Pursuits

The elusive clout of media barons

Vir Sanghvi — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:24:56 +0000

I ran into Rajat Sharma, anchor and effective proprietor of India TV, the other night. Rajat is one of the pioneers of Hindi news journalism but when he started his own channel a few years ago, he found that the going was tough. At one stage, he said, the situation was so desperate that the channel had no money to pay salaries and he and his wife had to dispose of personal assets to pay his staff.
Crowded field: The rush to own a news channel is prompted by the wrong reasons. Rajeev Dabral / MintIndia TV is now doing well—it is currently the No. 1 Hindi news channel in the country—and the profits are rolling in. But Rajat says that he is astonished by the enthusiasm of some new entrants in an industry where it is so difficult to make any money at all—and so easy to go bust. He says that he keeps running into people who say they want to enter the media or start a TV news channel because they believe it will give them clout and influence. He has told them that it is a hard, largely unprofitable grind and that all talk of media clout is rubbish. He runs a successful channel but he does not believe that his clout has increased because of India TV. Nor does he believe that anybody who owns a TV channel has gained in influence because of the channel. I thought about what he had said and decided he was probably right. There has never been any shortage of rich people who are dying to enter the media because they believe that ownership of a newspaper or a channel gives them power and influence.Vir’s previous Lounge columns And yet, it is hard to think of anybody who has become powerful on the basis of media ownership. On the other hand, I can think of many rich people who have been burnt by their enthusiasm for the media. In the 1980s, Vijaypat Singhania started The Indian Post, a Bombay newspaper. Not only did it make no difference to the clout of the JK empire, but it actually backfired on Vijaypat. Satish Sharma, who was then a powerful man, blamed him for every negative article that appeared and forced him to sack his editor. Eventually, the newspaper closed down. In the 1990s, the late L.M. Thapar’s passion for newspapers led him to make vast investments in The Pioneer, which launched a much-feted Delhi edition. Not only did the paper fail to make any money but it did nothing for Thapar’s clout. Eventually, the Thapars sold it to Chandan Mitra who is doing a much better job of running it. Most celebrated of all is the case of Dhirubhai Ambani who bought the Sunday Observer from Ashwin Shah of Jaico and launched a daily paper called The Business and Political Observer.The Sunday Observer was successful in its Jaico avatar but it never worked as an Ambani operation. The daily paper was an embarrassment and far from adding to Reliance’s clout, it actually became a liability for the Ambanis. In recent times, the focus has shifted to television. Many industrialists believe that ownership of a TV channel will ensure that ministers and bureaucrats will kowtow to them. In fact, not one businessman has been able to launch a top-class channel no matter how much money has been blown up. In the days when Subroto Roy was flush with funds he imagined that his Sahara TV empire would top the ratings because of the vast amounts he spent on programming. In fact, the channels never did particularly well. And when Sahara’s fortunes changed after the fall of the NDA government, the so-called clout of the TV empire was shown to be illusory as Roy struggled with adversity. My sense is that ownership of a TV channel can actually be a problem, rather than an advantage. For many years, I was associated with the Star TV network. At the time, Star had a terrific news channel and for part of this period, the No. 1 entertainment channel. But I never had the sense that Star had any clout at all. Every minister and bureaucrat would push Star around. One chief executive was threatened with legal action and possible imprisonment. Licences were routinely denied. Uplinking was always a problem. And the government acted as though Star should be grateful for being allowed to exist at all. Nothing has changed since those days. At the fringes of the Hindi news market are many small TV channels, some of them backed by medium-sized businessmen in search of influence. My guess is that most of these channels will not survive the current slowdown. But even while they exist, it is hard to see what they have done for the clout of their owners. You could argue that this is only true of new entrants and that the existing media houses have vast influence. But even this is dubious. Everybody who is anybody in Delhi political circles reads The Indian Express. Nevertheless, the Express’ Delhi offices were sealed by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) for reasons that most people regarded as flimsy. The clout of the media made no difference. Or take an even better example. The most important media house in the country today is Bennett, Coleman and Co., owner of The Times of India, Economic Times etc. But, in the mid to late 1990s, all of The Times of India’s influence could not prevent the needless harassment of Ashok Jain, head of the family that owned Bennett. We know now that at least one of the officials who persecuted Jain was a crook because he was later arrested on corruption charges. But no matter how much the Times protested, Enforcement Directorate officials hounded Jain almost to his death. If the Times cannot use its own clout to defend its owner, then what sense does it make to talk of the power of media barons? So why do rich people get attracted to the media? It’s the glamour, I think. It’s the same syndrome that causes businessmen to invest in Bollywood films. They think that some of the glamour will rub off on them. In fact, it is their wealth that rubs off on Bollywood’s glamorous people. So it is with the media. Believe the hype about power and clout and you will end up poorer and still entirely without influence.

When the movie script rewrote the book

Vir Sanghvi — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:26:22 +0000

Can anybody explain to me just what the hell is going on with the collected works of Robert Ludlum? You remember Ludlum, of course? He’s the guy who churned out those very thick airport best-sellers in the late 1970s and the 1980s.

The books were notable for their titles: each included a proper noun followed by a simple one. Thus we had The Chancellor Manuscript, The Matarese Circle, The Holcroft Covenant and more including, most famously, The Bourne Identity.
I used to read Ludlum in the 1980s. The books were page-turners. He had a certain flair for describing action. And the novels made long-haul flights more bearable.
Alias: This Bourne isn’t a character from the book.
Alias: This Bourne isn’t a character from the book.
But never did I think that Ludlum would be remembered. The basic problem was that all his plots were remarkably similar. It always came down to a shadowy secret group of villains who put our hero (and though the heroes changed with each book, they were all cut from the same cloth) in danger so grave that it took him 500 pages to escape.
And yet, seven years after Ludlum died, the industry lives on. There are faux-Ludlum novels, licensed by his estate, written by such authors as Erik Van Lustbader. There are new editions of the books that Ludlum did actually write himself. Two new movies, one starring Denzel Washington and the other with Leonardo DiCaprio, are under production.
And last month, the Ludlum estate sold the movie rights for the entire catalogue to Universal Pictures for a figure that is officially undisclosed but could work out to hundreds of millions of dollars over the years.
What is going on? How did this master of the chunky airport best-seller turn into such a hot property years after he died?
You probably know the answer.
Jason Bourne.
I remember The Bourne Identity when it first came out. Even Time magazine which, in common with the rest of the media, had been scornful of Ludlum’s output, had to concede that this was a better book than most.
The plot was inventive (by Ludlum standards, at least). A fishing vessel pulls a man out of the water. He is wounded and has lost his memory. All he has is a number tattooed on to his body.
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The rest of the novel consisted of the wounded man’s efforts to find out his real identity (hence, the title) and to discover who had shot him. At first, it seems that he is called Jason Bourne. But this turns out to be an alias. He is actually an assassin assigned by the US government to find the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal.
When the book was written, Carlos was still at large, so we knew that Bourne would not kill him in the end. But it was daring for somebody as firmly rooted in conspiracy fantasy as Ludlum to actually include a real-life character in one of his books. Being Ludlum, he turned this into a bit of a conspiracy as well. It is suggested that Carlos lives in Paris under a secret identity and Bourne tries to work out who he really is.
The Bourne Identity sold well and a few years later, Ludlum broke with precedent to use the character in a second novel. When that was also a best-seller, he wrote a third Bourne novel.
Hollywood had never been as keen on Ludlum as it was on say, Frederick Forsythe so The Bourne Identity did not became a movie. Instead, it became a TV mini-series with Richard Chamberlain (a journeyman actor whose finest moment came in the 1960s as Dr Kildare on TV) which met with some success at the time but which is largely forgotten now (I can’t even find it on DVD).
Then, for decades: nothing. Ludlum collaborated on a TV show and wrote a few more books but it was generally agreed that his moment had passed.
In 2000, I read that The Bourne Identity was being made into a movie. I was intrigued. Why would anybody dredge up that old novel? The world had changed immeasurably in the two decades since the book came out. For one, there was no Carlos any longer. A French undercover team had invaded his West Asian hideaway and captured him. He was now lodged in a Paris jail. And no, he had never had a secret identity and lived undercover as Ludlum had posited.
Then, the movie came out (Ludlum died while it was being filmed) and I was startled by how different it was from the book. Only the basic plot outline (the amnesia) remained and there was no mention of Carlos and there were no secret societies. Even Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne was nothing like the character Ludlum had described. In effect, they had reinvented the whole franchise while keeping its name.
The Bourne Identity did record business and Damon came on board for two more movies (there were three Ludlum Bourne books) though they switched directors to the edgier and more politically left-wing Paul Greengrass.
The second film (The Bourne Supremacy) had nothing to do with the book at all, and nor did the third (The Bourne Ultimatum). The details of Jason Bourne’s life (his wife, for instance, who appears in the books) were completely altered.
But it worked. It may not have been Ludlum’s Jason Bourne up there on the screen but the movie rewrote the rules for screen action. Even the producers of the James Bond series replaced the suave Pierce Brosnan with the edgier Daniel Craig in an effort to be more Bourne-like. It was not lost on them that the three Bourne films made over a billion dollars—much more than the last three Brosnan-Bond movies.
Which brings us back to the Robert Ludlum revival. Given the size of the deal that the estate has struck with Universal, we are going to be bombarded with Ludlum movies over the next few years.
But here’s my question: Will they really be based on the books? Because if they are, they’ll seem dated and flop. On the other hand, if they are completely rewritten (as the Bourne films were), then why bother to buy the books?
I guess we’ll find out.

How you can propel change, make a difference

Vir Sanghvi — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:30:03 +0000

Is there something that we can do with the anger that all of us feel in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks? Can we find some constructive way of channelling it apart from appearing on TV shows and demanding that so-called Pakistani flags be removed from slums near our favourite five-star hotels?

In the line of fire: Police officers at the funeral of ATS chief Hemant Karkare. PTI
In the line of fire: Police officers at the funeral of ATS chief Hemant Karkare. PTI
It saddens me that so many morons from Mumbai’s chattering classes went on TV to declare that on the whole terrorism was a bad thing but gosh, when it appeared this close to their doorstep it was so bad that we really had to give up on democracy/attack Pakistan/abandon our civil liberties/not pay taxes or whatever.
Because the middle class awakening can make a difference. There are ways in which the educated middle class can use this anger to push for changes in the system. The events of 26/11 exposed the structural weakness in the way India is protected. We may not have the votes to change the way in which it is governed, but we certainly have the power to push for changes in the way it is policed. I yield to nobody in my admiration for the Armed Forces (despite the odd admiral who may have behaved like a prat in the aftermath of the crisis) but the problems in our security structure do not have anything to do with our excellent army, air force or navy.
They have to do with the police. It worries me that the police have not got the credit they deserve for the successes of 26/11. If you look at the CCTV footage that was released by the authorities of the scene inside the Taj you realize that long before the commandos went in, lightly armed Mumbai police officers and constables were already inside risking their lives as automatic fire and grenades rained down on them.
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The deaths of such officers as Hemant Karkare took place only because they led from the front, actually placing themselves in the line of fire. We forget also the sacrifices of individual lower-level officers and constables—the railway policemen who attacked the terrorists with their World War II vintage 303s and the policemen from Mumbai’s DB Marg station who using hand arms and lathis arrested Mohammed Ajmal Kasab—and got him alive. One sub-inspector, a 54-year-old man with a family, grabbed Kasab and did not let go of him even as he was shot several times. He died but his efforts put Kasab into custody.
We forget also that the NSG—the undoubted heroes of the siege—is a joint venture between the police and the army; the NSG’s director general, J.K. Dutt, who personally led the operation and impressed all of India with his modesty, clear-headedness and leadership qualities, is an officer from the Indian Police Service (he is now probably the one alumnus that students of Mayo College, where he studied, are most proud of but that’s another story).
The NSG was set up by Rajiv Gandhi (as was the Special Protection Group, India’s answer to the US Secret Service and one of our finest forces—also run by the IPS) specifically to fight terrorism and it has never failed at a single operation.
One problem is that successive governments have not had Rajiv Gandhi’s passion for security and intelligence and all the forces have been denied many of the facilities that they require to function effectively. A larger problem is that all state governments ignore the crucial issue of police reform for fear that a professional police force will not allow them to interfere with its functioning.
It’s here that the middle class has a role to play—it is one area where we can make a difference and can change things for the better.
Take the example of the NSG. No sooner had the media highlighted the fact that the force did not even have a designated plane than the government promptly ordered three planes for the NSG. Now, the strength of the NSG will go up and there will be NSG units stationed in major cities.
All this is entirely due to pressure from the media. It’s not just the media that can make a difference. I saw banker Amit Chandra, lawyer Cyril Shroff, businessman Cyrus Gazdar and others on Maneka Doshi’s CNBC programme and was impressed by the clear-headedness of their vision. Now that group has found more like them and taken the legal route. They’ve filed public interest litigation demanding that the Mumbai police be given the facilities they need to secure the city effectively.
They have also asked why successive reports of police commissions have been ignored. And they’ve urged the court to ask state governments to push ahead with police reform.
Those members of the group I have spoken to are realistic about their prospects. They know that the battle for reform of the police force—which involves many state governments and political parties—will be a long and hard one (can you see Mayawati agreeing to let go of her hold on the UP police, for instance?). But they think that the effort is worth it.
They are more optimistic about using the judicial system to get the Mumbai police the facilities they need. Their petition asks the court to appoint a citizens group to oversee the process. That way we can be sure that the money that is spent actually goes on the right things.
So yes, there is a role for the educated middle class. What a shame then that the buffoons of Mumbai’s Page 3 set nearly blew it for us.

Does life after death exist?

Vir Sanghvi — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 06:40:31 +0000

It is now clear that the terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks were fidayeen or suicide soldiers. They came to Mumbai certain that they would not go back and were happy to give up their lives for their jehadi cause.
What makes a man set out on a suicide mission? In some cases, it is desperation. The kamikaze pilots of World War II flew to their deaths in a last ditch effort to prevent Japan’s humiliating defeat.

The Sri Lankan Tamils have often lost everything and see no purpose in continuing to live.
But the jehadi suicide attackers—the ones who attacked the World Trade Center and those who stormed Mumbai—are often men who face no particular deprivation and who do not emerge from desperate circumstances.
They do it for religion. They are told that if they die in the service of Islam, they will go to paradise where they will enjoy the favours of innumerable virgins (one good reason for any woman not to die a virgin, I guess) and other pleasures of the flesh.
The key to their motivation is the belief that what happens in this brief life doesn’t really matter. It is the hereafter that counts. So one’s actions in this life must be geared towards ensuring happiness in the next one.
It sounds odd and bizarre when placed in this context—heaven must be a truly dreadful place if all these suicide bombers land up there for their orgies—but it is a concept that most religions share.
In Christianity, actions in this life decide whether you go to heaven or hell. In Hinduism, the soul survives and is reborn, till it is finally freed of the endless cycle of life and death. Buddhism is also big on reincarnation. And so on.
So, take away the concept of life after death—whether in heaven, hell or another body—and most religions collapse. Because prophets cannot ensure justice in this bitterly unfair world, they promise it in the next.
Except: Is there another world? Is there really life after death? And crucially, is there any such thing as the soul, which exists independently of the body?
These are questions that have bedevilled philosophy, science and theology for centuries. The hard, mechanistic scientific view of existence is that our consciousness is contained in the 1.3kg bag of tissue and water that we call the brain. When the brain dies, so do we. Nothing survives.
If you take this view to its logical conclusion then human beings are no more than machines. Advanced, remarkably sophisticated machines, perhaps. But machines, nevertheless. Every action is the result of how our programming reacts to various inputs. If we are programmed (genetically perhaps) to be emotional then we will cry in a given situation. Others who are programmed to be less emotional will not cry in the same situation.
This is the current scientific consensus and it has huge implications for society. The basis of all morality—and therefore, of law—is that human beings have free will. When confronted with a situation, we can choose how to react. If you do something bad to me, it is within my power to decide whether to assault you/kill you/ shout at you/forget about it/forgive you/etc.
But if my reactions have already been determined by my programming, then I really have no free will at all. I will do whatever I am programmed to do. Of course, the programming is a mixture of genetics and conditioning and experiences so it evolves over time.
But here’s the thing: I have no choice in the matter.
Once you take away my free will, I have no responsibility for my actions. And if that is true, then morality collapses. How can you blame somebody for something he has no control over?
The free will vs determinism debate is nearly as old as moral philosophy itself but it has been sharpened over the last decade by advances in science. Neuroscientists are now convinced that there is no evidence of the mind (a great philosophical construct of the last two centuries) or of any consciousness independent of the brain. When the brain dies, so do we. No soul survives. Nobody gets to deflower virgins in paradise.
Many scientists and doctors are religious people and are unwilling to accept the proposition that there is no soul and therefore no afterlife and probably no God. They fall back on what are known as near-death experiences (NDE).
NDEs began to be talked about after Raymond Moody published his book Life After Life in 1975. Moody reported that people who had been declared clinically dead but then revived and brought back to life all reported the same phenomenon: a feeling of floating in the air, looking down at their bodies and drifting towards a tunnel of light, sometimes with Jesus in attendance.
These days, hospitals revive something like 15% of all cardiac arrest victims who have flatlined so we have many accounts of NDEs. And they are all remarkably similar if you allow for cultural variations: Hindus may see Ram rather than Jesus near the tunnel of light.
If these are accurate, then there is indeed life after death. More crucially, a human being is not just a machine. There is a consciousness—a soul, even—that survives physical death.
Put it another way: The scientific survival of religion and morality may well depend on the validity of NDEs.
The trouble is that all the NDE accounts are anecdotes. And many scientists say the phenomenon is one that occurs naturally when the brain is shutting down—it is all inside the patient’s head, not near a tunnel of light.
According to Brian Appleyard in The Sunday Times (London), a research team is now placing pictures near ceilings at hospitals. If NDE accounts are accurate and souls do float upwards, then those who are revived should be able to recall what was on the pictures.
It doesn’t sound like a perfect study. But it represents one interesting attempt by science to take NDEs seriously.
And to tell us whether suicide bombers are wasting their time.

The year we learnt to hit pause before reacting

Vir Sanghvi — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:01:18 +0000

One of the things that the Western media seem most surprised by is the relative calm with which India has handled the 26/11 attacks. Many Western countries had worried that our immediate response to the terror strikes would be to bomb Pakistan. And certainly, much of the commentary in the foreign press in the days after the attacks concentrated on the imminent war in the region. The predictions of an attack on Pakistan came because of the way other states have reacted to terrorism—and the US’ responses in particular.

American presidents have regularly sent missiles and bombers to destroy sites in sovereign countries that they believe are being used for terrorist activities. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya. Bill Clinton bombed Afghanistan. And of course, George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 was the invasion of Afghanistan.

Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint

If we went by American precedents, India would have no difficulty in offering a moral justification for an invasion of Pakistan. Consider the post 9/11 response. America asked the Afghan government to hand over Osama bin Laden. When the Afghans refused, the US invaded and instituted “regime change”.

So, when Pakistan refused to hand over terror suspects, we could have used the same justification for launching our own invasion.

So, why didn’t we do that? Why has the mood in India been so introspective rather than aggressive? We almost seem angrier with ourselves—and with our politicians and intelligence services—than we do with the terrorists. Why don’t people who want us to carpet bomb Pakistan receive a more enthusiastic response?

I’m wary of making grand judgements but it seems to me that 2008 might go down in history as the year when Indians became coolly realistic about what it means to live next door to Pakistan.

The Indian response to Pakistan has always been complex. In the north, memories of the horrors of Partition have largely faded but a new generation of Punjabis remains fascinated by Pakistan and Pakistanis. It is fashionable to caricature the Punjabi attitude to Pakistan in terms of old buffers lighting candles at the Wagah border, dreaming of the by-lanes of Lahore and inviting professional peaceniks from across the border to seminars at the India International Centre.

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But that generation is dying out. And though its descendants do not share in the nostalgia, they still respond to that old cliché: “We are the same people, really”. When I edited the Hindustan Times, I was forever being told by market research agencies that readers in Punjabi Delhi (even younger ones) wanted more news from Pakistan.

The science of being Mr Politically Incorrect

Vir Sanghvi — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:32:31 +0000

I don’t know how many people mourned the passing of Michael Crichton at the beginning of November. For most of this century, Crichton was known for two things. One was his importance as a climate change denier (his fiction destroyed the argument for global warming, leading to protests from environmentalists who said that he had misrepresented facts). And the other was his role as the creator of Jurassic Park, the novel that Steven Spielberg turned into a massively profitable Hollywood franchise.

Ahead of his times: Crichton (right) and Spielberg first met during the filming of The Andromeda Strain; (left) Spielberg turned Jurassic Park into a blockbuster. Jeff Christensen / ReutersBoth are not inconsiderable achievements. It requires guts to take issue with the climate change lobby, even if your fiction is more interesting than Al Gore’s movie-making. And the creation of a successful Hollywood franchise is not to be laughed at: Hundreds of writers try and fail to do this each year.
But neither of these achievements either impressed or particularly surprised me. Crichton always had the ability to take on the conventional wisdom and to fight politically correct lobbies. His novel Disclosure (later made into a so-so film with Demi Moore and Michael Douglas) was greeted with outrage by feminists because it attacked the prevailing politically correct notions of sexual harassment. But over a decade later, many of us would agree that nothing Crichton said was terribly shocking—or untrue.
Nor did his cinematic achievements surprise me. Right from the time in the early 1970s when Universal turned his novel The Andromeda Strain into a movie, I knew that he had a gift for telling stories cinematically; a view that was confirmed when he directed the excellent West World and the underrated The Great Train Robbery (with Sean Connery).
Also Read: Vir’s previous Lounge columns
But even as he achieved his biggest sales ever and earned many millions, I was a little turned off by Crichton’s work. Many of his later novels seemed to me to be trite. The best-selling Airframe about an investigation into a mysterious plane crash had a foolish denouement: A child was at the controls of the plane. Next, the last Crichton book I read featured a talking bird and veered dangerously close into Dr Dolittle territory. There was a clear sense that Crichton was now writing solely to please his publishers who expected big fat best-sellers.
The Crichton I liked was at his best in the 1970s and the 1980s. I discovered him in the early 1970s as a thriller writer whose The Andromeda Strain was a real page-turner but as I read more of his work, I found that a single theme ran through many of his books. Unlike many other best-selling authors, Crichton understood and was fascinated by science and technology.
But his fascination always led to the same point: What happens when we depend on technology and it fails us? The Terminal Man was a modern reworking of Frankenstein and it told the same story of an experiment gone wrong. In Congo, we were first dazzled by the satellite and video technology (still new in the 1980s) that accompanied the explorers into the African jungle. Then, just as we believed that technology was the future, it failed and the novel turned into a Rider Haggard-style jungle adventure.
In the movies, the same themes reappeared. Westworld was about a theme park where action figures entertained visitors—till of course, the figures went rogue and tried to kill the same visitors. And though Jurassic Park is now seen as an adventure story, the book was actually a morality tale about the dangers of tampering with nature through science. In Crichton’s novel, scientists believe that by cloning dinosaurs from DNA preserved in bits of amber they can create the ultimate theme park. But of course, the dinosaurs have no intention of playing Mickey and Minnie Mouse for the visitors and go berserk. (Westworld with dinosaurs…)
I enjoyed these books because Crichton was always on the cutting edge of science and technology. He wrote about discoveries and inventions well before they entered the public domain and he explained how they worked with a felicity that most science writers lack. Sometimes the plots did not live up to the early promise: Sphere collapsed, for example, because the story had no logical ending. But they were always page turners and when you finished them you had a sense that you were wiser than before. Plus, he was an early believer in chaos theory (which has a prominent place in Jurassic Park) and understood the very randomness of everyday life.
Unusually for a writer whose background was science (he was a doctor when his first books were published), Crichton was fascinated by history. His Eaters of The Dead isn’t much of a novel but the historical details are painstakingly researched. The Great Train Robbery, one of his better books, has a terrific sense of period. Even Rising Sun, his controversial best-seller about a Japanese corporation in LA, displayed his flair for research: The book offered an interesting insight into the Japanese psyche (it also gave Sean Connery his best role in years; Crichton wrote the character in the novel with Connery in mind so naturally he was the obvious choice for the movie).
My favourite among his books though is a non-fiction collection of essays called Travels. Often, non-fiction offers a deeper insight into a writer’s mind than fiction and Travels gives us a glimpse of Crichton’s world. He writes about going to a psychic in London who put him in touch with his dead father; of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro; of fighting the prejudices of a British film crew; and most revealingly, of his view of women (he was a much married man who had clearly been around.)
As far as I know, all the Crichton books are in print and almost all have been made into movies though few (apart from the first Jurassic Park) are very good. If you missed reading him while he was alive, you can make up for it now because I’m sure the books will all be re-released and repackaged to cash in on the publicity that has attended his passing.
Write to Vir at pursuits@livemint.com