Subir Ghosh is a Bangalore-based independent journalist-writer-researcher. He writes on subjects related (but not limited) to environment, cinema, conflict, wildlife and forests, the Northeast, gender, retail and fashion, and human rights.
Subir started out his career in sales, spending three years in that profession, before switching over to journalism in 1991. His first job as a journalist was with the eastern metropolitan desk of the Press Trust of India (PTI) in Kolkata. He joined The Telegraph daily in 1994 and was part of the first ‘region desk’ that was set up in the newspaper to bring out dedicated pages and supplements for the states of Bihar, Odisha and the Northeast. It was here that he developed a keen interest in north-east affairs and started specialising in the region. He wrote and reported prolifically on the Northeast during his tenure in the daily.
He shifted base to New Delhi in mid-1998 and joined the publications units of the leading non-government organisation on environmental issues, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). During his short stay here, he worked on the fifth edition of CSE’s flagship publication, The State of India’s Environment. He thereafter moved to the apex body of the hospitality industry, the Federation of Hotels and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI), and served as assistant secretary-general in charge of publications. He turned around the staid black-and-white newsletter into a four-colour glossy which broke even within a year. Here, he also brought out a number of research studies on the state of the hospitality industry in India. His next assignment was with leading wildlife organisation, the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), where he was in charge of communications: handling publications, the website of the WTI and media relations. He was to have a second stint here again in 2009-2010.
In the interregnum, Subir experimented with the online media and published two ‘e-zines’: The Reviewer (one that reviewed books) and Northeast Vigil (one that aggregated news and information pertaining to north-east India). In 2005, he started a website called Newswatch which collated news about the media industry, press freedom issues and media ethics. The mainstay of the site were micro research studies about how various incidents and issues would be covered in the Indian media. All these studies were appreciated worldwide for their detailed analyses: each story that was selected for a study was assessed, at times, based on more than 100 parameters. He still specialises in Northeast affairs, and has served in the past as an advisory council member with the Centre for Northeast Studies (C-NES).
Subir is the author of Frontier Travails: Northeast - The Politics of a Mess published by Macmillan India in 2001 and has won two national awards for children’s fiction (including one titled The Dream Machine, co-authored with Richa Bansal, which won a prize for children’s science fiction). He is passionate about all the subjects that he writes about: conflict, ethnicities, wildlife, human rights, women, poverty, media, and cinema. His last assignment was with the Bangalore edition of DNA newspaper. He currently blogs at www.write2kill.in, tweets at @write2kill, and is co-author of Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis.