Ok, so a lot has been written about the sacking of Mubhashar Jawed Akbar from The Asian Age. Khuswant Singh, Rahul Singh, Seema Mustafa, Pritam Sengupta, Kuldip Nayar and Shantanu Guha Ray, among others, have expressed shock, resentment and sadness over the unceremonious exit of one of India’s most distinguished editors. The articles are all here.
Can’t resist quoting from from Akbar’s farewell letter to his colleagues. He may have flirted dangerously with politics (long story, that!) and is no angel, but M J certainly has a way with words.
“For reasons that need not detain us, I must say farewell. I was under the impression that I might have been able to do so with more grace. But judging from this morning’s edition of our paper, it seems I might have overstayed my welcome… We may not have been the biggest, but we held our head high because there was one nonnegotiable asset in our family: We could not be bought. We were independent. We were free. We held our head high. Never let your head stoop, not as long as you are a journalist.”
Not one to get bogged down and stay out of the newsroom, Akbar has already launched Covert, an unabashedly political fortnightly, which is now two issues old and features columnists such as Seema Mustafa, Kuldeep Nayar, Khushwant Singh, Arif Mohammad Khan and so on. And yes, Byline is alive and kicking. The design isn’t the greatest, but the forceful political content might just make Outlook, India Today and (ahem!) Tehelka sit up and take note. I really don’t have much to say on the cover story on Sharad Pawar in the first issue as well as the one on Kalam in the second, except that they are quite audacious in more than one sense of the word. Anyway, here’s some more wordplay. The mission statement of the magazine reads:
“Power is secretive about truth and propagandist about claims. Democracy demands media that reveals the covert and sifts the overt to peel off propaganda. Knowledge is the ultimate asset of the citizen. We hope, in COVERT, to tease the truth out of the wrinkles of secrecy. Our weapon is the scalpel, not the sword; we prefer the soft-spoken word to the scream, a smile to anger.”
“For reasons that need not detain us, I must say farewell. I was under the impression that I might have been able to do so with more grace. But judging from this morning’s edition of our paper, it seems I might have overstayed my welcome… We may not have been the biggest, but we held our head high because there was one nonnegotiable asset in our family: We could not be bought. We were independent. We were free. We held our head high. Never let your head stoop, not as long as you are a journalist.”
Not one to get bogged down and stay out of the newsroom, Akbar has already launched Covert, an unabashedly political fortnightly, which is now two issues old and features columnists such as Seema Mustafa, Kuldeep Nayar, Khushwant Singh, Arif Mohammad Khan and so on. And yes, Byline is alive and kicking. The design isn’t the greatest, but the forceful political content might just make Outlook, India Today and (ahem!) Tehelka sit up and take note. I really don’t have much to say on the cover story on Sharad Pawar in the first issue as well as the one on Kalam in the second, except that they are quite audacious in more than one sense of the word. Anyway, here’s some more wordplay. The mission statement of the magazine reads:
“Power is secretive about truth and propagandist about claims. Democracy demands media that reveals the covert and sifts the overt to peel off propaganda. Knowledge is the ultimate asset of the citizen. We hope, in COVERT, to tease the truth out of the wrinkles of secrecy. Our weapon is the scalpel, not the sword; we prefer the soft-spoken word to the scream, a smile to anger.”
PS: If someone asks you who the Editor of Covert is, don’t say M J Akbar. He's wisened up. This is a D'Mockeracy : )
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