Initially, I was the Editor of Stardust and then later Shobha De became the Editor. After Shobha it was Leila Naidu who was the Editor for a short time. It was later handled by Uma Rao, Vanita Ghosh, Farida Balsara Master, Prochi Badshah, Nishi Prem, Ashwin Varde, and then Jointly edited by Omar Qureshi & Sarita Tanwar and then by Ram Kamal Mukherjee and now by Sumita Chakraborty.
We had started other magazines such as Society which was headed by Shobha De and then later by Binoy Thomas, Lalita Gopalan, Suma Varughese, Priyanka Sinha Jha and eventually by Suchitra Iyer.
Parade was headed by Rajender Memon.
Savvy was headed by Ingrid Albuquerque and later on by Nirmala Ferraro, Trupti Kotecha, Saira Menezes, and eventually by Andrea Costabir.
Showtime was headed by Surinder Bhatia and later on by Malvinder Grewal.
Interiors, was headed by Swati Balgi
Health and Nutrition, was headed by Nirmala Ferraro and later on by Bharti PG and eventually by Vinodini Rao.
Island was headed by Pinki Virani.
Family, Bangalore city magazine was headed by Ingrid Albuquerque
Citadel, Pune city magazine was headed by Sunanda Mehta, Farida Balsara Master, Corina Manuel, Ashvina Vakil, Nita Deshmukh, Vidya Tiwari, Alka Kshirsagar, Sapna Iyer, Nishad Shinde, Sapna Sarfare, Ketki Latkar.
Star weekly was headed by Srividya Menon
Mandate, was headed by Yuvraj Juneja
All these magazines made a huge dent in the market and were brand leaders in each segment. There were many imitators who came in one after the other but none could touch the pinnacle that Magna had reached. It became evident that we were going to be the largest magazine publishing company in the country. Our only competitors were Times of India with Filmfare and Femina and of course, the India Today group headed by Arun Poorie which also had a number of other magazines in their stable. But competition makes it worth your while because it keeps you on your toes and does not allow you to be complacent.
Fortunately, in our heydays, I built up a lot of assets which included an apartment in Advent (near Mantralaya) which we used as our office. While we retained Agra Building office which was used by the advertising department. Over there Ashok Dhamankar worked for Tommy Fernandez. After Tommy the department was managed by Ashok and Ashish Dey. Ashok decided to move to Bangalore and then the department was handled by Hari who was in charge of advertising. Quite frankly there was no need for an advertising concessionaire because it was just a question of handing out positions and placing ads rather than any selling. I still remember that Shobha Doctor had booked all our back covers for her client Phoenix Mills. Needless to say Savvy also was an instant success because Ingrid at the helm did not spare anybody. Personal details were disclosed. Savvy carried a lot of divorce stories and women who were mistreated by men and so on and so forth. She did not spare anybody. I can give you one example. Vijay Merchants daughter who had run away with her driver. When Ingrid went to meet Vijay Merchant with a tape recorder hidden in her purse. She turned on the waterworks and Vijay told her it was not the right thing to do. She recorded everything that he said and brought it back to the office quite triumphant that Vijay had more or less agreed that her driver had run away with his daughter. These stories were an instant hit with the masses and copies were sold out instantly. Unfortunately, advertising interfered especially Ashok who said that his advertiser Hindustan Lever (one of the biggest at that time) did not want these kinds of stories as it would affect their image. So, we had toned down the stories and by this time Ingrid had passed on the mantle to Trupti Kotecha, and then to Andrea. They had to put what I would call ‘Lovey Dovey’ stories. This, of course, did not please the reader who was not interested in reading such boring stories, and naturally, the circulation declined. So, while Hindustan Lever who had asked us to make the changes stopped advertising with us, we lost the circulation.
However, Interiors magazine came in at that time, and in spite of tremendous competition from other magazines like Inside Outside etc it still stood its ground and became one of the most important and popular architectural and interior magazine. We also used to have an annual event where we honored well-known architects such as IM Kadri and Hafeez Contractor and it became one of our premier annual events. Interiors became the largest selling Interior magazine.
Society magazine also carried some path-breaking news stories one of them was the Ambani brothers split. Later on, the newspapers got on to the story and once Mukesh had confirmed it Society was regarded as one of the best celebrity magazine.
Then we started Parade which was a contemporary version of Readers Digest. We bought articles from various leading news magazines and newspapers from abroad and reprinted them with permission from the respective publishers. Most of the articles were from the New York Times magazine. Parade was a big hit and would have been a greater success as we paid a very small amount for each article (about $ 100) and this was enough to fill up each issue. We also took articles from Lamont and also from Der Spiegel. In this way, we compiled the issues and it was a big hit. However, as time passed it became more and more difficult to get more magazines as by now India had now lifted a lot of restrictions so foreign investments and the foreign magazines demanded extra for licensing the articles which did not make it a worthwhile proposition. In addition to that one of the magazine group complained that it was technically a foreign magazine since there were no local articles from India. The Indian government told us that we should either print some Indian articles too or we would have to close down. This condition was not acceptable to me and that is why we had to discontinue publishing the magazine in spite of it being a big success. We had tasted tremendous success with each of our magazines as they were leading in each sector.
To be continued……watch out for this space.
