Shanti Prasad’s son, Ashok Jain, took over in the nineteen-sixties; in 1975, Ashok’s eldest son, Samir, joined the company as a junior executive, after receiving a university degree from St. Stephen’s College, in New Delhi. During the next seven years, Samir concentrated on the media business, while his father focussed on running the more than ten companies that made up the non-publishing parts of B.C.C.L., including cement, jute, and textile businesses. By the late eighties, as vice-chairman, Samir had assumed command of the company. In the nineties, his father, pursued by government charges of fraud and seeking medical treatment for a weak heart, left for the United States; Vineet joined Samir in 1993, as the deputy managing director, after graduating from the American College of Switzerland. Although the brothers confer on all points of the business, Samir concentrates on newspapers and broad strategy, while Vineet focusses on television, radio, and the Internet. Company executives rarely address Samir by name, preferring instead to call him V.C.; they address Vineet as M.D.

When Samir Jain first took over, the various businesses of B.C.C.L. were in decline. With national literacy rising, he decided to gamble on newspapers. He led long strategy sessions. “His mind was very clear about what business we were in,” Bhaskar Das, who became Samir’s principal sales executive, told me. “We knew we were in the business of aggregating a quality audience. Before that, we just sold advertising space.” Das, who joined the Times Group in 1980, is a member of the company’s board of directors and now serves as president and principal secretary to Vineet. He is tall and lean, with a chiselled jaw and silver hair that falls to his shoulders, and wears designer glasses. “We are a derived business,” Das said. “When the advertiser becomes successful, we are successful. The advertiser wants us to facilitate consumption.”

Jain encouraged his executives to push back as he honed plans to forge a stronger business. “He’s one of the most challenging and stimulating men I ever met,” T. N. Ninan, a former editor of the Economic Times, who is usually a critic, said. “His mind is active. He reads people’s motives very well.” Jain recruited managers from consumer-product companies like PepsiCo and Unilever and invited them to attend editorial meetings. Credit cards, which, at the time, were hard to get in India, were secured for members of the sales team but not for the editorial team. This was Jain’s way of downgrading élitist newspaper editors who might want to leave a mark on the paper, thereby constraining his ability to make business decisions. “Editors tended to be pompous fellows thundering from the pulpit, speaking in eighty-word sentences,” Rahul Kansal, Jain’s executive president and brand chief, told me. “They saw themselves as part of nation-building, as part of a big dialogue. It did not connect too well with younger Indians.”

Samir Jain pressed his executives to create a more youthful paper. Articles would be shorter, sentences snappier; there would be more sports, less politics, more Bollywood, more color, lower necklines, and few book reviews. “You can’t write about Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday for a fifteen-year-old,” Das said. “You can give a passing reference for the grandfather.” He added, “Everyone wants to feel young, think like the young. Youth is an aspirational band, not a demographic band. So if you make the paper youthful it satisfies everyone.”

“Aspirational” is a word one hears often around the Times offices, as a way of characterizing the sunny outlook that the Jains say their readers want. “We keep saying the glass is half full, not half empty,” Vineet said. Poverty, given that it’s not a condition to which one aspires, receives scant coverage. In the early nineteen-nineties, Palagummi Sainath, now a rural-affairs editor at the Hindu, wrote several dozen newspaper reports on rural poverty as a freelancer at the Times. Later, when he spent four years living among the Dalit community, often described as the “untouchables,” he didn’t bother submitting the pieces he wrote about them to the Times. He recalls a Times editor once asking him why he was pitching a story on rural poverty: “How is this relevant to our readers?”

By the mid-nineties, the Times referred to itself, as Das did in his conversation with me, “not as a newspaper but as a brand,” with target audiences that advertisers coveted. Although there is no absence of bleak news in the Times—railway accidents, terrorist attacks, bureaucracy, corruption—“our general take on life, and it comes back to our editorial philosophy, is one of optimism,” Dhariwal told me. When a tsunami struck south India, the Times “tried hard to find some good stories there”—heroic rescues, families reunited. Recently, when Rajat Gupta, who was born in India, was convicted in New York of insider trading, the lead story on page 1 of the Times focussed on the human dimension and was headlined “JURORS WERE IN TEARS AS THEY HELD GUPTA GUILTY.” Shekhar Gupta, the editor-in-chief of the Indian Express, a more hard-hitting paper, said that when he and Samir Jain encounter each other Jain usually hands him underlined copies of Hindu scripture and “affectionately” admonishes him that “my publication is too dark.”

Little more than a decade after Samir Jain assumed control, the company had become the largest media corporation in India. “I would give all credit to my brother,” Vineet Jain told me. The company also benefitted from a warmer economic climate; starting in 1991, India privatized many industries and reduced regulations. The government would continue to be the sole provider of news that aired on state radio; elsewhere, market forces were usually allowed to dominate the media.

Although the Jains were friendly to advertisers, they played hardball. “We tell advertisers that if you want to be in the Times of India you have to drop our Marathi competitors and take the ads to our Marathi paper,” a senior executive, who asked not to be named, said. “We told advertisers that if you want the Times of India in Mumbai you drop the Hindustan Times.” When the salmon-colored Financial Times prepared to expand into the Indian market, Samir Jain worried that it would undercut his salmon-colored Economic Times. So in 1993 he registered the term “Financial Times” as a trademark of his company, and declared that if the British paper entered the country it would be violating his intellectual property. Two decades later, the case is still winding its way through the Indian court system.

Jain’s artillery against existing competitors involved reducing newspaper prices. In 1994, when the top-selling paper in New Delhi was the Hindustan Times, Jain slashed the price of the Times of India by a third, to one and a half rupees, or about three cents. He took care to build a bigger ad-sales force in advance, because he knew that with lower circulation revenue the paper would need more ad income. By 1998, the Hindustan Times had slipped to second place in New Delhi. When Jain cut the price of the paper in Bangalore to a single rupee, Siddharth Varadarajan, one of his editors and the current editor-in-chief of the Hindu, told him, “This is predatory pricing.” Jain responded, “Absolutely not. By lowering the price, I am expanding the number of readers.” The gamble paid off: home subscriptions to the Times increased fivefold.

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The inspiration for one of Samir Jain’s more innovative pricing strategies was the zoo in Calcutta, his home town. As he walked by on a Monday, normally a slow day after a busy weekend, he was surprised to see a long line. To boost attendance, the zoo had lowered its admission price that day, he learned, which gave him an idea: one day a week, on Wednesdays, he would halve the price of the paper. Circulation rose, so Jain introduced “invitation pricing,” lowering the price three days a week in certain locations. The strategies pioneered by Samir Jain at the Times of India—setting aggressive prices, employing focus groups to learn what readers crave, and, above all, treating advertisers as the primary customer—have since become standard in the industry. “His legacy is really making this business a profitable business,” Sanjoy Narayan, the editor-in-chief of the Hindustan Times, conceded. “Before him the newspaper business was run almost like a nonprofit.” He added, “He’s been emulated by everyone else.”

The Jain family is very close. With Samir’s twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Trishla, and her husband, Satyan Gajwani, the brothers share a Gatsby-like home on three and a half acres in the exclusive New Delhi area off the Motilal Nehru Marg road. Their neighbors are billionaires, celebrities, and government officials, who live in “bungalows” hidden by high walls and tall, leafy jacaranda, acacia, gulmohar, and neem trees. A visitor to the Jain home is greeted at the dimly lit stone entrance by a statue of Ganesha, the elephant god, revered as the “remover of obstacles” and worshipped by many Hindus as the supreme deity. Inside are three living areas, with two separate kitchens, dining rooms, and living rooms. Samir’s living room is more formal, with wooden floors covered with dark Persian rugs, walls adorned with centuries-old Indian and European paintings, and stained-glass windows. The rooms of Vineet and of Trishla and Gajwani are brighter and more modern. On the top floor, Trishla paints in a studio, seeking to insinuate into her paintings, collages, and sculptures text from the English literature she studied at Stanford.