Who are we reading?
Week One: The Times Of India
As a kid when I opened the door every morning to collect the newspaper, I’d stare at the TOI on my neighbour’s doormat and lust after their wonderfully satisfying Page Three, before drearily picking up The Hindu from ours and wanting to die. There was nothing in The Hindu that I wanted to read and Tuesdays were the worst because their Young World supplement was such a “Hey-kids-let’s-save-the-environment” joke.
When Samir Jain took over as Vice-chairman of the Times Group, one of the things he did was refer to TOI as not a newspaper but a brand. Well, you have to give it to him, because it sold. At 14, I desired the TOI as much as I desired a pair of Levis jeans.
I guess somewhere along the way to college, I outgrew the TOI but I had never consciously chosen to not read it. Until yesterday that is. Because yesterday, I discovered that the TOI is a newspaper without even a real editor. In fact, the more I read up about it, the more I wonder if it even counts as a paper I ought to include here, because Vineet Jain himself (the MD of the group) has said they’re not a newspaper business but an advertising business.
Deep breath*
Let’s just rewind a little.

All the way back to 1838, when the Times Of India was founded by a Maharashtrian reformist, Rao Bahadur Velkar. By the 1860’s it had become the official news agent for Reuters and in 1892 it was bought over by the same British company under which it is registered today — i.e. Bennett, Coleman & Co.Ltd. Interestingly, the two guys who owned this company drowned in 1915 when a German U-boat torpedoed the SS Persia. (Fun fact: Eleanor Thornton — the model and mistress who inspired that graceful, little ‘Spirit Of Ecstasy’ mascot now perched atop every Rolls-Royce engine in the world — also drowned in that ship).
It was only in 1946 that the paper was returned to Indian ownership under a big-time sugar baron by the name of Ramkrishna Dalmia — a man who knotted its destiny with that of the criminal world for years to come. While Dalmia himself was charged with embezzlement and imprisoned for two years in Tihar jail, his son-in-law Sahu Jain (who took over next) was arrested for selling newsprint on the black market. For seven years the newspaper was removed from their control but during the Emergency, it was given back and this was so suspicious, that it was briefly nicknamed The Times Of Indira. However, the new owner Ashok Jain then got into a money laundering scam and had to flee the country in the 1990’s and this, brings us back to his son Samir Jain.
Apparently Samir Jain’s wild-card decision to do away with an editor altogether came sometime in 1994 when a man named Dileep Padgaonkar resigned from that very position. I found an article from IndiaToday that was written back then and if you want some idea of how sensational this story was at the time, give it a quick read. As for what the editorial scene is today, I’m honestly very confused. They have all these positions of Managing Editor and Executive Editor and Editor-in-chief but it’s really hard to figure out what the difference between these posts is. If you check the “About Us” section on their website it’s even more bizarre because they just have a whole bunch of photo-albums titled “Christmas cheer” and “Break free” to show you how fun it is to work for them.
And yet, as I said earlier, it sells. With an editor or without, the TOI is the largest selling English language daily in India, with a readership in 2014 of about 7.5 million per day. To put that into perspective, the Hindustan Times (India’s second most widely read newspaper) had a readership in the same year of about 4.5 million. That means TOI has nearly double the number of readers as any other English language newspaper in the country. How did this happen?
Well, in 1994, as Samir Jain decided that editors were useless creatures, he also made some significant changes in pricing. Not only was the price reduced by a third to just Rs 1.50, but every Wednesday it was also halved again to “invite” readers. Though his competitors referred to this as ‘Predatory pricing’, it worked and by 1998, TOI had beaten the Hindustan Times in Delhi. Apparently, this brainwave of his was inspired by a zoo in Kolkata.
Before I conclude, here’s a quick look at some of their regular columnists. There’s Chetan Bhagat and Shashi Tharoor on Sundays, Swaminathan Aiyer’s column on ‘Swaminomics’ as he calls it, and MJ Akbar’s periodical ‘The Siege Within’, which we will come back to in future posts.
FURTHER READING:
and finally, the one written back in 1994:

