Bachi Karkaria

Bachi Karkaria is an Indian journalist and columnist. She has served as an editor at The Times of India and has also helped create new brands for the Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd media group. She is best known for her satirical column called Erratica in the newspaper and as the author of the best selling title Dare To Dream: A Life of M.S. Oberoi.

She also writes a relationships advice column called Giving Gyan for Mumbai Mirror, a city tabloid for the Times of India group. She is a regular panellist on television news programs.

Karkaria was the first Indian on the board of the World Editors Forum, is a recipient of the US-based Mary Morgan-Hewitt Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a Jefferson Fellow of the East West Centre, Honolulu. She is on the advisory boards of the National AIDS Control Organisation and the India AIDS Initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Karkaria graduated in 1965 with honours in English Literature from Loreto College, Calcutta, and then received a diploma in journalism from the University of Calcutta and was awarded a gold medal. She then joined her family newspaper. Later, she moved to the Illustrated Weekly under Khushwant Singh and subsequently joined the Times of India. In 1975, the Times Group sent her to undertake a course in advanced journalism at the Thomson Foundation, Cardiff, Wales.

In the 1980s, when city issues were still considered a lower form of journalism, Karkaria wrote stories for The Statesman, Calcutta, on urban agenda. Returning to Mumbai, she edited the Saturday edition of The Metropolis, launched the Bombay Times and was instrumental in the dramatic turnaround of the Bangalore edition of the Times of India. Having stagnated at No.4 for 10 years up to 1996, by mid-1997 the edition had shot up to No.1, and has steadily increased its lead since then. The Bangalore model became the template for all the other editions of the Times of India, including the premier Mumbai and Delhi editions.

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