 I wish Rajdeep had stayed on a couple of minutes because as a utopian a picture that he painted of the potential of television as a medium which I don't intrinsically disagree with being a child of television myself, I had certain disagreements with him and his talk made me think. When I call myself a child of television what do I mean? I mean that when television news actually became privatized in India. And anybody here, it's a fairly young hall, anybody here remember what year that was? Anybody, any guesses? So 1995 was when India Today and NDTV at the time were production houses that were tasked to produce a 30 minute news bulletin in English and Hindi. And as scripts would have to go to Durdarshan and to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for vetting before we could actually get a clearance or an approval for that night's prime time news. I mentioned this and I mentioned myself being a child of television because what I mean is that while at that time a lot of people who came into television came from newspapers, there was some of us who were first generation entrants into television because we recognized the potential magical sort of possibilities of the medium. Unfortunately as a former television person and a presently sort of all embracing digital entity, I have to disagree with Rajdeep because I think the point has come where we can't theorize anymore that television may potential. Television, this can happen and television, that can happen and television one day can be like this and one more day can be like this. All true, technologies are what we make of them. But the question to be asked today is what have we made of television news? Rajdeep mentioned two stories. He mentioned this vegetative state of a BJP MLA. By the way the MLA, Mr. Valte, who is in a vegetative state, a crippled, paralyzed state because he was attacked by a mob. He's today not able to walk on his own, eat on his own, speak on his own. I'm proud to say that that story, that story was actually broken in two different mediums and neither was television. One was the Hindu, the newspaper that first shone a light on it and the second was Mojo's story and after that every television channel followed, right? So when we talk about the potential of television, it's all very well, but where was television on that story? Television came 48 hours after I interviewed the MLA and 48 hours later every channel ran that interview done after our report as an exclusive. The most maligned, banal word on television news today apart from breaking is exclusive. The definition of exclusive has become agar koi aur mic na frame mein ho, agar sre baap ka mic frame mein ho, it's exclusive. It is the most, I would say, solid phrase in television news today. Then Rajdeep mentioned Manipur. I'm glad that Rajdeep did visit Manipur during the elections. He didn't call that parachuting but he called those of us who went to Manipur right now parachuting. I spent a week there. I spent a week there and I can share with you that the largest presence of media in Manipur apart from the local media of Manipur were independent digital platforms. I did not see a large presence of television news on the ground in a sustained way other than as purely reactive to that viral video. There was no before and after coverage of Manipur on our TV channels. So I wanted to, I had come prepared to talk about something else but I think I got provoked into wanting to make this point that it's time to stop theorizing about the potential of a medium and start looking at why some of us, and I see many people in the audience, why some of us decided no television is not for us anymore. The reasons are complicated. In my case, it was a combination of reasons. I wanted to own a little bit of my little piece of the pie. I was tired of being an employee. I had been an employee for 20 years. I had started having disagreements with my managers over how free I was to report the stories I wanted to and I can tell you that if you speak to any television journalist in this country privately, if they think what they're saying is not going to go back to their bosses, literally every television journalist will tell you that their newsrooms are not free. For one or the other reason, I'm not saying the reason is always politics. Sometimes the reason is ratings. Sometimes the reason is advertisers. Sometimes the reason is, I don't know, the subjective opinion of whoever they're reporting to. And I'm not saying that the 100% free newsroom exists anywhere in the world. It possibly doesn't. I have this joke that as having three kind of decades now almost of media, India's media has gone through three tyrannies. When we started this with the tyranny of being state-owned. We were in a state-owned age. Then we went to the tyranny of the market. You were required to do what the market wanted you to do. You were constantly told, your program doesn't know the rating of this story. Who will see this, who will see this? And now we're in the tyranny of the algorithm. I don't want to romanticize the digital world and say there are no pressures to get views in the digital world. We live in an age where the challenge is who will click on your story? So please, let us be honest. Let us be honest about a few things. One, the way television news has evolved in India has led to many of its best talents leaving television and stepping out of it. I think this is a no-brainer. If you were to look at YouTube today, you would look at people that you recognize and follow, possibly respect, sometimes disagree with, but never ignore. And many of them today are in the digital space and we must ask ourselves why that happened. That's the first point. The second point is television news has a broken revenue model because of which it stopped spending money on reporting. I discovered this not in Manipur. I discovered this when I actually launched my digital platform. Mojo means magic. And I said, oh, is there a way to discover once again the magic of storytelling? And as sort of coincidences take over your life, three months after I set up Mojo Story in the basement of my house initially, like any startup, we were three people and my driver, four people, and COVID hit. Like COVID descended as we launched my platform. And I said, you know what? I can't cover this story from my house, from my basement, from my office, from my studio. And in the first wave, airports were shut. If you all remember, there were no airports open. So the only way to get to point A from point A to point B was by road. And I ended up initially foring to a place and coming back, literally spending 16 to 24 hours in the car on a single day. And then I said, this is not making any sense. So we actually sat in my Maruti Ertega and four of us drove from Delhi to Kerala. And we reported COVID ban India, including following and center staging the exodus of our migrant workers. And once again, that story was covered most effectively by newspapers, by local journalists, and by digital platforms. And television, with all its scale and all of its resources and all of its access, and of course they were honorable exceptions because I know many of you will walk up and say, in so-and-so city, in so-and-so bureau, this television journalist did this and there will always be honorable exceptions to what I'm saying. But by and large, television news with being the richest medium of these three mediums that I've described did not own the COVID story. And that was my first realization that technology is changing so quickly. So quickly that actually today, you can compete on a level playing field with organizations that have, you know, hundreds more reporters than you, billions more in budgets than you. If you just have the gumption, you just have the passion because something has changed in the way we consume content. Reuters Institute already tells us that most Indians get their content from, any guesses, to two forums. Anybody? YouTube and WhatsApp. Most Indians today get their content from YouTube and WhatsApp, which is why most TV channels today have had to pivot to taking their YouTube and digital strategy much more seriously than they ever had to, whereas earlier there was this idea that, no, bhajai, no bhajenge, aap khana leke TV ke sad bhetenge, aap serve kareenge, aap no bhajai ki news dekhenge. Aaj kaun neg ther, no bhajegi news. I'm not saying TV doesn't have a space in a big event, right, with scale matters, but in a day-to-day way, you are consuming, like me, content on our phone, on the go. And that has created an opportunity for independent players. So, if I were to summarize it, I would say, I was asked to talk there 40 seconds left, so I'll try and stick to time. What is the future of, not just Mojo's story, what is the future of digital content, digital news content in India? And I think, like everybody else, in newspapers, in television, we're still figuring out revenue models. I think across mediums, the biggest crisis for media, not just in India, but globally is, how do you remain journalists and find a way to be self-sustaining? What is the best way to fund media in a way that it remains independent? Obviously, political funding nobody wants, yet newspapers are dependent on government advertising. Corporate ownership is now a sign of the times. Nobody's comfortable with that. Is the future audience-funded platforms, but the digital media is very fragmented? Even if you want to support, let's say, five digital platforms, are you going to support all of them? These are questions before us, and I'm not going to stand here and give you some fake utopian romantic answer that we know the answers to these questions. We don't. We're trying to figure it out, but I can tell you that in terms of impact, in terms of being able to change the perception of a story, in terms of connecting with your viewers, in terms of connecting with your readers, we are in a much freer space. Our capital expenditure is less. The show that I used to anchor in any TV with a crew of, let's say, no less than 15 people, I do a daily streaming live show every evening at 5 p.m. called Bottom Line with Barkha, and we do it with two people. That's how fast technology has changed, and it's professionally produced. It has graphics. It has sound bites. It has everything. If you watched it on your phone, you would not be able to tell that you're not watching the show that has been made by a television channel. And therefore, we must be ahead of the technology disruption. And let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, and to all my friends in the media, it's coming so fast that if we are talking one year from now, you will be using AI to write copy. You will be using AI to write your captions and descriptions, and you will be using AI to generate videos. And there are an entire slew of jobs that will be in danger. And why do I mention this? I mention this because the one thing that AI can't do, the one thing that technology can't do is to build a relationship between yourself and your audience. And why I am confident about Mojo's story now entering its fourth year is that I believe that today people do not come to a website, a channel, a program. They come to a person. If you are able to build a relationship with your audience, your reader or your viewer, if people believe in you, if people even disagree with you, if people fight with you every day on Twitter, but also say well done and sometimes say terribly done, but they're engaged with you, that is where the future of content is. And we are in a medium agnostic phase. We are entering a medium agnostic phase of content because if everybody's consuming content on their phone or if most people are consuming content on their phone, then whether you're running a 20-person organization or a 2000-person organization, you have the same opportunity to connect with your audience. And finally, nothing encapsulates that better than the fact that the Manipur viral video, any guesses on how long that video was, anybody knows what the length of that video was? Any guesses? 26 seconds. It was 26 seconds. A 26-second video, right? A 26-second video did what news organizations with thousands of employees and billions in rupees as budgets, or millions at least, were not able to do. And if you need anything to drive home, how swiftly content is changing, it is that. So in the end, I will only say, because I'm getting the sign that times up, as a journalist today, three things remain undated by technology and by the medium. Passion, authenticity, and a capacity to take risk and be courageous in your storytelling. It doesn't matter what the medium is. If you have these, your audience will not just connect with you, it will also forgive you on occasion. I mean, there are times I've come on my show, we can't pretend to know everything about everything, and I think, you know what? I don't know this, maybe you can tell me. Be honest with your audience, be authentic. Authenticity and passion are the two most important virtues, and I'm confident that if you have those in doll-ups, which I think our small team certainly does, and we're at 1.1 million on YouTube today, and we're self-funded, we have no venture capital equity, we've not gone to the market, we've not taken corporate money. So I feel that if you have these qualities, you can certainly build a fantastic future today. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you so much, ma'am, for being honest and authentic with your views. May I please request, Rohail Amin, Senior Data Exchange for Media Group, to please present a token of love and appreciation to man. You know, we can be louder, I believe, we can show some more love, just saying.