At Swim, Two Birds Perched On Latticed Sites

Outlook and internet in India drew first breath only a day apart. The former took Indian magazine journalism to new heights with its audacious verve. The latter took India.

Sandipan Deb

Updated on: 5 December 2020 12:06 pm

On August 16, 1995, the founding team of Outlook moved into its newly-furnished headquarters at Safdarjung Enclave in South Delhi. It was a young team—I don’t think there was anyone in the editorial department, except for the editor-in-chief, the late Vinod Mehta, who was above 40. We were all raring to go, to create something new and cool and exciting. Some of us had joined a few months earlier, working out of two hotel rooms, but this was the day that the full team came on board. The game was afoot.

We were all too absorbed in our frenetic search for new ideas and novel ways of doing magazine journalism to pay any attention to a momentous coincidence. The day before, Independence Day, the internet had been launched in India. Indeed, The Times of India had gone so far as to title its news report on the launch: Independence Day to mean freedom with the Internet.

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India was only the fourth country in Asia to launch the internet for citizens, after Japan, Singapore (not full access) and Hong Kong (then a British Dominion). Yes, India had internet for everyone before the People’s Republic of China.

I had seen a rudimentary version of the net—the Educational Research Network (ERNET)—in 1989 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, where my would-be wife was doing her PhD. ERNET connected leading educational and research institutions around the world, but it was very limited in scope, and the software that would truly define the internet and make it accessible to the layman—the web browser—had not yet been invented. Yet, it was fascinating for me to watch my wife and her peers communicate real-time with professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and access research papers. And by the time the net came to India, I had been a regular reader of the cult US magazine Wired and had some sort of idea of the communication and social revolution taking place in the West.

Gods on our side

Outlook publisher Deepak Shourie, his wife and editor-in-chief Vinod Mehta at a puja at the magazine’s new office in Safdarjung Enclave, New Delhi.

The launch of the net in India was initially a disaster, as Brijendra K. Syngal, then chairman and managing director of the public sector enterprise Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL), which was in charge of providing the service, has freely admitted in his recently published memoir Telecom Man (disclosure: I am the co-author). VSNL had grossly underestimated demand, priced the subscriptions too high, and there were enough technical glitches that it had not factored in. For example, most phone lines in the country at that time were not ‘sanitised’—there would be a beep every three minutes, and if one was accessing the net through such a line, the connection would break. Consumers, politicians, the media were soon up in arms. The internet in India was a sham and a scam.

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The day after the first issue of Outlook hit the market, goons from a certain political party attacked and vandalised our Mumbai office, and in its mouthpiece newspaper, the party’s leader called for death to Vinod Mehta.

A few months later, Syngal, today recognised as the “father of the internet in India”, called a press conference and made a statement that found its way into the headlines. “I goofed up,” he said, something no other public sector boss has possibly ever said in public, and asked for 10 weeks to fix everything. And VSNL fixed it all, from pricing to capacity to technology. Outlook, of course, still had no net connection.

I encountered the net for the first time, perhaps in early 1996, at the home of my friend Sundeep Dougal, one of the first subscribers in Delhi. He had taken a text-only connection, so it was just letters on a black screen, but I found it thrilling that I could just type in ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and find posts and opinions or read bulletin boards and see people from across the world arguing about anything, from geopolitics to jobs. Wow, this is the most immense library in the world, I thought, an infinite source of information, both useful and useless.

Vinod’s attitude towards any new technology could be described, at best, as “deeply suspicious”. He never used the mouse on his computer and wrote all his pieces in long hand. We finally managed to convince him that we needed the net because that was a much more convenient way to access the real-time news feed from the Press Trust of India. So in late 1996 or early 1997, Outlook got the net, but only two connections, one for Vinod and one for publisher Deepak Shourie. Vinod mastered using the PTI feed quickly, but that was about it. Since at that time, from my cubicle, I could see into Vinod’s room through the glass window on his cabin, it was an amusing pastime for me daily (sometimes hourly) to see him staring at a blank screen with a scary error message displayed on it. But he caught on after some time and covered up the window.

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And since he was kind and knew that I was interested in the net, he told me one day that when he was out of office, I could use the net connection on his computer. So, on most days when he went out for lunch, I would browse the net on his PC. Among the various search engines then available, before Google the Goliath appeared, my preferred ones were AltaVista and Lycos, now long-gone and forgotten.

But the forces of technology cannot be stopped. Within a year, almost every PC in the Outlook office had a net connection. And it was also becoming obvious to at least some people that we needed a ‘website’. But who would take charge? It was the business side of the company which did, and outlookindia.com was born sometime in 1998. It consisted entirely of what had been printed in the magazine. No one—inside or outside the organisation—paid much attention.

Sometime in mid-1999, I happened to meet Sundeep, in whose home I had first browsed the net, at a bookshop, and almost the first thing he said was: “Do you know that the masthead of your website reads: India’s most existing weekly newsmagazine. We have broken many stores?” I was aghast, and asked him what he was doing. He was running a one-man ad agency, so, right on the spot, I offered him an alternative: Shut that down and set up the Outlook website. By this time, the magazine was thriving; in fact, it was an astonishing media success story. Obviously, we needed to have a strong and credible presence on the net.

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I told Vinod that our website was a joke and we couldn’t afford this. The editorial team had to get involved, and I had found someone who could possibly take charge. Vinod harrumphed—more costs, and why do we need a website?—but met and approved of Sundeep, who also did his bit to convince him that the net was a necessity. We found a chair and a table for him in the basement. Vinod and I never had any explicit conversation about this, but it seemed to be mutually agreed upon that, as far as editorial oversight was needed, he was leaving this whole new fad and this new recruit to me. In truth, I was involved only in the first two years maybe, and merely acted as an infrequent sounding board for Sundeep after that.

Sundeep was both a workaholic and a deep thinker, and we spent several months discussing the structure of the planned website. Website design was still in its nascent stages and classification of pieces was a complicated issue. For example, the print magazine had a section called ‘Features’ that constituted 40 per cent of the material every week, but it lumped together cinema, entertainment, sports, fashion, society, human interest topics—in fact anything that was not politics, business or international affairs. So, should the site also have a broad ‘Features’ section or should it be broken up? What about opinion pieces, should they go into the ‘Politics’ section if they were political commentaries or should they have a section of their own? We did not have very many relevant examples to go by.

In late 2000, a professional Outlook website was up, and immediately became a hit. Interestingly, this was a few months after the massive dotcom bubble burst in March 2000. Soon, we recognised three direct consequences. One, we discovered that a majority of the page views we were getting were from the US and Europe, and over the years, Sundeep’s work hours moved to some sort of a mid-Atlantic time zone.

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Two, we realised the site had to have much more content than a weekly magazine provided; we had to, in fact, have new stuff up not only every day, but every few hours. Sundeep assiduously developed a wide network of commentators whom he could call upon to write something quickly on an event that had taken place the day before, or maybe just some hours ago. The first piece carried on outlookindia.com that was written exclusively for the new website and did not appear in the magazine was an obituary of Sir Donald Bradman in February 2001, produced in-house.

We were learning as we were going along, and outlookindia.com was becoming a full-fledged website, not just an adjunct to a newsmagazine—quick on the draw, rich in content and reflecting a variety of opinions. Even today, many people outside India refer to the magazine as ‘Outlook India’.

And Vinod, perhaps the last of the editors in India who truly believed in freedom of expression, encouraged us to carry opinion pieces on the site that argued against articles in the magazine.

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Three, the readers’ comments sections beneath the pieces we published often degenerated into foul-mouthed slanging matches, especially between Indians and Pakistanis. These comments needed to be moderated. But budgets were very limited, since the site generated no revenues, so the tiny two-or-three-member web team had to work the most gruelling hours in the entire organisation. These people were tucked away in the basement of a nearby building, and almost the only contact the print team had with the web people was when Sundeep came to the headquarters for his weekly Monday evening meeting with Vinod and stayed on to chat with me.

I quit Outlook in August 2005, at a time when the first phase of the net’s life story was ending and the pioneers in Silicon Valley were thinking up Web 2.0, which, with its emphasis on user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (compatibility with other products, systems and devices) for end-users, would utterly transform the net. The power equations too were shifting. Google had had its stunning successful IPO a year ago, raising $1.9 billion, and was about to launch Gmail; leaders like Yahoo! were set to go into permanent decline; smartphones would appear soon and Microsoft, for two decades one of the most powerful corporations on earth, would flounder, to be rescued only after Satya Nadella took charge as CEO in 2014 and fully reoriented the company. A 21-year-old Harvard sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg, had just launched a site called thefacebook.com (yes, thefacebook) to cater to US college students.

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Looking back, though, I can still feel our excitement during those heady dotcom days. Wired was talking about “the long boom”, an eternally glorious future. Of course, like Francis Fukuyama’s audacious claim about “the end of history”, that never came to be. I happened to be in the US when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, when investors woke up to the fact that dozens of www.(thingamaijig).com companies that had absolutely no hope of earning any profits and were burning cash as if they had found the 40 thieves’ cave, had market capitalisations of more than a billion dollars each. The stock market crash resulted in a loss of almost $8 trillion of wealth in a matter of days. In a coincidental irony, I came to be a first-hand witness to the bloodbath, seeing companies supposed to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars being wiped out in a single day, because I was attending a five-day conference organised by a leading US software company.

The point to be made is that certainly not even the most enthusiastic visionary could have imagined then how the net would grow and evolve, both organically and through mutations, and change the very fundamentals of the way we live, love, work, play.

Today, we find ourselves worrying more about the negative effects of the net—the surveillance economy and certain monopolies acting as gatekeepers and manipulators of our perceptions of the world—than about the benefits we have reaped. Those benefits we take for granted; indeed it’s difficult even for people of my generation, who encountered the net in their late 20s or early 30s, to now recall the world before the world wide web. How on earth did we get our work done? How did businesses and trade function? Of course, these are silly questions, but that doesn’t keep us from wondering about that, because all this has happened in our lifetimes.

The net democratised public opinion, gave every individual the power to be a journalist or a public intellectual (or a public nuisance). This has had strange and mostly deleterious effects on the traditional media world, the vast majority of which has not been able to adapt. In fact, adaptation is the wrong term. Reinvention might be more appropriate. Also, strangely enough, instead of what the original ideators of the internet had envisioned, it is today dominated by a handful of companies, which are more powerful than most nation-states, and on the way to creating a human society at the mercy of opaque algorithms. I request everyone who has not done so yet, to read (or watch videos of) Jaron Lanier, the inventor of virtual reality and player of antique musical instruments.

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In the world of traditional media, only a few companies have been able to develop strategies that keep their web operations profitable and their print editions sustainable. It is high time we rethink the whole media business. Giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter are fighting foot-and-nail to establish that they are not media companies but social platforms. Perhaps, media companies should consider how they can become platforms, and not remain just media outfits. But this will require such a mindshift, such a reorientation of their worldview that few may be up to the task. But it can be done.

Meanwhile, it remains a joyous and celebratory coincidence that the arrival of the internet in the country and the beginning of the last lap to launching Outlook, one of the biggest Indian print media success stories of the last quarter century, were just a day apart. One can safely claim that Outlook changed Indian magazine journalism with a new verve and a copyrighted form of courage that bordered on audacity. In fact, both events would have taken place on the same day if August 15 had not been a holiday for us Outlook staffers. The lives of all those taking possession of their new workplace on that day changed. It was a great day for people like us. We were part of something new and untried. We were also pioneers.