Muses of Murari

I read an interesting TOI article today. It talks about how Indian businessmen and other businessmen around the world finding cultivable lands in countries like Ethiopia, Namibia, Argentina and growing oil seeds and other commodities to help their native countries in cases of shortages and also making a new wave of export businesses. Fascinating to learn.

In one instance, the author mentioned about a person holding an astonishing 3,000 sq km of cultivable foreign land!  Many people are trying hard to form associations, forums and raise huge capital to venture into this lucrative business. And countries like China and India are in support too for these private companies. Earlier, India, it seems, was reluctant to support this kind of venture because of political backlash, but slowly it is inching out from its stance. This affirms my belief that businesses influence our world more than political systems do in the current age.

Without digressing, coming to my point. This particular venture of buying cultivable lands and exporting from the foreign countries is there for a while, but our mainstream media picked it up, what I would say, ages late! Yes, in this age of instant news and information, this piece of info is too late. Let me give one example. Recently gold prices surged and many in India went mad buying securities tied up with the yellow metal or bought the gold itself. This incidentally happened after a national pink paper published gold’s immediate future prospects. But, in many online blogs, this information was roaming for a couple of weeks before the newspaper had published its article and in this window period, there one already saw a steady increase in the precious metal.

In yet another business related example, few weeks before, tea stocks were smartly gaining for a period of time. In online stock market blogs, forums & financial sites, there’s a lot of discussion about the escalating tea prices and future prospects of tea stocks and technicality of stocks movement. I was tracking all the news and to my chagrin, I failed to make most of the gain. (that is another story) After few days of handsome increase in tea stocks, the same pink newspaper published a news article about the growth of tea stocks. By that time, prices went way up. Of course, one cannot expect every kind of business news in finance newspaper and that is my point. In the current age of instant news & opinion making, Newspapers cannot deliver all the latest news to its readers with their current model. See what happened in after Iran elections results are announced. Twitter broke the news first and not any big traditional news organization.

Since we are in age of Long Tail, where people wants to fill their unique apetite and varied interests, we need news, expert opinions to reach faster, in bare truth format and more efficiently. As experts say, newspapers will need to revamp with the current age otherwise they would wither away. And already few media houses (including some TV news media) are integrating internet enabled delivery models. When Apple tablet and other similar devices enters & dominate the market, where news can be delivered and monetized efficiently, the next generation would view newspapers as modern age relics, something we may not be privileged to see.

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