PERILS OF WHETTING THE APPETITE OF TIGER-TURNED MANEATER
Bangalore: The English-knowing people of India, I described as the “cream” of the country’s 850- million population, are going mad. What else can be our verdict except this on the death of India’s oldest English magazine, illustrated Weekly, a Times of India publication? Nobody else can be blamed for this demise of the over 100-year-old institution.
A Bengali Christian, Pritish Nandy, pretending to know everything converted the 111-year-old country’s once most prestigious English journal into a silly sheet of rubbish stuff and naturally the circulation had a sharp fall. Thinking that its English-knowing clientele is like him, he went on packing more puff, more ‘muck and turned the whole journal gaudy and also bawdy. He wanted to whet the appetite of the well- fed and gave them more than what they wanted: sex, religion, crime, entertainment and petty politics – the five elements that blend and makeup the “cream” – of the Indian society. In the process he forgot that © there are some saner elements still left in the English-knowing cream. And this section felt ashamed to be – seen with the Weekly turned into a yellow journal.
Five elements in the cream: This English-knowing “cream” is not even 2% of the country’s population. And it is this “cream” which calls itself the brain of India’s ruling class comprising about 10 to 15% of the population. What is this corrupt cream made of? The five elements: sex, crime, religion, eternal – entertainment and petty politics. Pritish Nandy supplied more and more of the five elements. And ‘the over — hungry “cream” grew more and more hungry and wanted more and more of it. To satisfy the hungry, he separated the “serious stuff” and dumped it into the black and white broadsheet and reserved the all-color Weekly for the hungry “cream”. But the hungry lot wanted more. When Nandy could not supply the hungry, the tiger-turned maneater started leaving. By then the serious-minded have already left. Caught between the two, Nandy was I sandwiched and he decided to call it a day.
Nandy, a crony of its Marwari Jain owners, collapsed and closed down the Weekly. The Pritish PRO with no journalistic background represents the new breed of editors that is rising in this intellectual wasteland that is India.
Collective killing: C.R. Mandy was the last of the great British editors who husbanded this old Boribun Der madam. Then came the first Indian, the silly Sai Baba fan, A.S. Raman, a Tamil papan, who was the first to start slaughtering the Weekly with his manias and tantras. Then came Khushwant Singh, the whiskey and sexy sardar ji who combined his cheap humor with some intellectual stuff, and jacked “up the circulation. Then came M.V. Kamath, the Gowda Saraswat Brahmin now flirting with the Hindu Nazis.:
All these editors collectively killed a great institution and the Bengali Babu struck the last nail on the old Dame’s coffin. They may claim the Weekly is not yet dead and it is coming out as a broadsheet. That is true. But that is not how the Weekly used to appear in the past 111 years. The Weekly died because the English-speakers are going crazy. And the new breed of editors are driving them crazier.
Naked girl: The death of the Weekly also is a warning to the English magazine world, which is witnessing a temporary boom today. We find all sorts of garish and stupid journals on the news-stand. One thing that is common to all these journals is a colored picture of a naked girl – without which it will not sell. If you open the inside pages, you find all garbage. – The mortality rate of such journals is also high. They is dying young – say two or three years.
If this is the stuff the “cream” of the county reads, God save this country from this “cream”.
But look at Dalit Voice. it is now crossing ten years and going strong into 11. It publishes no pictures, not to speak of naked pictures. It is not even in color. And yet it sells and sells well. Why? Because there is a section of English-knowing population in India which does not go by the standards of this corrupt “cream”. It is this section which is growing — and also thinking how to save India from this cream:
