Thirteen years ago when Outlook was launched, India was a different place—culturally, politically and socially. Narasimha Rao was the prime minister, Manmohan Singh was the finance minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani were towering figures in the Opposition benches. At that time the idea of publishing one more newsmagazine appeared audacious and foolish. India Today's presence in the market was supreme. Some of the biggest newspaper houses in the country had contemplated producing a newsmagazine, worked on the project for a couple of years—and then abandoned the idea. I'm not sure whether it was funk or just the knowledge that India Today would ruthlessly gobble up any rival.
When I began work on Outlook, I was constantly reminded that much bigger fish than me had attempted in vain to challenge the giant. Moreover, the Rahejas had no experience in the publishing game. The project, as the market saw it, was doomed to be an expensive, high-profile disaster. So bad luck and failure were staring me in the face. And I must confess I was nervous.
Fortunately, there was one factor in our favour. For reasons which seem to me inexplicable, India Today continued to be published as a fortnightly. It is possibly a measure of the magazine's supreme self-confidence that it was not unduly bothered by the fact that there wasn't a single newsmagazine anywhere in the free world which was not a weekly. A fortnightly newsmagazine was, to say the least, a little bit odd—or that's the way it seemed to me.
Nevertheless, I was grateful we had something going for us as we prepared for the launch. Sure enough, at an early stage, news leaked out that ours was going to be a weekly. It did not seem to worry our eminent and distinguished rival. Who could blame them? Outlook didn't look like serious competition. It would soon go out of business.
I cannot claim that launching a newsmagazine was my idea. For that, credit must be given to Mr Deepak Shourie, who at that time was putting the project together. My contribution was to insist on making it a weekly—and prominently mentioning the same. So, when you see "Outlook, the weekly newsmagazine" on the masthead, and think it's slightly bizarre, let me tell you that, in October 1995, it made a great deal of sense.
I had a second advantage. At my first meeting with the proprietor, he told me that "content" would be the deciding factor—which he would back with resources to provide readers a high quality, professional journal. Content, I'm happy to say, became the benchmark of the Outlook Group, aided by aggressive marketing. It's necessary to stress this in these times of give-the-reader-what-he-wants and general dumbing-down of the media, though it might sound like self-praise.
I do not wish to recount the entire history of Outlook except provide some context in which it saw birth. Our very first issue did the trick. The editorial team had been planning it for over six months, and we had put together two major "scoops".
One, an opinion poll in the Kashmir valley. (Organising the poll was a nightmare; insurgency was at its height. Most Kashmiri Muslims took the surveyors for IB men!) The headline on the cover was authentic and revealing: "77 per cent say no solution within Indian Constitution".
This was explosive stuff in pre-Arundhati Roy days. Back then, the notion of azadi amounted to secession, the break-up of India. It was not just anti-national, it was sedition, it was facilitating the dismantling of secular India. Not surprisingly, Mr Bal Thackeray's men began burning copies in Mumbai, demanding that I be put behind bars. The upside was that we were on the front pages of every paper. You couldn't buy that kind of publicity for love or money.
If bad luck comes in pairs, so does good fortune. Besides the Kashmir poll, we printed the first draft of then prime minister Narasimha Rao's unpublished novel. How I managed to get my hands on the sexy manuscript is a long story that is not relevant here. The "exclusive" created quite a national sensation, with the foreign media too giving it prominent play. Of course, Narasimha Rao banished me with a few unprintable words. I did not meet him again. It was a small price to pay for a genuine scoop.
Is 13 a lucky or unlucky number for me? You decide on that, but I definitely think it is lucky.
