Vinod
Mehta, A Prince Among Journalists
Saeed Naqvi
Vinod Mehta would have been
flabbergasted. He would never have expected such a turnout at his funeral – the
most powerful politicians, journalists, writers, cartoonists, artists,
everybody except….well, in that exception possibly lay the secret of his
success. The fixers and their patrons were not there.
The attendance at the Lodhi Road
crematorium is not the only outpouring. Newspapers, magazines, TV channels
across the country have not stopped looking at what now resembles a void. Arnab
Goswami went to extraordinary lengths to pay tribute to a regular participant
always waving his arm “Arnab, listen to me, Arnab”. The Times Now channel was
kept open the whole morning for phone-ins.
I cannot remember an editor ever seen
off with so much adulation.
The area for independent discourse shrank
totally after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tectonic event was marketed
not as the victory of freedom but of market forces. Editors became promoters of
neo conservative economic policies.
Not so much under Atal Behari Vajpayee’s
NDA as under Manmohan Singh’s UPA, a new triangle of power emerged. Earlier,
the editor was part of New Delhi’s power structure. The new triangle sidelined
the editor. The triangle consisted of India Inc. in Mumbai, the US ambassador
and the Prime Minister’s office. Editors were reduced to fixers. They were out
of the loop on major developments – unless they became promoters of these developments.
What made Vinod’s funeral special,
wholesome and popular was the absence of a category most common people are
beginning to have a diminishing respect for – Big Business.
In some senses Vinod lived a charmed
life. He escaped the dilemma of being indentified either on this or that side
of the Emergency. He came on the scene after the event.
And later, when the neo conservative
ideal was ordered to be carried on editorial shoulders, Vinod cheerfully found
himself an outsider. Every publication of his upto the crowning glory of
Outlook, Vinod had virtually built up brick by brick, with his own hands. There
was no India Inc, no media tycoon to tower above him. The glory and the
brickbats were all his.
Outlook was not his means to power and
wealth. In fact it was quite the opposite. It was his means to enjoy his
journalism by upholding the classical, adversarial attitude towards political
power and its nexus with corporate India.
Like many men of greatness, Vinod was quintessentially
self made. His average, middle class family had not bestowed too much on him.
Armed with a second class senior Cambridge and a third class BA from Lucknow he
turned up in London.
The recycled Oxbridge elite was running
out of cash by the 60s. For a new crop of Indians, some even from public
schools, London still held promise. Would a “vilayati” dhobi mark on a
certificate stand the London-bound Indian in good stead? The Kolkata boy,
unlike the Lucknow Boy, found his spiritual resting place in Hampstead,
demonstrating their mastery over English, despite the brown tint. The Lucknow
boy of our narrative settled down in Surbiton, Surrey in the company of one
Bukhari from Pakistan who spoke English like Mr. Doolittle and Enamul Haq from
Bangladesh, always in a dark suit, waiting for weekends when the au pair girls
from Esher and Leatherhead transformed Vinod’s house into a night club.
No, London was not working out well for
Vinod. In the deep inside packet of his doublebreasted corduroy jacket I once
found a card which I put back immediately. It was Vinod’s employee ID card for
the catering department of the British Railways. I didn’t mention it to Vinod.
It was not the sort of job he would like his oldest school friend to know
anything about.
The weekend social clubs were his
emotional outlet, but week days he caught the train to Waterloo, seeking
journalists in the Fleet Street pubs, or pouring over newspapers, desperately dreaming
a paper of his own in India.
Journalism had come in his grasp after
so much struggle, that he was constantly afflicted by a nagging insecurity –
that he may lose it. Once he was at the Outlook office, family, friend, party
an evening at the movies, nothing would lure him away from the grind. The
“parcha”, as he called his magazine, was what he lived for. The sincerity of
his professionalism came across to his readers, as became clear at the funeral.
That is why the Editor we said good bye
to last week, deserved every bit of affection from the profession to which he
had given his all, without ever expecting a reward.
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