Russi Karanjia

Rustom Khurshedji Karanjia (15 September 1912 – 1 February 2008) was an Indian journalist and editor. He typically signed his reports as "R. K. Karanjia". He founded the Blitz, a weekly tabloid with a focus on investigative journalism, in 1941, and ran it for the next four decades. He also founded The Daily, a daily tabloid which was run by his daughter.

Early life and background Karanjia was born to a Parsi family in Quetta, now in Balochistan, in the Northern part of Pakistan.

Career Karanjia began writing while still in college, and during the 1930s, Karanjia was employed as an assistant editor at The Times of India. He left The Times of India in 1941 to launch Blitz (newspaper), a weekly tabloid with a focus on investigative journalism. It was one of the few Indian newspapers to have carried out interviews with the high and mighty, including the likes of Fidel Castro and Zhou Enlai. The Daily and The Blitz were also incubators for the likes of R.K. Laxman, Haroon Rashid, P. Sainath, and Teesta Setalvad, all of whom started their journalistic careers there. as Karanjia reported the next day.

Leanings as owner-editor of Blitz Karanjia was the founder and the owner-editor of Blitz, a weekly tabloid published out of Mumbai. The columnist Sudheendra Kulkarni wrote about how the decision to launch Blitz was taken over a cup of tea between three patriotic journalists, i.e., BV Nadkarni, Benjamin Horniman, and Karanjia, at the Wayside Inn, a restaurant near Kala Ghoda, Mumbai. The first issue of Blitz was published on 1 February 1941 (the same day that Karanjia died in 2008). Kulkarni calls his journalism "irreverent, investigative, courageous and a little titillating". Filmmaker Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Magsaysay-award-winning journalist P. Sainath were associated with Blitz. Blitz was radical and idealistic, left-leaning, and pro-Soviet.

Karanjia remained a staunch critic of the Congress party while continuing to remain friendly with Congress leaders Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi. However, Karanjia later became disillusioned with communism and its anti-Hindu secularism. He became a strong sympathiser of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Ayodhya movement. Initially a fierce critic of the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba, Karanjia later became his devotee in 1976. According to Kulkarni, P. Sainath was replaced as the magazine's deputy editor by Karanjia, who appointed Kulkarni to the post instead of him.

Books 1952: China stands up and wolves of the Wild West 1956: SEATO: Security or Menace? 1958: Arab Dawn 1960: The Mind of Mr. Nehru 1961: Castro: Storm Over Latin America 1966: The Philosophy Of Mr. Nehru 1970: Round Germany with Hitler 1977: Kundalini Yoga 1977: Mind of a Monarch: Biography of the Shah of Iran 1997: God Lives In India