The TOI Story: How a newspaper changed the rules of the game by Sangita P. Menon Malhan; Harper Collins; Price: Rs.350; 261 pp Of the four great estates of post-independence India — legislature, executive, judiciary and the press — the one that has most substantially fulfilled the expectations of the founding fathers of the Constitution is the press, aka the media (after the advent of 24×7 television news channels). With Parliament repeatedly disrupted by quasi-literates (one-third of whom have serious criminal charges filed against them), the executive destroyed by criminality and corruption, the judiciary rendered dysfunctional by archaic procedural codes and the law’s agonising delay, the media is the only estate manning the gates against the unholy coalition of lawless politici-ans, rogue businessmen and lumpen elements within Indian society. According to Sangita P. Menon Malhan, a former journalist of the Times of India, Mid-Day and The Statesman turned author, the transformation of the media industry began in the 1980s with the rise to preeminence of Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd (BCCL), the holding company of the Times of India, Economic Times and several magazines. BCCL, under its dynamic publisher/proprietor Samir Jain, “was the first to break the rules” of news publishing and transform the media into the powerful fourth estate of the republic which it is today. Unfortunately although well-written and perhaps even riveting, this history of the blossoming of BCCL under Jain’s leadership into a news media publishing powerhouse and the rise of Times of India (estb.1838) from the grande dame of Bori Bunder to the world’s most widely read broadsheet daily with The Economic Times (estb. 1961) as the #2 worldwide business daily (after the Wall Street Journal), starts on a false note. The plain truth is that the transformation of the news publishing business began in the immediate aftermath of the internal Emergency imposed by the late prime minister Indira Gandhi and the resounding defeat of her Congress party in the historic general election of early 1977. At the time, following the end of a harsh regime of censorship imposed upon the media, an unprecedented magazine boom erupted within the country, with the almost simultaneous launch of India Today, Sunday and Business India. Piloted by hitherto unknown publishers and editors, these publications were the “first to break the rules of the game”, and refashion the staid and dull news media publishing world focused on crooked politicians, whose acts of commission and omission during the Emergency were extensively exposed by the new magazines. Thoro-ughly compromised for cravenly supporting the Congress and its spoilt brat Sanjay Gandhi during the Emergency (a fact about which the author is totally silent), ToI and Samir Jain didn’t “break the rules” for over a decade thereafter. However, there is no doubt that Samir was perhaps the first newspaper proprietor to discern the importance of building media brands and derive profit and value from them. As Malhan accurately recounts, until the mid 1980s newspapers were essentially publications of official record, dutifully reporting the typically banal…
