Reading Navasky's book, I wished there was a similar account of India's longest-running radical weekly, the Economic and Political Weekly. Many who read it — and all those who write for it — regard the EPW as this nation's conscience. It began life in 1949 as the Economic Weekly, adding the "Political" 17 years later. Its founder-editor, Sachin Chaudhuri, was a bhadralok of catholic tastes who was too busy enjoying his life to write about it. His successor, the legendary Krishna Raj, had the opposite problem. He was a consistently self-effacing man, who would have regarded the genre of autobiography as an unnecessary form of self-advertisement. Perhaps some future historian will step into the breach, to trace the life of the Republic of India through the career of the EPW. There are, it appears, some telling similarities between The Nation and the Economic and Political Weekly. For one, both are appallingly bad looking.
No comments:
Post a Comment