November 1963: Eight columns for President KennedyVisitors to Madras were once greeted by a huge hoarding which extends a traditional Tamilian welcome, complete withnadaswarammusicians. It proclaimed in big letters; "Welcome to Madras - the home ofThe Hindu". Cast in the mould of the LondonTimes,The Hindu, which celebrates its centenary this year, reflects the conservative values of its readers.Madras is still the bastion of Southern conservatism, and the staid newspaper from Mount Road (now Dravidianized and renamed Anna Salai) is the very epitome of conservatism. Women have been taboo on the staff ever since two sub-editors decided to marry and quit the paper. Smoking is prohibited in its drab newsroom. Swearwords commonly heard in newspaper offices the world over are banned within its sobre precincts. Like the Times of India, called 'The Old Lady of Bori Bunder,' The Hindu has earned the nickname of 'The Mahavishnu of Mount Road.'It refused to budge from its traditions and clear the front page of classified advertisements to announce Gandhi's assassination in 1948. The paper carried a single column top on an inside page to proclaim the Mahatma's death. Double-column headlines were unknown.It was not until the typographical and design revolution in Printing House Square - the home of the Times, that the high-priests of the Vaishnavite daily decided to splash news on page one - with an apology to its readers.It was with the same kind of apologia that The Hindu jettisoned its archaic title-piece for a more modern one. It was John F. Kennedy's assassination that brought an eight-column headline for the first time to The Hindu..preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}January 31, 1948: Single column for the MahatmaAlthough conservative in its contents, the newspaper has been modernized in other fields. For instance, it was the only newspaper to have its own aircraft for distributing the paper over the far-flung South, where its circulation (now about 2,85,000) is concentrated.The rival Indian Express set up editions in cities and towns outside Madras to overcome distribution difficulties. But The Hindu believed, and perhaps rightly, that quality cannot be maintained unless a paper is edited in one place. Later, it got rid of its aircraft and went in for facsimile printing plants in Bangalore, Coimbatore, and, recently in Hyderabad.Lately, The Hindu has been in the news because of one of its directors and associate editors, who was the most-talked about communist in the Madras cocktail circuit before he joined the paper. N. Ram, son of the late S. Narasimhan, the paper's managing director, returned from the Columbia School of Journalism to join the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the late 1960s.His uncle, G. Kasturi, was and still is the editor of the largely family-owned paper. Ram did not give up his ownership interest. The dialectical snag was quietly overcome - the statement of ownership spelling his name as N. Raman (or was it a mistake?) - as the young Marxist became president of the Students Federation of India (his party's students front), and a leading functionary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).With his father's demise, Ram returned to the fold. (He had begun in the paper as a cub-reporter before he went to Columbia, and had returned to do a short stint as an assistant editor before joining the CPI(M)).Ram shocked the conservative readers of the paper by allowing David (An Eye to India) Selbourne to preach his radicalism through the edit page. Ram went to Europe and wrote a series of articles on the French Left, besides many hard-hitting pieces and editorials.But all this has not made much difference to the policy of the paper, which is essentially Right-wing and free-enterprise oriented. It had gone all out to support Indira Gandhi and her Emergency. Its editor was chairman of the Government-promoted Samachar news agency. Its chief correspondent in New Delhi has been named in the Janata Government's White Paper on the Misuse of Mass Media (for his association with an outfit called Communication Centre).The Hindu could go Left with Ram, lose much of its present readership and after a phase of low circulation acquire new readership. But it is unlikely that the other directors would accept such a gamble. Ram can try to change the newspaper's image by writing a few more Left-leaning articles and editorials, but The Hindu is not likely to change so early.It will slog on with its ponderous editorials (that make even The Times look pop in comparison) and with its reports on Mahabharata and Ramayana discourses and its defence of private enterprise.Ram's brothers are also with the family newspaper - one on the management side, the other an assistant editor. Didn't Frederich Engels write a treatise called The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State?Published By: AtMigration Published On: Dec 19, 2014--- ENDS ---
