Why We Love To Hate <i>Outlook</i>

I have been a loyal Outlook subscriber since its inception. I’ve enjoyed the investigative articles, the wit and candidness of the diary and the many shades of opinion in the letters to the editor section. However, the large number of ads that fill the pages cutting short news space and the elaborate lists of educa­tional inst­itu­tes at regular intervals are major irritants. The lengthy, biased articles of writers like Arundh­ati Roy also test the reader’s patience. Lastly, your hatred for anyth­ing Hindu, RSS, BJP, and the number of articles you publish against Narendra Modi is nauseating. Your love of Sonia Gandhi and her party is no good for any sensible reader.

I subscribed to Outlook for four years hoping for honest and unbiased journalism. But here’s why I am not renewing my subscription. Firstly, Outlook always needs a Nehru-Gandhi scion to rule us. Nepotism exists in other parties alone and the maladies of our nation are a gift of the BJP/Modi only. Robert Vadra who? Secondly, when you get your poll predictions wrong, why justify the faulty methodology etc? Thirdly, your understanding of development is always about the loot of the poor. Never mind the balanced views and big picture, just oppose everything. Fourthly, even if Indians want to forget caste divisions, Outlook will always play the card in all its analyses. There is an overdose of reading between the lines rather than sticking to the simple truths. Fifthly, there is a wrong methodology involved in rating medical/dental colleges. You leave out the two most impo­rtant parameters: number of patients in the OPD and meritocracy of the staff.

Here’s what I don’t like about Outlook: romanticising poverty and writing prose and poetry about the poor, furthering the failed Nehruvian socialism, thinking business is bad and profits are always unethical. Not articulating how the worse kinds of violence can be eradicated, but actually thriving on talking about it. Why else would the magazine publish every word written by Arundhati Roy? Why else would its editor-in-chief (may his soul rest in peace) hail Sonia Gandhi in one of his diaries as a champion of the poor? Outlook has failed to be the magazine for young Indians by promoting the concept of doles, by eyeing with suspicion all job providers. It has become a magazine of armchair intellectuals who derive pleasure from twisting English and its phrases so that the laity cannot catch up with it. Outlook has to understand that the economic well-being of citizens is the best vaccine against communalism.

Nearly twenty ago, I was looking forward to the launch of a weekly under the editorship of Vinod Mehta, mainly beca­use he was successful in the Sunday Observer and Debonair. And when it came, it informed as it provoked; it entertained as it amused. Khushwant Singh, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Shashi Tharoor, they were all there. But now the special interest essays by invitees are unexceptionable. And I cannot overlook the marked pre­­judice against Modi. I claimed not reading but I still find myself poring over the contents. Post-Vinod Mehta, I find his protege toeing the same line. Nevertheless, in the milieu of papers paying pae­ans, the establishment needs a credible alternative. And this Outlook serves.