Long back when I was in my second year, my prof was once discussing how cheap Shobhaa De's novels were. Back then, I only knew her through Sunday times. One of the glorious days of Sunday Times, when I would be eager to read Swaminomics and Gurucharan Das. Then I know Shobhaa De as one of those writers who loved to laugh on other people at hard knocks. Her favorite victims were celebrities. My question at that time was, if her work was such a junk, then who had the time to read it over even take the trouble of publishing it. TOI publishing her stuff was a no-brainer, but publishing books with such a wastage of paper and people buying and reading it was a bit surprising. Here is the answer on page 15: http://www.hanmermsl.com/pdf/hanmermsl_digital_credentials.pdf
Googling her was interesting because everywhere you will get to read only good stuff about her thanks to her PR agency. You have to creatively Google out on her to find out the big picture. Seems like she started her career in modelling but was not successful but got some success by marrying some rich guy called Kilachand. Then she ventured into "Free lance Journalism" which is more of paying the newspaper to get the article published. And then finally she struck gold by marrying an industrialist named Dilip De who funded all her junk and the PR agencies to help sell the junk.
Another example of hard core PR was IIPM. Everyone who has done their research on MBA schools know that there is a dabba college called IIPM. But like many other similar colleges, this one too manages to get some bunch of naive and desperate students. My boss once explained the business model of this school, which was very typical, as in you would find only ex-IIPM students who have turned faculties over there. Apart from that you have Planman and ICMR, which are again founded by Arindam Chaudhari himself where you will find the rest of ex-iipms. As Planman is their own company, they do all their IIPM publicity through them and again you wont find any negative stuff about them when googling them out. But today there are websites and blogs opened by people who got swindled by this college. And also some investigative journalism done by JAM and Career360 is found in the wikipedia page. Unfortunately, Planman guys couldn't do much to the wikipedia page :)
Googling her was interesting because everywhere you will get to read only good stuff about her thanks to her PR agency. You have to creatively Google out on her to find out the big picture. Seems like she started her career in modelling but was not successful but got some success by marrying some rich guy called Kilachand. Then she ventured into "Free lance Journalism" which is more of paying the newspaper to get the article published. And then finally she struck gold by marrying an industrialist named Dilip De who funded all her junk and the PR agencies to help sell the junk.
Another example of hard core PR was IIPM. Everyone who has done their research on MBA schools know that there is a dabba college called IIPM. But like many other similar colleges, this one too manages to get some bunch of naive and desperate students. My boss once explained the business model of this school, which was very typical, as in you would find only ex-IIPM students who have turned faculties over there. Apart from that you have Planman and ICMR, which are again founded by Arindam Chaudhari himself where you will find the rest of ex-iipms. As Planman is their own company, they do all their IIPM publicity through them and again you wont find any negative stuff about them when googling them out. But today there are websites and blogs opened by people who got swindled by this college. And also some investigative journalism done by JAM and Career360 is found in the wikipedia page. Unfortunately, Planman guys couldn't do much to the wikipedia page :)
4 comments:
Wiki Rules! Its the new world democracy.
Nice eyeopener. Had read one of De's book but never thought to know her other side. Now I know why I did not like her much :-P
Did you read Caravan magazine's investigative story on Arindam Chaudhuri? Do read it here. It is really scary.
Hey Shiju, read it. Its good but very carefully written. A magazine called JAM published a very point-blank article on IIPM and IIPM sued them for that. Even in their website the article page mentions removal due to some litigation. So much for free speech!
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