CIAO DATE: 01/2014
December 2011
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, I must confess that the title for this lecture was thought up on the spur of the moment. Still, you might wonder which characters in Dickens ’ novels we can see in the Indian media. I can readily say that any journalists see latter - day versions of Uncle Scrooge; publishers who want to run their empires on shoestring budgets. Publishers , in turn , will say we have our Oliver Twist journalists, who keep asking their employers for more — even when salaries are doubling every four or five years . We have reporters who are Artful Dodgers, especially when it comes to deadlines. We have bankrupt TV moguls who, like Micawber, are forever hoping that something will turn up. And of course, many readers are like Pip, they had great expectations about the media but feel robbed and are disappointed. But when I fixed on the title, of a Dickensian A ge for the Indian media, I had none of this in mind. My thought was the more predictable one, that this is a tale not of two cities but two narratives, competing narratives.
Resource link: Indian Media's Dickensian Age [PDF] - 213K