Is there life after death?

Well, I had to talk about it. This is the story of a magazine gone wrong. It was called India Insight.

Many people would have many different sides of the story to tell - this is my side of it. More than a year ago when I had the crazy urge to stop working as a translator and try my luck as a copywriter, I packed my bags and came to a city I thought I knew - Pune. The King in Paulo Coehlo's Alchemist says that when you set out on the way to your dreams, nature rewards you with a little success on your first step - its called beginner's luck.

So with no experience, no training in media, I ended up with the job I'd have killed for - not as Junior Copywriter in some obscure advertising company, but as subeditor for a newly launched weekly magazine with some ambitious plans to redefine journalism in India. For the first few weeks, the work was maddening - intimidating, exhausting, but oh, the feeling of holding a fresh copy of the magazine in my hands... 64 pages of honest, if a little amateurish journalism, that I helped organise, arrange into one issue packed with stories on every subject of interest from politics to films to history to sports... this was May and June 2008. India Insight was launched on May 4, I joined the tiny team on May 13. By the first week of July we got a real office - by mid-July I got help as two more sub-editors joined us. By end of July, from a team of two - me and the creative head slogging on issue after issue of the magazine - we had grown to a full-fledged editorial team of 3 sub-editors, a chief editor, a copy editor working from Delhi, and 3 assistants to the chief designer. By August, publication stopped.

I won't get into blame games here, so never mind what went wrong. Only a lot of dreams were shattered - big deal. But one issue of that magazine, dated August 8-14 2008, which was the first product of our complete team, never made it to the stands. Somewhat hurts. It also hurts, still hurts that two people among the new faces were there because of me. I told them we needed more people in this amazing new publishing house, that we had two magazines running and more in the offing, that yes it was a risk for them to quit their present jobs but that the risk was worth taking. I'm not conceited enough to think that I influenced their decision or the course of their lives, but I was the Nimittya - there's no better word for it. Had I not told them about this job, they wouldn't have quit their jobs in Bangalore.

I'm still chasing my dream. And I remain indebted to India Insight for marking my first step towards it. Journalism is what I wanted for my life and if I started late, it was only because I hadn't had the nerve before. This was my beginner's luck. This weekend, I'll be in Bangalore, watching a play by my favourite theatre group. We'd done a little story on them, in the August 8 issue - very few copies of that issue were printed, and I've managed to save one with me. I'll hopefully be able to hand it over to the group's director.

India Insight, meanwhile, lives on. After August last year, it was re-launched from Bangalore in October. And again from Pune last month, this time as a fortnightly. The publishers remain optimistic and I too wish the magazine all the success. Only hoping that this time, the still-ambitious project does not displace a lot of young people, play with their dreams and render them jobless in a month.

Truly multi-media

Television has changed. Thank God.

 Gone are the Tulsis and Parvatis and the entire generation of low IQ TV shows they had inspired - I don't care to be politically correct. If you don't agree with my views, read some other blog. While the sari-clad, heavily bejewelled bahus no longer rule the roost, the intellectual damage they have done to Indian television will take some more years to repair. The Ballika Vadhu generation of popular soaps address serious social issues - but in form, story development, characterisation and dialogue, they still largely survive on Balaji-created clichés. Good girls still prefer ethnic wear, and a pair of well-toned skirt clad legs usually carries a femme fatale with evil intent. Sigh.

 But well, a Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai isn't everybody's cup of tea. Intelligent television humour is what I'm talking about. Sarabhai created its own definitions, with characters replacing old clichés with fresh pet peeves. Who can forget the middle class Monisha; lazy and lovable, missing no chance to save every rupee of her wealthy hubby, to the point of selling stale wine packed in a plastic bag to a cop! That was Star One of yore, with fresh, funny, youthful content which provided good relief from the run-of-the-mill productions of that time. Sadly, Star One soon sold out. Dill Mil Gaye and Mile Jab Hum Tum might not fall into the Saans-Bahu category as rightfully boasted by their respective makers, but the bird brained doctors and collegians looking like 30-year-olds definitely don't qualify as quality television…

 So well, the change I’m talking about isn’t really a change in content. A few shows might have relaxed the dress code for their leading ladies, but television IQ has a long way to recover. What I am talking about then, is the PR approach. TV shows realise that to get noticed in times of shorter attention span, they need to have a presence on various media. Who would have thought 10 years ago of a TV show sponsoring another show on another channel as part of its promotional campaign? Or for that matter TV stars pretending to be their screen selves for the benefit of media? Enter Sony Entertainment Television. Some years ago, the ingenious publicity campaign of totally overwriting Mona Singh’s true identity with the bespectacled Jassi succeeded in creating sustainable hype around the otherwise mundane show. The same channel now has gone a step further for the new show Bhaskar Bharti – a lame TV execution of an outrageous concept. A guy turns to a girl overnight, and is doomed to a woman’s life.

 While the show itself is lame, the way it is being promoted is interesting – besides the usual hoardings and advertisements, Bharti maintains a blog and regularly updates her Facebook and Twitter profiles. Now, TV shows having a Facebook profile may not be new, only that here, the tweets are actually an extension of the fictional show. Wish that kind of creativity had also gone into the making of the show.

 What intrigues one is, what if that idea was applied to some classic old shows – imagine what Joey (from Friends) would daily tweet about – who’d be on Harriet Brindle’s friend network? Maybe we’ll soon have an entire network of fictional characters tweeting on the net, forever blurring the line between Tellyworld and cyberspace…