 | | THEN AND NOW: The editor-in-chief in 1975 and 2006 | Steve Jobs once said the difference between television and the Internet is that one is a lean-back and the other is a lean-forward medium, which means while television entertains you passively, the Internet engages you to interact. In an increasingly digital world, the print media has to work much harder to get an audience as television news is broadcast live and the worldwide web becomes as much a giant library as an online debating club. Although the new media is exciting and fast-paced, and as a group we are in all of them, I am as attached to print as I was 30 years ago when India Today was launched. For all of us caught in this new narrative, where contemporary reality is changing at what Marshall McLuhan calls electric speed, it is a time of learning and renewing. The touchstones that we grew up with are perhaps enormously altered. As one of our essayists has written, in a nation which encompasses 110 million phone subscribers and over 40 million online consumers, user generated content may well become the key to success. For magazines and newspapers engaged in a worldwide swirl of change, it is a time of enormous opportunity for media companies even though it does not currently seem that way. At such a time it seems odd to step back from the hurly burly and ask our readers to pause. But it is with reason. This is our third 30th anniversary issue and our goal is to keep telling our readers how we got here. Whether it is developments that forever altered our society (from the Jaipur Foot to the equity cult) or phrases that have endured (naani yaad dila denge), things that have become extinct (anyone remember the VCR?) or sporting moments where we had our collective hearts in our mouth (apart from the times Sachin Tendulkar went out to bat), this issue has tried to retrace some of our steps. Our correspondents have travelled all over India to chronicle our living treasures, 30 addresses, both secular and sacred, which are embedded in our consciousness. Other than that, we have taken in the sights of some hotties who have graced our pages and the wonderful characters who have immortalised our finest screen moments. We delved deep into our photo archives to locate pictures of 30 people to see how their look has changed over the past 30 years and just to be even-handed, I have done the same for myself on this page. This special 186-page issue has been conceived, coordinated and edited by Executive Editor Kaveree Bamzai who has worked tirelessly sifting hundreds of pictures and thousands of words to make this selection of images and text unique. Says Bamzai: "Putting together an issue of this size is always a considerable task but it is never possible without the backbone of our organisation." Our reporters, overworked and they will say underpaid, work for several editions on a multitude of tasks. In particular, for this issue, Kolkata Senior Correspondent Swagata Sen, Mumbai Special Correspondent Kimi Dangor, Bangalore Special Correspondent Nirmala Ravindran, Chennai Special Correspondent S.S. Jeevan, as well as Assistant Editors Ramesh Vinayak and Sandeep Unnithan, were always on call, chasing deadlines and catching them as well. A publication is always what its journalists make it. And I can say with pride that we have always had the best of their tribe. Index
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