Profile of N.Ram

Profile of N.Ram

Designation Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu, Frontline, Business Line, and The Sportstar.
Date of Birth May 4, 1945.
Address Office: The Hindu, Kasturi Buildings, 859, Anna Salai, Chennai (former name: Madras) 600 002. Tel: (91-44) 28413344
Fax: (91-44) 28415325
Residence: 43-B Kasturi Ranga Road, Chennai 600 018, Tel: (91-44) 24992674
Fax: (91-44) 24991123
Schooling Rosary Matriculation School, Chennai.
Madras Christian College School, Chennai.
Higher Education B.A. in History at Loyola College, University of Madras, 1961-64.
M.A. in History (First Class) at Presidency College, University of Madras, 1964-66.
M.S. in Comparative Journalism (with Honours) at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, 1967-68
Academic Honours First Rank in the University for the M.A. History Examination,
1966.
Honours at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, 1968.
Professional Background
Has been in journalism from 1966; reporting, editing, editorial writing, investigative journalism and magazine journalism.
Between 1977 and 1990, Associate Editor of The Hindu. Between 1980 and 1982, Washington Correspondent of The Hindu. Has been Editor of the fortnightly news magazine, Frontline, started in late 1984; of the weekly, The Sportstar, India’s leading sports magazine; and of the business daily, Business Line, started in January 1994, all three brought out by the publishers of The Hindu.

From June 27, 2003: Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu and all the above-named publications.


Awards and Honours

Padma Bhushan (Journalism): Honour conferred by the President of India in 1990.

Asian Investigative Journalist of the Year (1990)

Award conferred by the Press Foundation of Asia at the “One Asia Assembly”, Manila, 1990 for ``the courage and diligence which inspired him and his newspaper to continue searching for the truth in the now famous Bofors Case, the disciplined application of his journalistic idealism and the impact of his revelations on the Indian political scene.’’

B.D. Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, 1989, shared with Chitra Subramaniam

Award conferred in 1990, New Delhi (with the citation mentioning the Bofors investigation).

Freedom of Information Award, 1989, New Delhi: Conferred in 1990.

National Citizen’s Award, 1995, New Delhi (with the citation reading “for his brave and fearless writings in the interest of the nation”).

Vasireddy Malathy Trust’s Award for Investigative Journalism for 1989, Rajahmundry, Andhra Pradesh, shared with Chitra Subramaniam.

Krishnan Memorial Award, 1989, awarded by the K. Krishnan Memorial Trust, Trichur, Kerala, for the “the services rendered by him in the field of journalism in general and the exhaustive coverage of Sri Lankan developments in particular.”

XLRI’s First JRD Tata Award for Business Ethics, awarded at this management institute’s 46th Annual Convocation at Jamshedpur on March 23, 2002 for ``following rigorously the canons of journalism and ethics’’ and making ``this ethics part of a corporate philosophy.’’

Alumni Award 2003 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Alumni Association, presented at Columbia University, New York on April 25, 2003.

Other Particulars:

(a) A former member of the National Integration Council (1990-91).

(b) Has served on the Selection Committee to select academic staff for the Department of Journalism at the University of Calcutta.

(c) President, Harmony India, a registered voluntary association for communal amity and secularism based in Chennai.

Sports

First Class Cricketer; played for Tamil Nadu in the Ranji Trophy, 1966; wicket-keeper and batsman. Captained the Madras University cricket team in the All India Inter-University tournament, 1966. Played tennis for Loyola College, Chennai. Has written for The Hindu and The Sportstar on cricket.

Areas of special interest in journalism

Trends in Indian politics, stability and instability; relations between the ruling party and the opposition; the phenomenon of regional parties, in particular the Dravidian movement parties in Tamil Nadu; the Indian Left.

Issues in India’s political relations with the United States, the Soviet Union (now, its successor states), and China.

Political developments in China, of interest to people in India (a series of ar0ticles in The Hindu based on seven visits to China between 1978 and 1988).

India’s nuclear policy; the nuclear issue between India and the United States; and the political implications; issues in the history of the Indian nuclear programme. Implications of nuclear weaponisation, post-May 11, 1998.

India’s experience with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; and in some detail, the implications of the three-year Extended Fund Facility arrangement concluded between India and the IMF in 1981 (the secret terms and conditionalities of which were revealed in the columns of The Hindu for the first time) and of subsequent high conditionality arrangements which have tended to put pressure on India’s economic sovereignty.

The Sri Lanka ethnic crisis and the Tamil question; the experience of, and lessons from, India’s interaction with this problem.

L’affaire Bofors; issues of corruption and abuse of power.

The challenge of communalism in India; communal fascism; the `Hindu Rashtra’ project, and the declining capabilities of the Indian State; minority fundamentalism; state policies towards communalism; the Constitution and secularism.

Evaluating Indian federalism; Centre-State relations.

Freedom of expression issues.

Media and society; the different media traditions in India, the roles the press plays; issues of foreign media entry.

Academic Publications

Has contributed articles to the Economic and Political Weekly, the Social Scientist, and also publications such as The Quarterly Journal of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis, New Delhi.

An essay, “The Role of Intellectuals in the Third World in the Coming Age”, was published (in Japanese translation) by the leading academic publisher, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo in a book of essays titled Crisis of Today’s World and Perspectives on the Future, 1984.

A research paper for a Harvard University conference on “The Nuclear Dispute: An Indian Perspective” has been published in a book, Conflicting Images: India and the United States, edited by Sulochana Raghavan Glazer and Nathan Glazer, the Riverdale Corporation Publishers, Maryland, USA, 1990.

A detailed study, “An Independent Press and Anti-Hunger Strategies: The Indian Experience”, done for the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER), which is part of the UNU, has been published (pp. 146-190) in a book, The Political Economy of Hunger, Volume-I: Entitlements and Well-being, edited by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990: also available in an Indian edition by Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

R.K. Narayan:

The Early Years: 1906-1945 by Susan Ram and N.Ram, Viking, Penguin India, New Delhi, 1996.

Riding the Nuclear Tiger by N. Ram, Signpost publication, LeftWord Books, New Delhi, 1999.

A 15,000-word essay:

"The Great Indian Media Bazaar: Emerging Trends and Issues for the Future,’’ has been published (pp. 241-292) in India: Another Millennium? edited by Romila Thapar, Viking, Penguin India, New Delhi, 2000.

Lectures:

He has given lectures in various academic and public fora in India, the United States, Canada, England, China and Sri Lanka. The forums include Harvard, Chicago and Brown Universities in the United States, the London School of Oriental and African Studies and Oxford University in the U.K., Beijing University, and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.

The subjects covered include ethnicity, nationalism and pseudo-nationalism; the phenomenon of communalism; communalism and the media; press, politics and society in India; the Gulf War; India, the World Bank and the IMF; challenges before national unity; and India and the ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka.