Narasimhan Ram (born May 4, 1945) is an Indian journalist. Ram has been the Managing-Director of The Hindu since 1977 and its Editor-in-Chief since June 27, 2003. Ram also heads the other publications of The Hindu Group such as Frontline, The Hindu Business Line and Sportstar, and has been awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India. He is referred to as a left-wing editor and known to believe in left/communist ideology.[1][2]
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Ram was born on May 4, 1945 in Madras, British India. He was the eldest son of G. Narasimhan who served as Managing-Director of The Hindu from 1959 to 1977. Ram is a great-grandson of S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, the patriarch of the Kasturi family.
Ram graduated from Loyola College,[3] Chennai, with a bachelor's degree in arts in 1964, received a master's degree from Presidency College, Chennai, in 1966, and later an M.S. in comparative journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.[4] He actively participated in the students politics. He was vice-president of the Students Federation of India (SFI), which is politically linked to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), at the time of its formation in 1970 in Thiruvananthapuram.[5]
Beginning his career in The Hindu as an Associate Editor in 1977, Ram was made the Washington Correspondent in 1980. His association with Frontline dates back to 1984, when the magazine was started.[4] N Ram has become famous as a journalist during his writings in exposing Bofors Scandal during the reign of late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Prior to his current position as the editor-in-chief of the Hindu daily, Ram had served as the Editor of Frontline magazine and Sportstar between 1991 and 2003.
Ram's contribution to journalism has been recognized by a number of awards. These include the Asian Investigative Journalist of the Year (1990) Award conferred by the Press Foundation of Asia at the "One Asia Assembly", Bofors Case, the disciplined application of his journalistic idealism and the impact of his revelations on the Indian political scene"; the B.D. Goenka, 1989, shared with Chitra Subramaniam; in the interest of the nation"; and XLRI’s First JRD Tata Award for Business Ethics, awarded at this management institute’s 46th Annual Convocation at Jamshedpur on March 23, 2003.[6]
Ram's first wife Susan was an English woman who came to south India as a research student. Like Ram, she was (and remains) an atheist with a Left perspective on politics. After their marriage, Susan worked as a teacher, a freelance journalist, an editor for Oxford University press publications in India and a television presenter. As a husband and wife team, both published the first volume of a biography on R.K.Narayan, the eminent Indian writer. Their daughter Vidya Ram, herself a journalist, was a Journalism topper at Columbia University in New York and even won a Pulitzer fellowship for Journalism. [7] After the divorce from Susan, Ram married Mariam Chandy, who is the founder and Managing Director of TNQ Books and Journals (an ePublishing company that works on the leading scientific journals of the world).