AGRIBLOCK EXCHANGES

Welcome to the Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Mumbai. The Department was started in August 2003 with one Masters Programme in Communication and Journalism that saw 20 students. Today, we have totaled two Masters programmes in Journalism and Mass Communication, and J & MC-Strategic Integrated Communication and over 200 students. We are a public institution. Our strengths are that our classrooms represent India in terms of caste, class, religion, culture, language and region. All of India's diversity and inequalities are described here and together we dream and work for a better future.

As a postgraduate department, the first thing we inculcate in our students is a sense of responsibility and ownership for every aspect and every act of their lives. Yes, there are the usual syllabi, the exams and the marks but we know as adults that those are hardly an adequate evaluative measure of who we are and what we can achieve. Life is beautiful and it happens just this one time so we make the best of it as much as we can. As media persons, we feel the pulse of life; we are in constant touch with its rhythms and its melodies. There is work aplenty. Yes, there are jobs - the kind that come with provident funds and retirement. Those jobs, however, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. At Independence majority of the population was illiterate. Today, we march towards 100% literary. Our systems of education were geared to the assumption that the State would be the largest employer or would give us a livelihood. That too is a thing of the past. We have to gear ourselves to become entrepreneurs now. We have to up-skill and upgrade all the time. A media person is first and foremost a Schumpeterian entrepreneur. Every opportunity comes with a risk and we learn how to measure that risk. The ethics of mass media work have to go hand in hand with the commercial ethic of mass media because mass media is industrial and modern. As people who have lived and loved in an aural-oral media universe for close to 3000 years before literacy came to us, we have unique advantages. One of them is that we as a people are fantastically phonetically rich. We are migratory. The unitary and the federal come naturally to us. We are syncretic more than we are secular. Our social institutions, especially family and marriage, have shown remarkable tenacity and resilience as we battled with centuries of extreme poverty forced upon us by invaders. As a people our communication and media universe has immense potential to lead the world in mindful and meaningful communication. In our communication universe, the individual is at the centre and is free and willing to take responsibility. Let us work to that end and introduce an Indian Communication Design to the world. We know we can make the world a better place because that is what we are good at.