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Chewing Some DotCom Bubble Gum Kajal Basu says Burst or Bust

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It's an unhappy time being a journalist in India these days. The canniest of us lot, including me, are leaving for gargantuan compensations at dotcom companies whose linkages with the world of news and words are brittle at best and where the facility with both is a medal of honour whose lasting purpose is best utilised by the medal being tucked into a show box of velvet and vacuum. Goombye, Fourth Estate.
The whole obliterative force behind the muscle-flexing dotcommissariat was brought home last week by the huge dotcom full-colour advertisement that gobsmacked and effaced the entire front page of the 162-year-old Times of India, relegating Earthshaking news to the "local locus" on page 3 - in pusillanimous B&W, no less. Four pages of the TOI had been purchased by a clever start-up named Indya.com - obviously because there's a proprietary restriction on the legend "India". I have a crib against my mother nation-state being re-spelled "Indya.com" - "Indya? Ya from Indya? Whar she be? India's a 'burb in Silicon Valley." - but damned if anyone's paying me, and other plaintiffs like me, any attention. Nomenclature - as Mail.com which owns a whole slew of country names.com, including India.com, knows - is all about money. We're witnessing the selling of the motherland down the drain.
The Times of India has a history, starting a decade or so ago, of minimising its journalists, of packing them spinelessly contorted nose-to-bunghole into crates that have stamped on them, "Fragile! Do not handle with care." Long ago, at the tail end of the previous millennium, the same sorry newspaper had sold its masthead and ear-panels to a brick-and-mortar advertiser - and had crowed when every other journalist except those on its own staff had mewled in protest. This time round, it's an online sale, the self-obloquy symbolic - if you look searchingly enough - in more aspects than one.

First: it was the front page, ALL of it, masthead to anchor. The primary express purpose and intent of any newspaper - the dissemination of information first thing over your morning poached egg - became secondary to the secondary express purpose and intent - the making of shitloads of money (Rs 3.5 crore, this single instance) for the owners. Second: the sale was not to a hoary corporate with a history of relative financial integrity - it was to a maverick start-up sitting on a critical mass of untested and, thus, gratuitous Venture Capital, running an ad that favourably compared "Indya" to "India", much on the lines of that legendary bit of political flattery that painted the skies in the days of the late, lamented Indira Gandhi's Emergency: "India is Indira, Indira is India." Phew.
Distressing? Depends on how you look at it. An Israeli digital pundit surprised the cyberworld not too long ago when he said, referring to the conditions for the evolution of the Web, "Revenue is a distraction." In response to this fiscal anarchism - which is the philosophy that kickstarted the Web, in the first place - Silicon Valley whimpered, one of Nasdaq's cuticles trembled in discomfort, the Nikkei index plummeted by a full yen. The BSE didn't twitch an eyelid. Revenue is not a distraction in cyberIndia, it's the one and only traction for a rupee that perpetually has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.
But it's heartening to see the rupee's not going down without a fight. The sparkling ongoing debate at India Entrepreneurs, an exclusivist online community of - you got it - Indian dotcom entrepreneurs, is whether the subcontinent's press is portraying the economics of the dotcom detonation in the country in a "wrong light" - over-representing by a factor of thousands the pre-capitalisation valuation of dotcoms - by "not doing its fiscal homework". Would you say it matters? Going by the TOI's self-applied defacement, the Dead Tree Estate and the Cyber Estate are doing pretty good for themselves feeding off each other. Who says the Net is going to kill the print press? They love each other. I'm drooling for the day when the TOI is nothing but a billion-rupee bunch of dotcom fliers.
And that's front page news.

Kajal Basu is an Internet analyst

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