Good evening and welcome to the second HY Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture -- Dr Sanjaya Baru will be speaking about “Media, Business and Government”. I’d like to thank all of you for coming here and sharing this moment with us – On the 15th of April, Sharada Prasad would have been 87.
Sharada Prasad, “Shouri” or “Sharada” to most of you, was a man of many facets: Freedom fighter and nationalist, journalist, editor, writer and translator, teacher, music lover, and man interested in design, in culture, inthe arts. Many recall him as an unusual man of letters. Some of us may prefer to call him a man of words, a man of few words, but words well chosen – usually understated, but often sharp, witty, playful. Gentle, he wasn’t a man full of high sentence.
While we all have our personal memories of him, the best way, we felt, to remember Shouri was to have a series of lectures, which engage with the ideas, concepts,values and institutions that were dear to him. Mukul Kesavan spoke at the first memorial lecture on India and Republican Virtue. Today we have Sanjaya Baru speaking about an institution that Shouri engaged with throughout his adult life: the media.
Sanjaya Baru needs no introduction to you all. Most of you are well aware of his expertise in both economics and the media, and his distinguished career with Times of India, Economic Times, Financial Express and now, as the editor of Business Standard. Sanjaya is heir to Shouri in many ways, not just by stepping into his shoes as Media Adviser to the Prime Minister, but also as someone who would uphold the ethics of the profession, someone who understood the calling of an editor. And when Shouri, after over 40 years of writing the report on India for the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook, decided that it was time to hand over that duty to someone younger who could analyse nations events, political, economic, social, it was without hesitation that he proposed Sanjaya’s name.
The subject of Sanjaya’s talk is not merely topical, given recent events, but also one with which Shouri grappled even in the 40s and 50s, and later. Some years ago, when I asked him what he thought of the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model, he let out a gently dismissive cluck – that they stated the obvious, oversimplified, universalised, and above all didn’t provide a viable alternative. Sanjaya, I’m sure, will provide us a thoughtful perspective on how media, business and politics are mutually intertwined. Let us welcome Sanjaya Baru.
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