Raju Narisetti stepped down as Mint editor effective 1 January 2009. His Mint blog, A Romantic Realist, will be archived after this last post.

Thank you for reading and reacting to it and we look forward to your continued involvement with Mint’s blogs.

Livemint

Readers of this Romantic Realist are used to seeing a lot of posts on Indian media. Since there is now some published debate on this particular issue, I thought it might be interesting to post this open clarification that ran on the front page of Mint on 22 December in relation to a previous “Open Letter” by an unnamed IAS officer that had run in Mint. Read more…

Stories in Indian media about estranged billionaire brothers, Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries Ltd, India’s most valuable company by market capitalization, and Anil Ambani, of Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, shaking hands at a meeting of industrialists, and resulting, usual speculation of a potential thaw between them, reminded me of this legal notice.

Anil Ambani has formally sued his brother Mukesh Ambani along with Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman of The New York Times Co; Clark Hoyt, public editor of The New York Times; Anand Giridharadas, an India-based reporter for NYT; Mint’s publisher and owner HT Media Ltd; the Mumbai newspaper DNA and its publisher and owner Diligent Media Corp; DNA editor R. Jagannathan, and yours truly, Raju Narisetti, in the Bombay High Court over a New York Times profile of Mukesh Ambani headlined “Indian to the core, and an oligarch” published on 15 June 2008. Read more…

In one of those typical company-wide emails that only IT people can send, one landed in my in box a little while ago, titled “How Can I Contribute in Saving Corporate Costs?”

The IT department has decided that sending me an excerpt from a speech, supposedly given by former Indian president and now major gadfly, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, titled “Be the change you want to see!” (which in my book is now clearly up there in recently overdone cliches) is the perfect way to try and make me conserve energy and money. Read more…

In what was a predictable pick, here is what Time magazine had to say in naming Barack Obama as its 2008 “Person of the Year”: Read more…