-Rediff.com   Born in Mumbai's infamous red-light district, Shweta Katti has won a scholarship to the Bard College, New York. This is her story. Shweta Katti is warming up to the media attention she's been receiving lately. She has had a long day but has agreed to meet me at a coffee shop for what must have been the nth interview she's giving in the last 48 hours. It is close to 10 in...

-PTI KOLKATA: The West Bengal government has stepped in for damage control after chit fund company Saradha Group went bust reviving memories of the collapse of Sanchayita Investments in the early eighties when several investors and agents committed suicide. Sanchayita collected more than Rs 120 crore in 1980 before its offices were raided and it folded up with only a handful of people getting back a minuscule amount of money. Two main...

-The Indian Express On Monday, the Bengali new year's day, viewers who tuned into Bengali music channel Tara Muzik witnessed a spectacle never seen before on Indian TV. Anchors of the channel and independent artistes called in to present Barsha Baran, a programme to celebrate the new year 1420, wept copiously on camera while announcing that the channel, facing an unprecedented "crisis of survival", was shutting down. Hundreds of viewers commiserated with...

-The Hindu A mob burst on the scene as night fell. Equipped with hockey sticks, bricks, stones, firearms and crude bombs it prepared for an assault. “You are Harijans,” it yelled. “You have no right to read and write. Your work is to mend shoes and chappals. We will keep you as servants in our houses. Your ancestors did the same work. You leave the hostel or else there will be a...

-Kafila.org In a speech delivered at the Reuters memorial lecture in November 2012 at Oxford University discussing the Indian news industry, Prannoy Roy candidly said that ”Indian news is currently in a race to the bottom”. He further added that upon comparing the average TV viewership in India (1 hour) to that in the US (5 hours), one is led to the utterly dismal conclusion that this race is far from...