January 12 at 11:45am
- Shweta Rajan and Tania Sarkar like this.
Ramesh Prabhu Shruthi: The same people who say "post a discussion", I guess. :-)
January 12 at 7:50pm
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This blog is primarily for media aspirants as well as young journalists. My aim is to provide links to articles that will enhance their understanding of the media and help them to improve their writing skills, broaden their horizons, and expand their worldview. My hope is that The Reading Room will also help them to become good media professionals.
The masthead announcement on Page 1 of DNA, February 17. |
NANDITA LAKSHMANAN, SUBROTO BAGCHI |
When lobbying becomes ‘fixing’, it ceases to be in the domain of public relations. Many PR firms do cross the line; they hire former bureaucrats in the telecom or the retail sector — people who know the ‘right people’, who know how the ‘system’ works. PR can secure meetings with ministries, advise the client what to say, follow up, but there is a line. In India, as in many parts of the world, that fine line between influencing, advocacy and deal making is often trespassed.
Every company should treat public relations seriously. A conscious corporation puts its reputation among its stakeholders above all else. It may not necessarily be the most visible in the media, nor [does] its recall need to be high in the larger community. Ironically, I have come across many successful companies, with greater market-share, stronger balance sheet than their competition, but they feel weak in public relations because their competitors are more visible in the media. Good PR need not mean constant, high visibility in the media.
Media engagement is critical, but it is merely one aspect of PR and it must be used judiciously. PR can enhance your relationship with the financial community, help become a part of the local community, highlight issues to help change policy or behaviour. It can assist in managing and enhancing employee relations, pre-empting and preparing for crises and therefore mitigating their impact on your business.
PR cannot completely subvert a negative impact — if you’ve done something wrong, you have to suffer the consequences like in any relationship. And remember, a relationship is two-ways. You build it irrespective of whether times ahead are going to be good or bad. Sometimes, you need a relationship particularly when times are bad.
I was driven to all these great works not early in life, for Gujaratis have no use for such education. When I dropped out of high school it was not a matter for concern or comment among my friends and relatives. I do not have a degree and there is not a single graduate in my family.But I have tried to teach myself, and done so by replicating, however poorly, the method of the Orientalists.
In a 2001 interview, Mr. Isaacs reflected on his legacy. “Look at me as a man who performed works musically,” he said. “Who uplift people who need upliftment, mentally, physically, economically — all forms. Who told the people to live with love ’cause only love can conquer war, and to understand themselves so that they can understand others.”
The outcome of these efforts often brings about a strong conscious generation of individuals who have found peaceful ways to settle differences and who stand for the upliftment of their community.
All these features make USA a dynamic and growing society like no other society in the world. Therefore, a mere statistical comparison with some of the so called banana republics is rather misleading, as these countries usually do not offer the same or even similar avenues and opportunities for individual growth and economic upliftment.
This fusion of confinement and uplift may seem like an empowering veneer on the reality of oppression.
To do the biggest business stories right requires a significant investment of time and effort. It's an investment that frankly is becoming rare these days, but to me and the rest of us at Fortune it's a risk well worth taking if executed properly. The payoff — a long-form magazine story that provides understanding well beyond the daily ticktock — has almost unquantifiable value. As in, "Ah, I finally get what happened." How much is that worth?
The result is a rich, highly engaging tale told here in this issue — all 10,500-odd words of it — that gives a holistic picture of BP and what led up to the disaster in an analytical and cinematic fashion.
As a writer living and working in Mumbai, I’d established a rule: if a book couldn’t be carried into the city’s overcrowded suburban trains during rush hour, it did not merit my readership. It was a self-defeating middle-class snootiness, precluding my enjoyment of hundreds of masterpieces, but anyone who has endured the horror of those daily train rides will know that you cannot shrink yourself enough on a 6.08 pm Virar fast. A thousand-page book like Sacred Games belonged elsewhere, in a world of wide roads and spacious homes and peaceful rides in climate-controlled modes of public transport.
I've been using one of these gizmos for a month, and can already see how it has begun renegotiating my assimilation of written material. This is the first month of my adult life that I haven’t purchased physical books. Where usually there would be a pile of volumes comprising my current (non)reading list strewn around the house, there now sits a single slim paperback-sized plastic device containing 10 downloaded e-books, and the capacity to hold hundreds more.
Many of the books that I’ve been seeking to dive into for years aren’t available in the digital format as yet.... The e-book technology is still new and the reservoir awaiting digitisation is staggeringly vast. ... The search is no longer for books, but for digitally downloadable titles capable of being read on my e-reader. Given the limited choices, there is still joy in the hunt and relish in one’s find.
A more reliable understanding of e-reading habits and their effects will emerge a few months or years later. Can e-book stores remain immune to chain-store profusion? Will the e-reader surmount our growing inability to concentrate? It is inevitable that the ease of downloading titles will eventually devalue books, the way digitisation has made music and films pedestrian. ... There’s no telling how things might pan out in the long run. E-readers could prove critics wrong and not be the death of reading.
For now, at any rate, the e-reader is accomplishing its task satisfactorily: it has got jaded writers like me reading again — and not just any old book, but the elephantine and intimidating Sacred Games.
Which of us has not entertained that deliciously seditious notion: to do a Gauguin? To slip away for a while from everything that sounds so important — a steady job, a settled home, a regular salary — and go off in search of adventure, restoration, fun? There is, after all, more and more to escape these days....
The plot of "The Year of the Hare" could not be simpler. A journalist, Vatanen, is sleepwalking through his everyday life, blind to the beauties of the wild, when a hare, "tipsy with summer," runs across the road in front of the car he is traveling in. In the wake of the resulting collision, Vatanen wanders off into the forest to care for the wounded creature. Soon he is drifting farther and farther away from what is commonly known as civilization, till finally he is living in a Nature Reserve in Lapland, north of the Arctic Circle. Free of the daily grind, he finds that his senses are newly sharp, his food has a taste it never had before and he is alive as he has never been in his regular life (besides which, his wife seems hardly to miss him).
I, too, was working for a weekly magazine, once upon a time, sequestered in a small office in midtown Manhattan, and it was just a single autumn morning, on a layover in Tokyo, that acted on me like a fast-running hare: I was killing the hours before my flight back to New York by wandering through the little town of Narita, and something in the quiet stillness of the streets, the mildness of the late October light, told me of everything I was missing in my daily life at home. Why was I living according to someone else's idea of happiness, I thought, and not according to my own? I decided to move to Japan.
"The Year of the Hare" reminds us that what seems so important in our daily lives may not be all that permanent or sustaining. The best resolution to make this New Year's Day might be to open your eyes to everything around you — while also recalling that most of our lofty resolutions will ultimately come to naught.
After a month away from the story [after the meetings with Sabrina], Gupta sat down to write in his modest Versova [a Mumbai suburb] apartment. Looking at the material he had, he was frightened by its scope and scale. His last movie focused primarily on one character, while this one had several. “Then I thought, ‘If I do a bad job, no one will know about it because it won’t get made.’ But if I did a good job, this could be my best script. And if I could write this, I could write anything.” Before he began to write, he pulled down a poster of Aamir, and put it out of sight. (“You don’t want to think about what you did earlier.”)
After four starts, he found his pacing, tone and rhythm with his fifth attempt at the first scene. This is important, he says, because it gives him momentum when he launches himself into the foggy blank pages of a potential script. “I still didn’t have a story in mind.”
Still, he wrote. Words amounted to paragraphs. Paragraphs became pages. After writing ten pages, he decided he was going to make this movie. Propelled by the force of a steady beginning, he gradually had a story. And then it became a script.
“Writing is a very painful process,” he says. “Very tiresome. Very lonely. I have no one to guide me. So it takes me time to figure things out.” To move on with an incomplete script, or even one that’s less than perfect, is unthinkable.
It isn’t just about the story in itself. The story is what will wake him up in excitement for months during gruelling schedules. The story is what will keep him strong when it’s cloudy on an outdoor shoot. The story, essentially, is where hope lives.
“I think what’s important is that the script is the inspiration,” says Gupta. “Whatever I make, the story should be inspiring enough for me to keep going. And as a director, you know, there are 200 people working towards one person’s vision. Out of them, 70 per cent will be doing a job. There’s no art to it. But the other 30 per cent are creatively adding to the product, whether it’s the director of photography, or assistant directors who are highly neglected and underestimated. But everything begins with the script.”
In the last decade, the Hindi film industry has gone from strength to strength. Profits have boomed; viewers have multiplied; Brand Bollywood has amplified. Hindi cinema is everywhere — from the Sundance film festival to theatres in Poland and Germany. However, despite the success, the rising global profile and the increasing chances of getting caught, Bollywood filmmakers continue to happily plagiarise. So Aakrosh is Mississippi Burning, Knock Out is Phone Booth, Guzaarish has shades of The Sea Inside and Tees Maar Khan is After the Fox, which is written by Neil Simon.
My response: Because it is a prefix and not a standalone word.
From http://www.ecenglish.com/l
Here are five examples of prefixes using "post":
1. Postpone (verb): "She decided to postpone her vacation until next year."
2. Posthumous (adjective): "This is a posthumous album by Michael Jackson."
3. Postnatal (adjective): "There's a good system of postnatal care for mothers in my country."
4. Postdate (verb): "I'll postdate this cheque until the end of the month when I get paid."
5. Postmortem (noun): "They had a postmortem to find out how the man was killed.
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My guess is that the IT industry, which has turned the adjective "corporate" into a noun "corporates" is to blame for turning a prefix into a standalone word.