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. 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 Bihari
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 identified 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 it 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.
(A senior commentator on diplomatic and
political affairs, Saeed Naqvi can be reached on [email protected].
The views expressed are personal.)
