rod Stewart has a brain the size of a marble”).

 

   This was sensational never-said-before stuff but nobody at the India Today desk thought it was worth very much and the interview was slashed to less than a third of its original length. Who cared about the Beatles, anyway, they said. (I swear they did! Mad, mad mad!) And I was a 20-year-old with a childish obsession.

 

   Given that the folks in Connaught Place had no interest in the Beatles, I thought I would have more luck with Hindi cinema. Fortunately, this time, I was able to deal directly with Aroon. There was no real film journalism in India, just gossip, I told him. Why didn’t we start doing real film stories, treating the film industry with the same respect and attention that we paid to politics? (To say nothing of the attention we had lavished on the textile industry!)

 

"Aroon thought that Bombay was fast becoming India’s Manhattan.  There was a new middle class emerging that wanted to read about its city, its people, its problems and yes, about how to have fun in Bombay."

   Aroon saw the point at once. We went through film cover stories in Time and settled on a format we believed could be adapted to Indian conditions. Aroon’s father had once been involved in the film business so the Puries knew Raj Kapoor well. Kapoor was then finishing his magnum opus, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, the most eagerly-awaited film of the year and had gone off the press, refusing all interviews. Could Aroon persuade him to break his silence for us?

 

   Aroon could and Aroon did. And so I spent several days with Kapoor and Zeenat Aman researching the story (a much more exciting assignment than researching the decline of the textile industry) before we published (a bit of immodesty here—sorry!) the first major story in any Indian publication that took Hindi movies seriously and yet managed to capture the fun-filled glamour of Bollywood.

 

   The issue sold out, of course.

 

   By then, Indian Today was gaining momentum. After just three years in business, we had gone from being seen as outsiders who employed untrained kids (i.e. people like me), by the journalistic establishment, to being seen as a publication to respect and copy.

 

   When the Hare Krishna movement opened a religious theme park in Bombay, I wrote “Perhaps the Hare Krishna movement’s greatest achievement is that millions of Americans now think that the Hindu religion has three gods, Rama, Krishna and Harry.''

 

   In those days, major publications were not allowed to be flippant in their reporting (and certainly not about religion). But India Today printed my story anyway.

 

   A little later, the Bombay edition of a major newspaper lifted the line and used it in its report.

 

   We should have been outraged by the plagiarism. But we were thrilled. Imitation was not just the sincerest form of flattery. The fact that we were being plagiarised showed us how much India Today had changed the rules! From being upstarts we were now the publication to steal from!

 

   And so, we were on a roll.

 

   In Delhi, during the orgy of political reporting that followed the end of the Emergency, India Today quickly became the most reliable source of news.

 

   And in Bombay, where I lived, we had introduced a new way of looking at the lighter stuff: not just films and the back of the book, but also the so-called middle of the book, stories that were halfway between politics and entertainment.

 

   We did a few more film covers. One, called Is Shyam A Sham (Aroon’s title) examined Shyam Benegal’s movies and focussed on the rise of Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi. We argued that their success demonstrated that the old lines between art cinema and commercial movies were beginning to blur. (And no, we didn’t conclude that Shyam was a sham. We thought he was brilliant.)

 

   By 1978, only three years after India Today had been established, Aroon thought it was time to expand. He reckoned that just as India Today had proved that there was room for world class journalism in the otherwise moribund Indian media scene, there was a new bet worth taking.

 

   Aroon thought that Bombay was fast becoming India’s Manhattan.  There was a new middle class emerging that wanted to read about its city, its people, its problems and yes, about how to have fun in Bombay.

 

   He devised a publication that captured the spirit of the times. If India Today had been India’s Time or Newsweek, then Bombay (as we called the magazine) would be India’s answer to New York magazine.

 

   And so, we set off on another adventure. But that’s another story, for another time!

 

   This is India Today's party and it is only right that we remember how it transformed Indian journalism. And how it took a bunch of kids like us and turned us into writers!