Revisiting Rupert Murdoch's India adventure as he hangs up his boots

Once he arrived on the scene in a rapidly liberalising India, there was no stopping him. The country's private broadcasting story begins with the Murdoch-Subhash Chandra team

Rupert Murdoch fixated on the man in the brick-red kurta. “What do you do?” asked the (then) 63-year-old chairman of News Corporation that owned Star TV. “I told him I was tasked with the Indianisation of Star,” says Rakesh Sharma, then head of Star Plus and now an acclaimed documentary filmmaker.

This was in late 1995, soon after Channel [V]’s success. India was becoming important and the meeting in Hong Kong was designed to ‘educate’ the Murdochs and a bunch of New York bean counters. Sharma’s proud display of ‘Indian formals’ in a roomful of suits got Murdoch’s attention.

For over two