Just In Time

Modesty Blaise stares down from a wall in her trademark svelte black bodysuit. Bruce Lee stands in kung fu alert on another. No one would have batted an eyelid if the zany Kookie Kol stepped off his pedestal and strolled down the bright corridors.

Compared with the conservative dignity of The Statesmans landmark mansion on Chowringee Road, the gaudy mezzanine head office of the Junior Statesman, Indias first teenage magazine, couldnt have made a more telling statement.

JS, as it was affectionately known to a whole generation of avid teenage readers in Calcuttas Swinging Sixties, was a radical concept in print journalism at the time. In the ten years that it was published, JS redefined the role of the traditional English-reading Indian audience in many ways. It was a means to enabling the teenager to come into his own, recalls Jug Suraiya, the noted columnist who joined JS at age 20, fresh from St Xaviers College.

 

JS was conceived by artist and journalist Desmond Doig, who was then assistant editor with The Statesman. The basic idea, as Suraiya explained, was to help invent the Indian teenager.

Doigs contention was that in India, people were either treated as children or as adults. The intermediate stage - the experimentation - was missing. JS, as its perky strapline For people who think young put it, was aimed at filling in that gap.

The importance of JS was that Doigs plan went beyond editorial strategy. He realised that there was a very large teenage segment that would interest advertisers. Those were the days when advertising was considered a necessary evil, but Doig saw it as being complementary, says Suraiya.

Doig saw advertising as an additional service for the reader who was the consumer as well. In fact, JS actually asked its advertisers to create special advertisments for its readers.

When JS first launched in 1967 it proved a huge success in editorial terms. With its lively editorial cocktail that ranged from lead stories written by young people on music, fashion and lifestyle and youth issues, to agony aunt columns, comics and posters, beauty tips by Zeenat Aman, it provided a much neglected section of readers with an identity.

JS also clicked because it virtually invented what is now termed as called infotainment.

That was only part of its appeal. In sharp contrast to the received editorial wisdom of the day, Doig conceived JS as an interactive medium. We succeeded in banishing the vertical hierarchy between the editorial and the reader, says Suraiya.

The magazine built a large network of campus correspondents. Many of their readers became regular writers for the magazine. (Some of them are leading journalists and writers today Shashi Tharoor, Bachi Karkaria, Sunil Sethi, M J Akbar, Raghu Rai).

The interaction went beyond editorial subjects. For instance, the magazine introduced a vote-an-ad contest. Readers were invited to go through all the issues of a year, pick their favourite advertisment - and explain their choice. The spinoff: the shelf life of the magazine was lengthened.

The JS circulation peaked at 40,000 copies -- Femina, a market leader then, sold 60,000.

But the reasons for JS final closure lay precisely in its success. In essence, it was too far ahead of its time. One of its biggest problems was that it was culturally out of synch with its parent organisation, The Statesman, then an institution of sorts in the city.

This meant the parent gave it little back up. During its last days, Suraiya recalls, The Statesmans antiquated press could neither deliver the quality or quantity that JS needed. But the unions would not allow the printing to be outsourced. The usual problems began: issues would be delayed. People began to leave. By mid-August 1977, the magazine finally went under.