WASHINGTON: The bad news is India hasn't made the cover of major international publications on its 60th birthday. That may well be the good news too.
A decade after the world media celebrated India's 50th Independence anniversary milestone in a blaze of colour, the country isn't a novelty anymore. It is now an ongoing story, a work in progress.
In fact, there may have been more India covers in the international press in the last decade than in the century before that. The US-based South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA) tracked down more than 125 India covers in US publications alone over the past 80 years, nearly a third of them since 1997.
Much of the coverage centers around India and its growing economy and rising stature in the world, compared to the personality and poverty/disaster driven coverage early in the century -- the kind of attention Mahatma Gandhi famously dismissed as a "drain inspector's report" (referring to Katherine Mayo's book Mother India ).
Now, India coverage reads like a brain inspectors' report.
It began soon after the 50th anniversary attention when publications such as New Yorker and National Geographic put India on the cover. Soon after, BusinessWeek wrote a cover story on India' demographic dividend (India's Youth, Oct 11, 1999) followed by a Fortune's cover showing a farmer using a palm device (India Taps Into The Future, April 29, 2002).
BusinessWeek came back with The Rise of India (Dec 3, 2003), followed by Wired magazine's classic February 2004 cover showing India as "The New Face of Silicon Age." BusinessWeek , which has remained ahead of the curve in its India coverage, hyphenated India and China for the first time in its cover of August 22, 2005.
By 2006, mainstream magazines such as Newsweek (The New India, March 6, 2006) and Time (India Inc, July 26, 2006) were going rah rah over India. Meantime, the business journals cooled off some of their ardor, replacing it with doubt ("Can India Fly?" Economist , July 1, 2006) and dissection ("The Trouble with India" BusinessWeek , March 19, 2007.
Still, it's a whole different tone from the time when death and disaster were the staples in the west's India coverage. Except for the tsunami covers (which involved South East Asia too), India's many failures and miseries don't get the cover treatment now.
Even in terms of personalities -- although Manmohan Singh has made the Economist cover twice -- general publications have featured Indian or Indian-origin entertainers more than its leaders. Newsweek put Manoj Night Shyamalan (The Next Speilberg, July 28, 2002) and Saira Mohan (The Perfect Face, November 2, 2003) on its cover, while Bend It Like Beckham girl Parmindar Nagra and Naveen Andrews (of The English Patient and Lost fame) featured on the cover of popular magazines.
It's a different world from when Mahatma Gandhi became the first Indian to make the cover of Time magazine in 1930 (and twice more subsequently), although a magazine called The Mentor had featured Rabindranath Tagore as far back as 1921. Time also featured on its cover the Nizam of Hyderabad, that era's Bill Gates (Feb.27, 1937), Subhas Chandra Bose (1938), Acharya Vinoba Bhave (1953) and Zubin Mehta (1968).
Time's favourite though was Jawaharlal Nehru, who made the cover six times, followed by Mrs Indira Gandhi thrice. But the era of political giants from the developing world seems to have passed for international publications. Writes Sreenath Srinivasan, a Saja founder-member who dug out many of the covers: "Nehru's repeated appearances show you how the world has changed. I can't easily imagine a near-term scenario when a leader from anywhere in South Asia makes multiple appearances on the covers of the US editions of Time or Newsweek ."
Now, it's India itself which has emerged as a giant.
