May 2015
Mehta’s ‘Behind a Billion Screens’ features in New York Times
Nalin Mehta’s recently released book ‘Behind a Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us About Modern India’ is receiving rave reviews from around the world. The New York Times devoted an entire column to the book, where the novelist Manu Joseph noted that “Mr. Mehta’s book portrays a host of problems facing Indian television” and the […..]
Remote Control
It’s first fifteen years, the Indian private broadcasting industry expanded like the American Wild West. Canny local entrepreneurs rode into uncharted territories and planted their stakes in the ground. They then used their incumbent first-mover advantage to build turf walls and defended themselves against ambitious newcomers. The deep complexities of language and the unique challenge […..]
How a book launch set the stage for a fight between private and public television
The release of senior journalist Nalin Mehta’s book and the discussions that followed have revealed the deep contradictions held by Indian journalists and also the crisis that engulfs the media profession. Mehta’s Behind a Million Billion Screens: What Television Tells Us About Modern India was launched at a special event in Delhi on May 8. […..]
MEDIA MATTERS
Social scientist Nalin Mehta examines the defective paver-blocks of regulations that line the pathways of Indian media, and suggests roadwork. One of the great risks of writing about television is that like cricket, everybody watches it, everybody has an opinion on it and everybody thinks they know exactly what the solution is,” writes Nalin Mehta […..]
Has UGC run its course?
Writing at the turn of the last century on India’s education system, Swami Vivekanand forcefully argued that the “present system of education is all wrong.” The comment rings true even today. This is why HRD minister Smriti Irani announced in November last year that her ministry is reviewing most education-related regulatory bodies, including the gargantuan […..]
Ramdev’s Television Curse: Life and death by TRPs and TAM
The one system that professedly measures the popularity of all TV programmes in India is terribly, terribly flawed. The much maligned and long-suffering head of India’s TV ratings agency TAM, L.V. Krishnan, has a telling story. A couple of years back he was called for a meeting with a channel and as he waited in […..]
