Thoughts on Journalism from Journalists

With changing times and changing patterns of content consumption, journalism itself has undergone major changes and journalists have had to adapt to the new ways of doing things

I have no formal education in journalism, haven’t studied journalism in a college and do not have a degree or a diploma in journalism. And yet, I’ve worked as a journalist for close to three decades and have been fortunate enough to have written for leading newspapers, magazines and websites across the country. I started in the mid-1990s, when there was only print and television. Over the years, with the rise of the Internet, I saw the Web become the dominant medium, what with thousands of websites, blogs, YouTube channels, along with social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram vying for people’s attention and diminishing the power that print and TV once had.

Target Design: In Conversation with Hans-Georg Kasten

Hans-Georg Kasten (in black tshirt) was one of the three men at Target Design who were responsible for designing the 1980s Suzuki Katana. He is now the Managing Director of Target Design

Launched in 1981, the Suzuki Katana 1100 had relatively conventional mechanicals – the engine, chassis and suspension were pretty standard for its time – but the styling was radical, and made the motorcycling world sit up and take note. The bike was Japanese, of course, but was designed in Germany by Target Design. There was a three-man team that worked on the Katana’s design: Jan Fellstrom, Hans-Georg Kasten and Hans Muth. Back in 2012, I had an opportunity to do a brief interview with Hans-Georg Kasten, who is now Managing Director of Target Design. Here are some excerpts from that conversation.

Book Review: Code Dependent - Living in the Shadow of AI

Having grown up in Mumbai and now based in the UK, MadhumitaMurgia is Artificial Intelligence Editor at the Financial Times, in London. Her impressive list of academic qualifications includes an MA in Journalism from the New York University and before joining FT, she has worked with leading publications like Wired magazine, The Telegraph and The Washington Post. At FT, Murgia leads their coverage of artificial intelligence and writes about data, surveillance and policy. So, of course, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that her first book – Code Dependent:Living in the Shadow of AI – deals with the subject of artificial intelligence, the ways in which it affects our lives and its possible implications for the future. Written with clarity and precision, and backed by the author’s deep knowledge of – and familiarity with – the subject, it’s a brilliant read and has been shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

Book Review: Tightwads and Spendthrifts

You like to spend money, your partner likes to save. How do you co-exist?

What most of humanity can agree upon, without too much debate, is that most of us quite like having money. As much of it, in fact, as possible and then some more. But spending all that money can be the tricky part. The tightwads amongst us are inclined to be extra careful with handing out the greenbacks while the spendthrifts are maybe too liberal with those crisp, new Gandhijis. This isn’t a problem until these two radically different types of people have to live in close proximity and learn to coexist. That is when the sparks can really fly. And so, of course, we need a book that can teach us something about money and the psychology that drives the propensity to either hoard or splurge. Enter Scott Rick’s Tightwads andSpendthrifts, which the publishers say is ‘a revolutionary guide to navigating the financial aspects of real relationships.’

A Sound Card for my PC

I like the Creative AE-7, though the AE-9 is the one I'm dreaming about these days

I’m a committed audiophile and the centre of my music-universe is my PC, where my entire collection of music is stored. There are thousands of MP3s there (very few FLACs, unfortunately), ripped or downloaded over the last 10-15 years from different sources. I’ve never used Spotify and my only sources of music are my own MP3 collection and YouTube. That probably says something about how old I am (51 going on 81), but hey, that’s okay, I’m happy with MP3s and YouTube. They’re better than the cumbersome old LPs, cassettes and CDs I grew up with.

Book Review: Crypto Crimes - Inside India’s Best-Kept Secret

Everyone wants to get rich quick and some believe crypto is one way to get there

Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin. Digital assets. While the vast majority of people in India (and probably elsewhere in the world) have heard of these terms, most have very little or no understanding of what these really are, what they mean and what drives their value. And yet, many still believe that dabbling in these might somehow open the gateways to earning massive sums of money. This is, perhaps, what is truly amazing about cryptocurrencies – how little people understand these and how, despite having no idea of their underlying value (or the complete lack of it, depending on who you ask) they’re still prepared to invest in these anyway. Greed? Speculation? Yes, but given their meteoric rise in prices over the last 15 years, crypto can be an irresistible lure for some. Back in 2010, some guy named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two Papa John’s pizzas. At that time, one Bitcoin was equal to around two or three US dollars. Today, one Bitcoin is valued at US$64,470. Can’t blame Hanyecz though; given its lack of any real, measurable value, who could have predicted Bitcoin’s crazy price trajectory?

Western Media Narratives on India: In Conversation with Umesh Upadhyay

Published earlier this year, Western Media Narratives on India: From Gandhi to Modi explores how cultural imperialism influences the Third-World nations. ‘Media in the hands of the former colonizers that wish to maintain their sway has become a tool to dictate people’s thoughts. Focussed on India, this narrative spans from the nation’s independence in 1947 to the present day, scrutinizing the relentless targeting of Indian leadership by the dominant Western English media. With time, these attacks have intensified, particularly on a resurgent India,’ says the publisher’s note.

Past Perfect: Honda CB1100RS

1980s-styling, modern-day brakes, tyres and suspension. The Honda CB1100RS, which is now sadly out of production, is my dream bike. How times change!

‘We look before and after, and pine for what is not,’ said English poet Percy Shelley, two-hundred years ago. The English poet was definitely no biker-boy, but what he said does apply to motorcycles as well. Well, at least for some of us. Let me explain. When I was young, I lusted after the latest, fastest, most powerful sportsbikes and superbikes – Suzuki GSX-Rs, Yamaha FZRs, Honda CBRs and Kawasaki ZXR Ninjas. Exotic Ducatis and Bimotas. And BMWs, which were always a bit weird. These were machines I only saw in the pages of second-hand foreign magazines like Cycle World and Bike, copies of which I was sometimes able to get in bookshops in Hazratganj, in Lucknow. At that time, I used to have a Yamaha RX100, which had an 11bhp, two-stroke engine that loved to rev its heart out. Eleven horsepower isn’t really much, but the magic was in the way in which the Yamaha engine delivered that power – instant acceleration and long wheelies in 1^st gear. I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved that Yamaha.

Book Review: India’s Most Legendary Restaurants

Across the length and breadth of the country, India has one of the richest, most diverse food cultures anywhere in the world. For committed gastronomes, some of the most authentic, soul-satisfying food experiences can often be found in people’s homes. But these aren’t always accessible and certainly not to everyone. And that’s where restaurants come in – almost every city in India has a selection of eateries that have made a name for themselves over the years, specialising in the local cuisine, with the flavours amped up and taken to whole new level, achieved via a mix of carefully selected ingredients and cooking techniques developed over many years, sometimes many decades. And the best part is, you’re just as likely to find such legendary eateries inside a five-star hotel as on a nondescript streetside corner.

Why We Die: Book Review

Death is the final frontier, the inevitable end. We know that and yet most of us find it difficult to deal with thoughts of dying and of death. With major advances in medical science over the last 100 years or so, doctors and scientists have been able to increase human lifespans, but in the end, we have to accept that human bodies simply aren’t built to last forever. Ultimately, death still wins. Always. For those who might be inclined to ask why, Nobel Prize winner, molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan’s recently published book, Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest forImmortality has all the answers you could ever hope for.

‘We are living through a revolution in biology. Giant strides are being made in understanding why we age—and why some species live longer than others. Could we eventually cheat disease and death and live for a very long time, possibly many times our current lifespan? Venki Ramakrishnan, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and former president of the Royal Society, takes us on a riveting journey to the frontiers of biology, asking whether we must be mortal,’ says the publisher’s note. ‘Covering recent breakthroughs in scientific research, he examines the cutting edge of efforts to extend lifespan by altering our physiology. But might death serve a necessary biological purpose? What are the social and ethical costs of attempting to live forever? Why We Die is a narrative of uncommon insight and beauty from one of our leading public intellectuals,’ it adds.

Dream Speakers: The Sound of Music

I dislike wearing headphones and much prefer listening to music played on proper, high-end speakers. And no multitasking either - when I'm listening to music, I only listen to music and do nothing else

 
I love listening to music. But I’m not one of those people who wear headphones all the time and listen to music while doing various other things. Instead, when I listen to music, I only listen to music and do nothing else at that time. I used to buy cassettes and music CDs till the late-1990s, but that stopped with the coming of MP3s. Now, for the last 25 years or so, my entire collection of music has lived on my computer and is always backed up on a portable hard drive. And so, having a good pair of speakers is very important for me, since my desktop PC (yes, I’m ancient and prefer using a desktop PC with a 27-inch display and full-size keyboard rather than a small laptop and its cramped keyboard) is my primary music playback device.

Over the last 15-20 years, I’ve experimented with various speaker set-ups including 2.0, 2.1 and 5.1 formats. For me, a good 2.0 setup has worked best for pure music playback. 5.1 speakers work well for movies but some music can sound a bit weird on these (plus, wired 5.1 setups are a pain to install), and some 2.0 speakers offer such powerful bass output that 2.1 speakers, which include a separate subwoofer, are a bit pointless. I’ll note here that this is true for my listening preferences and the kind of music that I listen to. Some others may well feel the need for 2.1 systems for even more bass, and that’s perfectly understandable.

Anglo-Indian Stories: The Books I Want to Read

Risen from our colonial past, the Anglo-Indian community in India is unique in many ways, and an invaluable part of modern India. When British (or other European, mainly Portuguese) men married Indian women, mostly in the late-19th and early- to mid-20th centuries, their progeny came to be known as Anglo-Indians. After 1947 – through the 1950s and 60s – most chose to leave India and go to the UK, Australia or Canada, in search of a better life. But many did stay on, and their descendants hold on to some vestiges of their ancestors’ ‘Anglo’ lives.

For most Anglo-Indians, all of whom are Christians/Catholics, English is their first language though many are also able to speak Hindi and/or other Indian languages with varying degrees of fluency. As the decades roll by and India’s colonial past fades into distant memory, the British influences continue to diminish. ‘If you compare Anglo-Indians of four or five decades ago with Anglo-Indians of today, you will realise how much we have changed. We are not half as sporty or outdoorsy a people as we once were. Living for the day and laid-back aren’t accurate descriptions of us any longer; focused and competitive are,’ says Barry O’Brien, author of The Anglo-Indians: A Portrait of a Community. 

Book Review: The Pursuit of Reputation

Let’s start with an honest admission. While I’ve worked as a journalist for most of the last 25-30 years, I have also worked in Public Relations and Corporate Communications for a few years. With a German car manufacturer, in Formula 1, with India’s only F1 and MotoGP circuit, and with a leading agency that’s headquartered in Bombay. So, I can claim to have seen both sides of the coin as a journalist and as a PR professional. And yet – and this is the surprising part – even after having spending a few years working in PR, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to fully understand what PR is all about. At one time, in the distant past, PR used to be mostly about sending out press releases and then following up with newspapers and magazines for media coverage. Now, what with the rise of bloggers, vloggers, social media influencers, YouTube, smartphones, apps and a thousand other digital doodads, I’m told PR is much more complex – a ‘strategic’ function that’s at least as important as marketing. These days, we have highly-paid specialists who ‘craft’ ‘PR strategy’ for companies and going by the terms they use – content marketing, earned media, owned media, paid media, positioning strategy, messaging strategy, share of voice, advertising equivalence value and many more – the PR pros are giving MBA types a run for their money when it comes to using buzzwords.

Book Review: Fluke – Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

In his book, Fluke, author Brian Klaas presents some powerful ideas that might make you reconsider the way you approach life and its many complexities

Think about this for a second. There are currently more than a billion websites in the world, about 200 million of which are active. Two hundred million active websites. And here you are, on The Lucknow Wallah, reading about Fluke. In the larger scheme of things, how random is that? What might have been the probability of you ever visiting this website and spending 2-3 minutes of your life reading this particular article? Infinitesimal, perhaps. And yet, here we are. Pure chance? Think about the biggest movie stars, the richest businessmen, and the most successful people in the world, regardless of what their profession might be. How did they get there? Are they necessarily the smartest, brightest, most talented, most knowledgeable, most hardworking people in the world? Sure, they probably do have one or more of those qualities, but there may well be many others with at least as many – and perhaps more – of the qualities that are required in order to succeed, and yet they don’t achieve the same levels of fame, success, money etc. Ever wondered why that might be?

Class Act: Driving the Mercedes-Benz S-Class

The Mercedes-Benz S-Class remains the best luxury car money can buy

 Back in 2021, I had an opportunity to drive the then-new, seventh-generation Mercedes-Benz S-Class and write about it for Man’s World magazine. Here are some excerpts from the article I wrote.

Flooring the throttle in the new S-Class and chucking it around a series of fast corners in quick succession should probably just feel wrong on so many levels. The S-Class, a stately luxury sedan that’s more than 17 feet long, an opulent car that weighs more than 2,100 kilos, definitely isn’t boy-racer material. It is, instead, the preferred mode of transport for those who’ve achieved XXL-sized dollops of fame, success and wealth. Top business executives, industrialists, heads of state, and film stars with 10-figure annual incomes love the S-Class. And the preferred status isn’t anything new for this ultra-luxe Mercedes-Benz, which has been on top of things for the last 50 years.

On Track: Best Books on Rail Travel

Airplanes are faster, of course, but rail travel is often so much more interesting. Sometimes, slower is better!

If the idea is only to get from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible, airplanes are hard to beat. But for those who are not in a tearing hurry to get to wherever they are going, trains have a certain charm that air travel can’t match. Rail travel – especially long-distance rail travel – harks back to a slightly more relaxed, more laid-back time when things moved at a slower pace. Boarding a train, finding your berth, laying out crisp white linen and soft, fluffy pillows, and settling down with a good book (and later, hopefully, a hearty lunch!) has its own charm. Especially if the train in question is the Trans-Siberian Express. Or the Orient Express, The Canadian, The Indian Pacific or even India’s own Maharajas’ Express.

Unfortunately, not too many of us will be hopping on to the Trans-Siberian Express anytime soon. However, there are a fair number of excellent books that bring the romance of rail travel right into our living rooms. For embarking on long train journeys without leaving the comfort of your favourite sofa, here’s my list of the best books on rail travel. The last three books on this list aren’t, admittedly, strictly about travel alone, but I’m sure rail travel enthusiasts and those who simply love trains will like these books, so I’ve included them in the list.

Motoring Roadtrips: The Best Books Ever Written

 

Few things feel as good as packing just the essentials, getting into a car with a friend or two, and setting off on a long roadtrip – preferably with an itinerary that hasn’t been fixed beforehand or at least one that’s reasonably flexible. And one that necessitates the crossing of countries or, for those who’re really lucky, perhaps even continents. And for those who might be wondering, it’s not as much about that car you do the journey in, as much as it is about the journey itself – the desire to explore new places, meet people, experiment with new kinds of food, try speaking a new language (even if it’s only a few words!) and experience new cultures. It’s about getting away from the daily grind, roughing it out occasionally (or frequently, if that floats your boat) and living an adventure of your own making.

With the best roadtrips, the journey is indeed the destination. But what if you can’t drop everything at a moment’s notice, climb into a car and drive off into the sunset? As always, there’s books to the rescue. Here’s a list of books I recommend you read if you love motoring roadtrips.