The death of two airlines

Vijay Mallya     Pic: Wikimedia Commons

Indian journalists used to suffer from an OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) of a peculiar kind as they religiously prefixed the adjective ‘flamboyant’ to refer to Vijay Mallya. The ‘flamboyant’ fixation and occasional comparison to Richard Branson remained at its feverish pinnacle even after his Kingfisher Airlines ran aground and employees staged public protests demanding their unpaid salaries. As banks started baying for his blood, we saw the overly used ‘flamboyant’ getting replaced, though with much reluctance, with words like ‘beleaguered.’ 

Mallya became Indian media’s popular corporate poster boy after he brought to India Tipu Sultan’s sword from Britain twelve years ago. Now he has escaped to the same Britain with the street-smart guile of a fly-by-night-operator. It had all the natural ingredients of a Jeffrey Archer novel: corporate conspiracy, bikini-clad concubines, and a final Bond-like escape. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have named the whole episode A Scandal of a Bohemian! But then, his sleuth Sherlock Holmes’ science of deduction and art of intuition wouldn’t just be enough to locate the now-elusive, has-been prince. Holmes might just get lucky if he gets one or two tips from the flamboyant-crazy journalists on Mallya’s whereabouts.    

Thakiyudeen Wahid

We saw how a weak-kneed state stood helplessly before the tantrums of Mallya who beguiled the whole country with his corporate melodrama; with jargons such as debt restructuring, local investors, and equity being thrown in for good taste. And he went about with hubris, embellished by his Formula 1 and IPL adventures, as out-of-job pilots and other airline staff looked at the sky for their salaries. The other day a few disgruntled staff protested outside his Mumbai residence; but unknowingly they were unwittingly singing songs of farewell to Mallya.

The near-void caused by Kingfisher’s exit was eventually filled by a couple of full-scale as well as no-frills carriers. Two decades ago, the country’s aviation sector witnessed a similar gap with the exit of East West Airlines, though on account of entirely different reasons. The meteoric rise and melancholic fall of East West, promoted by the Wahid brothers from Kerala, remains etched in India’s aviation history with the avant-garde entrepreneurship of its CMD Thakiyudeen Wahid. If Kingfisher died because of the corporate skullduggery by its owner Mallya, East West died after its promoter Thakiyudeen succumbed to a spray of machine gun bullets. 

The East West’s was a rags-to-rich filmy story, with a tragic real-life climax. What started as a modest manpower recruiting agency in Bombay blossomed into the country’s first private airline to touch skies in early 1992 after India launched its open-sky policy. It was a daring move: to test waters in a sector dominated by the government carrier. In its heady days, when Indian Airlines pilots went on strike, the then civil aviation minister asked East West to fly those routes. But trying times were ahead. And, just when the promoters contemplated shifting the headquarters to Chennai or Bangalore in the face of growing threats from various quarters, Thakiyudeen Wahid was shot dead outside his office in Bombay in 1995.   

Post-Wahid, the airline suddenly found itself stranded in mid-air, with the pilot having gone, gasping for breath with a leadership vacuum and aircraft companies knocking at its doors. Thakiyudeen’s brothers, lacking in vision and the wherewithal to steer the troubled career, couldn’t carry forward his legacy.

East West soon disappeared, rather tragically, into thin air without trace; everything about the airline company was submerged in the din of its alleged connection with Dawood Ibrahim. The politicians who had hitherto hobnobbed with the airline directors suddenly hid in the cocoon of the airline’s alleged underworld link. Probably, even to talk about saving a fast-sinking airline with supposed underworld connections must have been a sacrilegious act.

The airline’s alleged underworld link is still a legally unproven charge, so is the charge that business rivalry was behind the murder. Chotta Rajan had claimed that he got Thakiyudeen killed. He was, claimed Rajan, Dawood's financier in India. 

Thakiyudeen was probably not the right fit for a flamboyant tag dished out by our journalists. He was born in an ordinary family in a coastal village in Kerala; he didn’t own yachts or resorts, neither an exalted pedigree worth exhibiting. But he created history in an industry few dared to touch, so did Mallya, but for entirely wrong reasons. East West and Kingfisher were phenomena of entirely different times and contexts. But, both can form the base of a plot that would make Jeffrey Archer squirm! 

(First appeared in countercurrents)

An ode to print

At a time when naysayers are writing eternal dirges of print journalism, here comes a new kid on the newspaper block, that too in Britain, where dwindling readership is fast becoming a rule rather than an exception.  

New Day, from the publishers of the Daily and Sunday Mirror, is targeted at “readers who no longer buy a paper.” It would be quite a daunting task, for, we now know that The Independent has decided to close its print edition by the end of March 2016; only its online face will remain. Strangely, New Day will not have a website, the paper will just have a social media presence. And it has set an ambitious target of no less than 200,000 copies!  

Will print survive in a market dominated by a mobile-first generation that is fed on a staple diet of breaking news? If we go back in time we know that the advent of a new medium does not normally supplant an existing one. On the other, it complements each other. Take radio for instance. The television arrived with the prospect of injecting passive euthanasia to the humble medium of the masses. And we saw the rather painful consignment of the gentle radio from living rooms to attics. But years later the radio took sweet revenge with a graceful resurgence. And it may sound ironic; this resurgence was made possible due in large part to smart phones.  

Can we expect a similar resurgence of print in places like Britain? We have to wait and watch the fate of New Day and its ability to lure readers back into print. In countries like India, print will not die at least in the foreseeable future, given the diverse and disparate demography. Inauguration of newspaper editions and opening of mobile app companies will happen side by side here with consummate ease.

No matter how hard the votaries of digital journalism and market pundits bombard us with statistics of dwindling ad revenues and the allure of the online media, the appeal of print still lingers on. Agreed your tablet or smart phone is capable of delivering news as it happens. But nothing compares a print newspaper in your hand. Can your tab entertain you with the heady aroma of a fresh morning newspaper which makes your nostrils dance with primal pleasures? Pit the freshness of a fresh newspaper every morning against the same old drab instrument in your hand. And how many of you are happy reading a long-form journalism piece or a lengthy analysis in your mobile? (Having said that, newspapers should reinvent themselves in order to compete with their digital-era counterparts. They can't sustain for so long selling stale news for long.)

Despite everything, advertising managers still vouch for print, owing to its greater impact. A visually appealing print ad still creates the same impact it used to create a century ago. A compelling print ad still tempts readers in great measure unlike television commercials which are more often treated as nuisances. (Some TV ads are so horrible that the temptation to break the TV set becomes quite irresistible. Thank you the inventor of remote control!).

So print must not die. Call me an old-fashioned tape-recorder; I am a closet print-lover. Pass me the morning paper please.