Thursday 20 September 2012

Visitors from India

Our new secretary, Pamela Doherty, has written this excellent overview of Tuesday's meeting.

This week our fearless group met with a publisher and a journalist from India. Devang Vibhakar and Mirani Patel are travelling in Scotland with the Rotary Club’s Group Study Exchange. They observe the host nation’s institutions, professions and way of life in the hope of exchanging views and building cross continent relationships.

Mirani gave us powerful insight into her world of the media in India. With 3.5 million readers, her newspaper is not considered to be so big, in a country that boasts the largest circulation in the world. Mirani also told us about her passion for the folk dance of her region, the Gujarat-Garba. She explained that, like our traditional Scottish dances, each dance is another form of storytelling. The Nine Nights festival, for example, is the world’s longest and Mirani conjured the colours, music and excitement so eloquently, right here in sunny Bargarran.

Devang, a publisher, writer and editor of a mass communication website, said he was eager to study the business models employed by UK publishing houses. He was somewhat surprised to learn that very few publishers exist independently in Scotland, although he had managed to track down a couple that only our seasoned marketeers knew of!

With nineteen languages, of which English is seen as the median and taught at an early age, and Hindi is seen as the common language, publishing must be no mean feat.

Devang explained that Self Help or ‘management’ books are very popular in India at present, as well as stories about youths embarking on their new careers; hardly surprising in a country which is changing exponentially. There followed a most interesting debate into why we Scots do love a murderrr!

Pammie D

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