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About the writer
My name is Subir Ghosh. I run this site, and am responsible for all content that appears here. I don't believe in issuing flippant disclaimers.
I am a journalist-writer who spent the first three years of his professional career in sales and marketing. I started what I was better at – writing – when I joined India’s premier news agency Press Trust of India (PTI) in October 1991. I later moved across to the Calcutta-based daily, The Telegraph where I looked after the Region Desk till I left in mid-1998.
After a brief stint in the books unit of the New Delhi-based nongovernmental organisation, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), I was instrumental in redesigning and repackaging the journal of the Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI), and also looked after the publications section of the Wildlife Trust of India. I specialise in Northeast affairs and am associated with the Centre for Northeast Studies and Policy Research (C-NES) as an Advisory Council Member.
I also edit-publish Newswatch India.
Northeast and I: I commenced my working career as a sales professional in the Northeast — a region which, ironically, I was not enamoured with at first blush. As chance would have it, my curiosity in the Northeast was kindled while working on the eastern metropolitan desk of Press Trust of India (PTI), handling news from the region. The inquisitiveness grew into a passion during my stay at the Telegraph, where I penned a series, 'Travels on the Frontier'.
I was among the first few journalists to be selected for the National Foundation for India's (NFI) Northeast Media Exchange Programme. From 1999 to 2006, I ran the largest site on the region, a cyber news archive called Northeast Vigil. The site had to be suspended because it was becoming a financial burden on me. It was meant to be a not-for-profit site, and it remained so till the end. There are plans to resurrect it; and resurrections are usually in new avatars. That, in all likelihood, should happen in the near future. Nearer than you can imagine.
My only major work in terms of books is Frontier Travails: Northeast — The Politics of a Mess, published by Macmillan India in 2001. For more about the book, follow the link on the navigation menu.
— Subir Ghosh
May 14, 2007
May 14, 2007
Female MPs and their right to pose for calendars
Anything being done for the first time generates a lot of interest, both in the media as well as among the consuming public who devour such coverage. So when it comes to female MPs posing in a glam calendar, the interest generated is bound to be on the higher side. As it was when the Public Affairs (VV – Veci verejne) party in the Czech Republic started selling a 2011 calendar featuring photographs of some of its leading female members, including four newly sworn-in lawmakers, clad in revealing outfits and posing provocatively.
Operation Blackout: Keeping Kashmir out of the news
In July I received a mail from a journalist who wanted to pitch me an interesting story idea from Kashmir. The mail was directed to an account I hardly check. Not that it would have made much difference since Newswatch carries only content that has something to do with the news media. I gather she pitched the story to many publications.
The story, let me tell you, never saw the light of day anywhere in this country where Kashmir is such an emotively jingoistic issue. Close to a month later, the story has appeared, but not in an Indian publication. I happened to stumble across it quite perchance in the New Internationalist.
Yet I am not surprised that no Indian publication wanted to carry the story despite the fact that the journalist, Dilnaz Boga, writes well. And more than anything else, it was a good story.
Read the blurb. If it doesn't make sense to you, you probably need to see a shrink: