blogs

For two years in a row, the month of September has turned out to be a black month for me. In a span of last two years, I lost two good friends. In September 2023, I lost Deepangshu Dev Sarmah. He was the Founding Ed...

What if I tell you that the combined annual sales for calendar year 2023 of three luxury car brands Mercedes-Benz India, BMW India and Audi India totalled 39511 units? On the other hand, in China and Hong Kong in 20...

On Sunday, September 03, 2023, I got a call from my friend and a senior photo journalist Mohammed Shafiq informing me that Deepangshu Dev Sarmah was no more. He was at that time working with Mobility Outlook, a B2...

What’s with journalists these days? Has journalism changed from being a noble profession to one that is ignoble? It seems that it has become a profession of jokers, extortionists, political stooges and spineless boy...

Author Elisabeth Foley has rightly said, “The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.” And that is precisely what Vikram Kirloskar and Toyota have demonstra...

Many decades back, much before I joined the newspapers as a journalist, I remember reading the book titled ‘Iacocca: An Autobiography’. The bestselling book was co-authored by William Novak and was originally publis...

Just the other day a leading English newspaper came out with a report quoting a data released by the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB). It said that road crashes in India claimed 426 lives per day or 18 every hour...

“Gurinder is no more you know? He died of gunshot injuries a couple of years back. I was informed about this a few days back when I met a journalist from Punjab,” Shafiq told me. I was aghast. How is it that I misse...

Capt Jayant Joshi along with Lt Col AS Batth was doing a routine practice exercise in their Army Aviation Rudra Advanced Light Helicopter at the Ranjit Sagar Dam near Pathankot when it crashed into the deep waters o...

In the good old days, some of us used to pick up the morning #newspaper to read the latest news, whether it was on #politics, #sports, local development or #business. The more voracious readers amongst us spent thei...

Words like “Make in India”, “#AtmanirbharBharat” or self-reliant India have been doing the rounds much before we got our Independence in 1947. It was Mahatma Gandhi dressed in his simple cotton dhoti and shawl who...

Yes, I know auto journalists and the organisations they work for are not rich in the real sense. Auto journalists cannot travel all over the world and drive fancy cars and bikes by spending their own money. No media...

OEMs are basically manufacturers of cars, two wheelers and other vehicles. I have often asked myself, are OEMs like the Pied Piper of Hamelin in the poem written by Robert Browning. And are we journalists and influe...

I saw the #socialmedia tsunami coming but could never fathom its intensity. It was around 2004-2005 when platforms like #youtube , #twitter , #facebook , etc were born. Much later #instagram came into being. #tiktok...

Everybody in the auto journalism world had to adapt to new rules of social media, its charm, its pluses and minuses and its absolute ruthlessness amid the excitement and opportunities it offered.

A couple of decades back, #journalists were kind of independent when it came to reporting and they never had the management breathing down their necks to get moolah for their organisations. And even if they wanted...

In days of yore, #journalists were simple in their outlook, existed on meagre salaries and were there on a mission to bring out the truth. In the 1980s and early 1990s before the television boom, business journalism...

In Part 4, I explained what it means to deal with the “Paapi pet ka sawal hein…” issue. After all, journalists and PR pros are humans too. They have to survive.

Many of us would have heard of the Hindi phrase “Paapi pet ka sawal hein…” In essence it means, eventually it’s all about feeding ourselves, it’s about our stomach… Yes, we all work hard because we want to put food ...

Are #journalists different from #PRprofessionals? I really do not think so. Both jobs call for a lot of hard work, patience and self-respect. I have often referred to these professions as two sides of a coin. Throug...

In the past I have talked a bit about #journalists, but what about #PublicRelations boys and girls? Who are they? What is their mandate?

For more than a decade from the 1980s to 1990s, I was a business journalist working in different newspapers. #Journalists at that time were known for their ethics, self-respect, high moral standards and their vast k...

Every time the Auto Expo is held in India, the components players have an Asli Naqli pavilion which displays spurious components along with real ones. The purpose is to educate the consumers of the rampant availabil...

They say IITians are smart and savvy and they are good at what they do. Look at what one IITian professor did to the Delhi traffic with his silly Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor plan. After spending hundreds of cro...

Journalism is getting murkier by the day and so are some journalists...or should we call them journalists? People ask me as to why I do not want to attend press conferences (PCs) and I tell them it’s getting more an...

The Nurburgring was the Holy Grail for car manufacturers to prepare their cars for the worst lap of its life to break each other’s record. Some manufacturers would bring their cars to the track just to develop them,...

Jeremy Clarkson. We all know that this man working for BBC and who hosts the show ‘Top Gear’ has a huge fan following. So does Sunny Leone and Pamella Anderson, at least when her silicon implants were in good order!...

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a clarion call to make India clean (Swatch Bharat), there has been a flurry of activities, both genuine and fraud, trying to heed to his call. Some have honestly taken up...

How was it before the internet became popular? Very simple, people read newspapers and magazines, watched the limited news on television and listened to radio. Then came the internet bomb. Why bomb? Because it almos...