Making money off the Mumbai attack … utter rubbish!

I just got an email, originally written by someone who likes to call him(her?)self the “unknown Indian”.

It’s floating around the interwebs asking people to boycott three Indian weeklies who’ve raised the prices of their latest issue. He/she believes that this is an attempt to “fleece the Indian public.”

Read the email, reaction follows:

Today, three magazines hit the stands.

India Today

Outlook Magazine

The Week

All three of them have the “Mumbai attacks” as the cover story. However there is a major difference. While India Today and Outlook have jacked up their prices from Rs. 20 to Rs. 25, The Week has increased their price from Rs. 15 to Rs. 20/-. This is a blatant atempt to fleece Indian readers at the expense of the several hundred martyrs who lost their lives!

Hence, we request all patriotic Indians to boycott :

1. India Today & all magazines from the India Today Group

2. Outlook and all magazines from the Outlook Group

3. The Week and all its allied publications.

Let us not purchase these magazines and instead search and read on the internet. Please forward this mail to your friends, family, colleagues and associates.

Let us lay a wreath over those who sold our country’s martyrs for the sake of a few extra bucks.

Yeh Public hai, yeh sab janti haai

Andar Kya Hai Bahar Kya Hai, yeh sab kuch pehchanti hai………

Forwarded by an unknown Indian…

This is rubbish of the worst sort and symptomatic of one of the deepest problems afflicting Indian society — the 1 rupee newspaper.

Here’s what we want — accountability from those in positions of responsibility. Typically, it is the fourth estate — journalism in both the most traditional sense and in the most modern as seen in social media — that performs this full time role.

Most reporters are no different from the policemen who died during the Mumbai attack. They’re poorly paid, sometimes as little as 9,000 rupees a month despite having fifteen years experience. They’re vilified, not always for the wrong reasons, but amazingly enough, often for the same reasons that we vilify our policemen.

All of this boils down to the value that we as a society place on the role they perform. We can’t control the salaries that our cops get paid, the politicians decide that. But we do decide the salaries that our reporters get paid everytime we choose to pay the same amount of money you’d give a beggar on the roadside for a newspaper. Or the same amount of money you’d spend drinking a cold drink, for a magazine.

The money you pay doesn’t even cover the cost of printing the damn thing. In fact, the reason the magazines have raised their prices this week is because they’re trying to give YOU MORE CONTENT. And it costs money to do that.

And I’m not talking about money for salaries. I’m talking about money for newsprint, the paper that the stuff that reporters write is printed on. That the ads are printed on.

Ah, the ads.

It’s corporate India that’s been keeping newspapers, magazines, and television channels afloat, in most cases just about barely.

The cost of producing a newspaper is borne almost entirely by corporates. And therein lies the problem: the person bring in the ads becomes far more important that the person bringing in the news. So, pay is completely lopsided, resources are completely lopsided and in more than one newspaper office, the floor that marketing and sales occupies looks like a 21st century office, while the floor for editorial is run down, with large rats roaming around.

Everytime you refuse to pay for content, you disrespect the reporter who’s willing to stand while a gun battle rages, knowing that a stray bullet could kill him.

And today, formal journalism has been broken to the extent that they only give you what you want. So, if you watch when scenes of great suffering are show, cameramen will face abuse and vitriol to capture those images. If you want to watch filmstars look pretty, reporters and producers put up with tantrums and bad behaviour to give you what you want.

And despite all this, some of the best, brightest people I’ve met have been journalists.

Like I said, this email is utter rubbish based on half truths and distortion. It’s the sort of thing that got us to where we are today.

UPDATE: K points out that the email looks like a missive from minions of the Ponytailed wonder. Hmmm … Thanks for the traffic K.

Anyway, these links to great writing from an email from Peter Griffin (also known as zigzackly) …

Suketu Mehta in the NYT

Dilip D’souza in the Washinton Post

Naresh Fernandes in The New Republic (See also his piece on Jews in Bombay)

And these pieces, on their blogs, by Amit Varma, Sonia Faleiro and Rahul Bhatia.

And these by Prem Panicker: 1, 2 & 3 (the latter two link to some other excellent pieces as well).

And this, by Ingrid Srinath (read also Priyanka Joseph’s comment on that post).

Recovered from the site’s WordPress archive, where it was published on 2008-12-01.