Peter Mukerjea, big guy of the small screen, pens a memoir

Vikramdeep Johal 

Peter Mukerjea, the CEO of Star India from 1997 to 2007, defied heavy odds to transform an also-ran into a champion racehorse of the small screen. It has taken him more than a decade to complete his memoir, but it’s well worth the wait. This book comes at a time when India’s electronic news media is facing a crisis of credibility, courtesy of the TRP scam, the menace of fake news, and the pro-establishment leanings of a majority of the news channels. Amid the cacophony, Mukerjea makes his experienced voice heard loud and clear. He believes that news can’t be reduced to mere entertainment as it has the moral responsibility of providing accurate and reliable information to the public. He writes: “News should not be defined by ratings alone, which by their very nature force news channels to seek out the sensational or to create it through so-called ‘sting operations’ and ‘breaking news’ opportunities.” He wants news channels to be assessed and rated on the accuracy and depth of their reporting — on the basis of quality rather than simply quantity. His valuable suggestions provide ample food for thought for the Indian television industry, which finds itself at the crossroads like never before.

It was Mukerjea’s insistence on quality that helped him establish Star India as a powerhouse that took on the government-run Doordarshan, which went unchallenged in the 1980s and remained a mighty entity for the better part of the 1990s. One of the high points of his tenure as Chief Executive was the runaway success of Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC), a desi avatar of the British-origin game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The show was a make-or-break gamble for Amitabh Bachchan, an ageing superstar whose movie career was then in decline and who was apprehensive that the shift to the small screen might worsen things for him. Mukerjea describes in rich detail his meeting with Big B at the latter’s house — how he held his own before an icon, the mind games both of them played to wrest the initiative. Despite the ‘outrageous’ sum demanded by Bachchan to do the show, Mukerjea stuck his neck out, imagining what rampaging media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who had chosen him for the India assignment, would have done in this tricky situation: “Rupert would pay Amitabh the money and then would find a way to recover it.” KBC not only turned the tide for Bachchan in an astonishing way, but also cemented Star India’s place in the hearts and minds of Indian viewers.

Mukerjea dubs his eventful TV journey as an adventure, “like taking the trip of a lifetime down the Amazon river with a bunch of friends”. He laments that had he been 20 years younger, he would have entered the big, bad and brash arena to enjoy the current battle for survival. It was passion, hard work and pure genius that made him a star in his own right. What this bike lover got at his farewell party from his Star colleagues was a Royal Enfield 500 cc — a befitting gift in more ways than one. “The motorcycle, for me, signals energy, noise, speed, strength and personality – all of which I tried to bring to the office every working day, and through many working nights.” ‘Starstruck’, which has come out a year after Mukerjea — an undertrial in the Sheena Bora murder case — was released on bail, is an engrossing account of a game-changing innings in the annals of Indian television. In the ‘mobile first’ market, the ailing telly badly needs to reinvent and reform itself to regain the admiration and trust of viewers, but there seem to be no Mukerjeas around to do that.