Bachi Karkaria is among India's most-read columnists and m-respected journalists. The first is courtesy Erratica, a usually satirical, sometimes touchingly warm take on a notable event of the week. It has a sign-off character called Alec Smart who makes a cheeky one-liner comment, and who has acquired a persona of his own. The column's popularity is helped by the fact that it appears in the Sunday edition of the Times of India which is the world's largest selling English language broadsheet. "Sometimes I think Alec Smart actually competes with my own byline. I need to put him in his place," says Bachi, placing her own tongue firmly in her cheek.

Ms Karkaria's niche in contemporary journalism comes as much from her creation of some of the most successful English newspapers from the Times of India's stables in the 1990s, and her turnaround of moribund editions. Both have became templates widely imitated in the Indian print media. Her signature invigoration process combines news that's important to know, useful to know and fun to know in attractive packaging. As a professional, she brings to the table an ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, and drill down to the details. She can distill the essence from a vast pool of data, extract facts from the hype. She also knows how to tell a story with both style and substance.

All this makes her an inspirational role model, credible, energetic, and fun to learn from. Which is why her work has diversified to training the next generation of media leaders within the group, and outside. Even abroad. As the first Indian on the board of the Paris-based World Editors Forum, she is part of the core team conducting Master Classes for Editors in Emerging Economies.

She is also a member of the Washington-based International Women's Media Foundation, a Jefferson Fellow of the East West Centre, Honolulu, and recipient of the international Mary Morgan-Hewitt Award for Lifetime Achievement. She is on the boards of the apex National AIDS Control Organisation and the India AIDS Initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Among other creative works, she has written a best-selling biography of MS Oberoi, Dare to Dream (Penguin/Viking). Her adaptation of DL Coburn's Pulitzer-prize-winning play, The Gin Game, was a critical and commercial success.

With little use for silver spoons, Ms Karkaria was born with creativity in her bloodstream. Her grandfather plunged his life savings - and into debt - to start the first Gujarati-language weekly in Eastern India in the heady days of the freedom struggle from colonial rule. Her mother, not to the media born, still became its influential editor, years after she came to Calcutta from a faraway village as an 18-year-old bride. "Though theirs was a smaller paper, her leap was much greater. I was just lucky to have had the national platform of a widely circulating magazine when I began my career," concedes the daughter. Bachi did not regrettably continue with the family paper, because her education and skills were in English, not Gujarati. But she takes some consolation in the fact that she has contributed a son to media. Urvaksh works as a reporter in the US. Her other son, Rishad, is a marketing executive, having followed his father's career choice. "We're quits," she says.

Urban Issues
Ms Karkaria is arguably the first senior Indian journalist to have recognised the value of the urban agenda, having done path-breaking stories at The Statesman, Calcutta, in the 1980s when city issues were still considered a lower form of journalistic life. She stayed with the belief, formulating and editing The Metropolis on Saturday and then Bombay Times. Her dramatic turnaround of the Bangalore edition of the Times of India was on the pivot of projecting it as the paper with a stake in the future of a dizzily changing city; from a stagnating No.4, TOIB shot up to No.1 in 11 months.

Mid-Day creating the post of Editorial Director for her was an acknowledgement of her pole position in this specialization; it also enabled her to add an understanding of the Net and radio to her enviable print experience. Returning to The Times of India, as Resident Editor, Delhi, she weaned that edition away from its political dependency, and, with a fresh urban flavour, nurtured the robust citizens' involvement so evident there today. All this culminated in her appointment as National Metro Editor of the Times of India.

She has a deep understanding of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore and Ahmedabad, a familiarity with other Indian cities, and a working knowledge of global benchmarks.

This corpus of work on urbanization is invaluable at a time when getting our cities right is the key to our global economic success. The social agenda is being set here too with 35% of our population now living in urban areas, and expected to swell to 50% within 15 years. The insights garnered over the past 20 years give her a unique understanding of the complex churn of issues created by today's urban revolution. She has hands-on experience of urban hardware and the equally necessary social software: the inadequacy of infrastructure, the ecological price paid for the concrete dream, and the emerging range of fault-lines.

She also knows how much there is to celebrate about city life. The new communities it creates; the freedom and anonymity, the opportunities for work and play, and have a say in how our civic space takes shape. In short, the power to be.

Public Health/AIDS
Ms Karkaria's other specialization is public health, specifically AIDS where her investigative and analytical stories have set policy agendas. She was the first journalist to penetrate the `conspiracy of silence', consistently exposing the lapses, and convincing squeamish editors to front-page the still-nascent scourge.

Her closely researched pieces in the Times of India provide the social epidemiology of the Indian epidemic over the past 15 years: the plight of marginalized communities caught between life and livelihood, the denial of policy makers, AIDS as the new medical pariah, and the contamination in blood products. Her white-knuckle investigative series on the last-mentioned resulted in their being taken off the shelves, and the subsequent formulation of a new safety policy. The totality of her work explained the complex nature and implications of HIV/AIDS, gave it a human face, challenged official apathy, demanded accountability, and exposed dangerous hypocrisy.

Ms Karkaria has participated in international AIDS conferences at San Francisco, Berlin, Chiang Mai, Yokohama and Barcelona, and is familiar with the major global players in halting the pandemic. She served on the first legal, ethical and social committee of India's apex AIDS organisation, NACO, and is now again on its advisory board. She has worked as a consultant for global public-private partnerships taking forward new prevention technologies. Both, the US-based Mary Morgan Hewitt Lifetime Achievement Award and the Media India Award, 1992, made special mention of the commitment and uniformly high standard of her AIDS reportage and analysis.

Ask her what fires her extraordinary energy, and she replies with a libidinous gleam, "Passion."