Shobhana Bhartia has let professionalism, not her persona, carry the day for her media empire
There is no other way to say this. But Shobhana Bhartia is a very good looking woman in a very Audrey Hepburn-kind of way: slender, graceful and classy with a pixie hair cut that completes the elf-like image. Add to this her easy demeanour — unassuming way with people and propensity to let her team run their ships on their own terms — and it is entirely possible to imagine an unlikely publisher in a business otherwise populated by extraordinarily mercurial, passionate and colourful characters.
Instead, she found herself pitted against well-entrenched unions that opposed anything and everything she believed in. She couldn’t figure out, for instance, why workers at the press ought to be fed milk three times a day. Neither could she understand why modernisation was viewed with suspicion. “Newspapers in India,” she says, “were not meant to be well run businesses, but a cause.” Those were different times, a socialist time.
(This story appears in the 08 January, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)