How the mighty are fallen! Aveek Sarkar, hitherto chairman and editor-in-chief of the Kolkata-based Ananda Bazar Patrika Ltd (ABP), a closely held family-run company which dominates the media business in West Bengal, has been ousted from office in a swift and silent boardroom coup engineered by younger brother Arup obliged to pay second fiddle for over three decades. Currently, the ABP website lists Aveek as vice chairman and editor emeritus, and Arup as the director and his UK-educated son Atideb as executive director. Aveek’s large ballroom size office in the new high-security Doric-style ABP headquarters on Prafulla Sarkar Street is reportedly vacant with this media tycoon relegated to a tiny annexe, which he visits occasionally with none so poor to do him reverence. If there is a trace of schadenfreude in this narrative, it’s because your editor conceptualised and launched BusinessWorld for ABP in 1981, and with extraordinary diligence established it as the country’s #1 business magazine, raking in vast profits. However, when I put in my papers in 1987, no golden handshake or severance package was offered. Moreover when this evangelist sui generis education magazine was launched in the new millennium, repeated invitations to Aveek to invest a tiny proportion of the crores your editor earned for ABP by way of an equity stake, went unheeded. In the end, hubris proved the undoing of this self-absorbed media tycoon. In the run-up to West Bengal assembly elections of May 2016, Aveek foolishly took sides and antagonised Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee who was re-elected chief minister with a landslide majority. And with the ABP Group — to which the TMC government had cut off all advertising — obliged to downsize its 1,800-strong workforce by 700 last December, because of the vast expenditure incurred by Aveek on the imposing new ABP headquarters and the imminent possibility of the state government siding with the laid off workers, Aveek became the sacrificial goat who had to go. Now reportedly in charge of ABP’s unglamorous vernacular television news channels, Aveek who prides himself as an authority on the world’s finest hotels and private clubs, whiles away his days in effete epicureanism with “books, food, wine and art , his four principal loves”. Sic transit gloria mundi. Over-monetised society The big gamble of Theresa May, prime minister and leader of the Conservative party, to call a mid-term general election to strengthen her five-seat majority in the House of Commons (UK’s lower house of Parliament) has blown up in her face and reduced the Tory Party to a minority government obliged to cobble up a working majority with a small far right Northern Ireland party. Meanwhile, the opposition Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn, written off just a month ago, recorded handsome gains in the recently concluded British general election. The question which everybody in the UK and elsewhere is asking is how did the massive majority that every opinion poll in the UK had predicted for May’s Conservative party, vanish before election day…
