Author: Chidanand Rajghatta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: August 15, 2007
Introduction: In US Media, India Is Seen As
A Growing Economy And Rising World Power
The bad news is that India hasn't made the
cover of major international publications on its 60th birthday. That may well
be the good news too. A decade after the world media celebrated India's 50th
Independence anniversary milestone in a blaze of colour, the country isn't
a novelty anymore. It is now an ongoing story, a work in progress.
In fact, there may have been more India covers
in the international press in the last decade than in the century before that.
The US-based South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA) tracked down more than
125 India covers in US publications alone over the past 80 years, a third
of them since 1997.
Much of the coverage centres around India
and its growing economy and rising stature in the world, compared to the personality
and poverty/disaster driven coverage early in the century-the kind of attention
Mahatma Gandhi famously dismissed as a "drain inspector's report'' (referring
to Katherine Mayo's book Mother India). Now it's mostly the brain inspector's
report.
It began soon after the 50th anniversary attention
when publications such as New Yorker and National Geographic put India on
the cover. Soon after, BusinessWeek wrote a cover story on India demographic
dividend (India's Youth, Oct 11, 1999) followed by a Fortunes cover showing
a farmer using a palm device (India Taps Into The Future, April 29, 2002).
BusinessWeek came back with The Rise of India
(Dec 3, 2003), followed by Wired magazine's February 2004 cover showing India
as "The New Face of Silicon Age.'' BusinessWeek hyphenated India and
China for the first time in its cover of August 22, 2005.
By 2006, magazines such as Newsweek (The New
India, March 6, 2006) and Time (India Inc, July 26, 2006) were going rah rah
over India. Meantime, the business journals cooled off some of their ardour,
replacing it with doubt ("Can India Fly?'' Economist, July 1, 2006) and
dissection ("The Trouble with India'' Business-Week, March 19, 2007).
Still, it's a whole different tone from the time when death and disaster were
the staples in the west's India coverage.
Even in terms of personalities-although Manmohan
Singh has made the Economist cover twice-general publications have featured
Indian or Indian-origin entertainers more than its leaders. Newsweek put Manoj
N Shyamalan (The Next Spielberg, July 28, 2002) and Saira Mohan (The Perfect
Face, Nov 2, 2003) on its cover, while Bend It Like Beckham girl Parmindar
Nagra and Naveen Andrews (of Lost fame) featured on the cover of popular magazines.
It's a different world from when Mahatma Gandhi
became the first Indian to make the cover of Time magazine in 1930 (and twice
more subsequently), although a magazine called The Mentor had featured Rabindranath
Tagore as far back as 1921.
Time's favourite though was Jawaharlal Nehru,
who made the cover six times, followed by Indira Gandhi thrice. But the era
of political giants from the developing world seems to have passed for international
publications.
Writes Sreenath Srinivasan, a Saja founder-member
who dug out many of the covers: "Nehru's repeated appearances show you
how the world has changed. I can't easily imagine a near-term scenario when
a leader from anywhere in South Asia makes multiple appearances on the covers
of the US editions of Time or Newsweek.'' Now, it's India itself which has
emerged as a giant.
