The first to premiere the new, improved Murdoch will be Rendezvous with Simi Garewal. The 24-minute show on Star Plus, starting next month, will feature a softer, sweeter Murdoch than India is accustomed to. A Murdoch who is unhappy that his 36-year-old marriage to Anna broke up. A Murdoch who is enjoying his relationship with his much-younger girlfriend, Wendy Deng. A Murdoch who talks fondly about his three children Elizabeth, James and Lachlan, and even announces his successor (no prizes for guessing who). And a Murdoch who, says Garewal, is ``far from being a dragon''.

Garewal, who'd been tryingto get an interview with Murdoch for a year, and was turned down four times, says she finally got a call in December, and was given just a week to prepare. ``I took a crash course on the man and read up everything about him,'' she says. She flew down to Los Angeles a week later and interviewed Murdoch for an hour at a Fox Television studio, just before he caught a plane to China. Her brief, as always, was to do a personal interview with the man who Vanity Fair consistently rates as the second most powerful media mogul in the world (after Bill Gates, of course). ``He was wonderful,''gushes Garewal, ``quite unlike the image we have of him. I think he's one of the great achievers of our age and a man who built up his empire single-handedly. I wanted to see what sort of person he is.''

The other Murdoch will be unveiled in April, on Vir Sanghvi's new show, Star Talk. This will be the Murdoch India is more familiar with, the ruthless media baron who takes no prisoners in his conquests. Alsoconducted in a Fox Television studio in Los Angeles, Sanghvi asks Murdoch a series of questions about his often questionable business practices, though he steers clear of controversies like the ban on Direct-To-Home (DTH) television and the obscenity case against Star Movies. Although the man who owns one-third of all British newspapers says India is very sensitive about being accurately represented in the world media, he insists he has no agenda here. To a specific question about his history of using his newspapers and television stations to further his commercial interests, Murdoch says he's never done it.

The interview goes into details of his ruptured relationship with Harold Evans, former editor of The Times and Andrew Neil, former editor of The Sunday Times. Perhaps for the first time ever, Murdoch calls Evans a liar, and says Neil's problem was that he wanted to be TV star. Among the subjects Sanghvi brings up: the advance Murdoch paid to Newt Gingrich, Harper-Collins withdrawing frompublishing memoirs, as well as less than polite remarks about Senator Teddy Kennedy.