Why I will miss him
Where does one start reminiscing about Vinod Mehta? Vivid images flash by: his looming presence in the office; barking ``She’s not here’’ into the phone while I filed my story; his personal observations which were never flattering, yet didn’t offend; his gossip and banter during edit meetings.
And yet, when you bumped into him outside the office, Vinod turned into a stranger, looking down and muttering what was presumably a greeting. He kept his own company when he went out for lunch. It wasn’t as if he was meeting high-powered politicians or celebrities, as most editors do. He lunched at the nearest udipi or fast food place. In fact, one of the places I started frequenting after seeing him emerge from it a number of times was a tiny stall under the staircase of the building next door. Their hot omelette sandwiches were comfort food.
I was part of the small batch to join The Sunday Observer a few months before its launch, and the only female. Among the first questions Jaico owner, Ashwin Shah, asked was: ``You know you’ll have to work till midnight on Saturdays. You’re OK with that?’’ Before I could answer, Vinod butted in with: ``She’s not scared, she’s a feminist,’’ and laughed.
Vinod had just left Debonair, where I had been a regular contributor (despite my `feminism’). Yet, he took feminism seriously, as he did other anti-Establishment ideologies. He never took himself seriously, though. Not for him the delusion of holding the country’s second most-important job. That’s the greatest lesson I learnt from him.
But with all that irreverence, Vinod respected views not considered fashionable. Reports by human rights groups got a lot of space in his papers. My report on the Mumbai police’s fake `encounter’ with a petty thief – the first time any mainstream paper exposed this relatively new practice in the ‘80s - was given a front page display in the Observer. (Unfortunately, the second one, a few months later, was treated with less enthusiasm.)
Openness was Vinod’s trademark. His columnists ranged from the BJP’s K. R. Malkani to Iqbal Masud to Darryl D’Monte to M. V. Kamath. Some of us at the Observer were activists besides being journalists. Yet, we found we could write stories linked to our causes, as long as we could sell them in the edit meetings as topical, interesting news stories, and wrote them like that.
I still remember the edit meeting held a day before Radhika Ramaseshan, our Jabalpur correspondent, who was also a People’s Union for Civil Liberties member, was to join us in Mumbai. ``You tell her no more Adivasi stories now,’’ Vinod told me.
But Radhika’s stories on slums in Mumbai got the same display as her Adivasi stories had, because her writing possessed the hallmark of all Sunday Observer writing: readability, accuracy and objectivity. Almost a decade later, Vinod stood by Radhika when the proprietors of The Pioneer, which he was then editing, asked him to rein her in because of her reports exposing the BJP’s cynical moves in the Babri Masjid years.
One ability that I developed simply by working under Vinod was selling the most serious ideas as ``newsy’’ stories. This has stood me in good stead in my long years as a freelancer having to convince reluctant editors to give me space (though it’s not been working over the last two years.)
As one of two reporters at the Observer for the first few months, I had to do the movie listings (I still remember the names and locations of all the cinemas in Mumbai in the ‘80s), and was sent to cover `rose shows’, while Ivan Fera, the other reporter, was left to pursue political news.
After I could take it no more, I mustered up the courage to ask Vinod if this was why he had hired me. As was typical of Vinod, he didn’t try to justify himself, in fact, he had no explanation apart from asking with a laugh: ``You want to cover Mantralaya?’’ But that was the last rose show I did.
That was Vinod’s great quality. We could go into his room (you had to catch him there because he spent most of his time outside, with the rest of the staff) and tell him what we felt and be assured of a serious response.
The one big fight I had with the editor I had grown to adore (no point denying it) was during the 1984 Mumbai-Bhiwandi-Thane communal riots. Vinod gave us all the space we wanted, censoring nothing, not even my first report that was, I realized later, one-sided. Our coverage was quite clearly the best in the city.
A week after the riots had ended, I was asked to do a round-up of the mood in the riot-affected areas. Feelings of revenge were running high among Muslims and the Shiv Sena, and I reported their impassioned words. Vinod called me to his cabin after reading my copy to say he couldn’t use it. I’d put in my all for this report, being out the whole week in the May heat. How could he pass it by and use an agency report instead, with its ``Police on high alert, situation under control’’ meaningless stuff?
``Your report reads like `Gunfight at OK Corral’, how can I use it?’’ Vinod asked, leaving the room. I decided to strike. It was Saturday, the paper had to be put to bed and all hands were required. Vinod sensed I was on strike, but said nothing. It was Amrita Abraham, the assistant editor, who knocked sense into me.
My seven years in The Sunday Observer with Vinod and his senior assistants: Amrita Abraham and Maseeh Rahman, all three committed to secularism, gave me the opportunity to develop extensive contacts with Muslims, the Shiv Sena, the RSS, and Sikhs in those Khalistan years.
The feelings of ordinary Sikhs in Mumbai who found themselves being humiliated publicly, were carried in no other paper. Nor were the problems of the Urdu press.Every paper carried without contradiction the false allegations of the cops against the two Mumbai Sikh professors accused of being part of a conspiracy (along with Simranjeet Singh Mann) to assassinate Indira Gandhi. Only The Indian Post put forward their side of the story. (The charge against them was withdrawn by Rajiv Gandhi after they had spent more than a year in jail.)
I joined The Sunday Observer as a reporter, and that’s how Vinod treated me till I last worked under him as Assistant Editor in The Independent. Titles didn’t matter to him and he was as stingy with promotions as he was with money. After pestering him for a promotion in the Observer for a long time, he finally agreed, asking me with a laugh, ``So what do you want to be called – Chief of Bureau or Special Correspondent?’’ He knew it mattered little; for him, I would always be a reporter, even in The Indian Post and The Independent, where I was also writing edits.
Pushed out of The Independent by a wily TOI management a few months after its launch, Vinod started planning his own paper, to be funded by his well-heeled admirers. We would meet once a week to discuss it. At the end of months of such discussions, when he had finalized the names and designations of those he would hire, I dared to ask him: ``And what will I be?’’ ``Reporter of course,’’ he replied. Years later, when I had started writing edit-page pieces as a freelancer, he met me at a function in Mumbai where he was being given an award. ``So, you’re going to cover this with a 1500-word piece for The Hindu?” he laughed uproariously.
Thanks to Vinod, I’ve never stopped being a reporter, nor considered anything too trivial to be reported. In The Observer, he made me do in-depth stories on subjects I knew nothing about (a ship sinking, PSUs); why a Hindu had become Muslim (Vinod had read the change-of-name in the classifieds); who was buying the most expensive shoes in town; whether people knew November 14 was Children’s Day. (I remember approaching commuters at CST station, feeling really foolish, asking them: `Aap ko malum hai aaj kaun sa din hai?’-- Do you know what day it is today?).
One time in The Indian Post, no reporter was ready to rush to the scene of a slum fire, preferring to file from the office. These were not people Vinod had hired, so he was not able to bully them. He turned to me to cover it. The next morning, there was a leak in an ice factory at the other end of town. Vinod caught me as soon as I came into the office and, when I protested that I had spent the previous evening out amid the ruins of a burning slum and asked him to send someone else out in the heat, he replied: ``I’ll give you the taxi fare, yaar.’’
Like all Mumbai newspapers, The Sunday Observer gave a lot of space to Bollywood, and since I was the only one – apart from Vinod himself - who was interested in Hindi movies (the others saw only `parallel cinema’ as it was then called), I was sent to interview Bollywood figures. When our regular film critic left, I was told to do Hindi film reviews.
I doubt any other editor would have checked film reviews and given them headlines himself, the way Vinod did. Though Khalid Mohammed, who was the TOI reviewer and my mentor in that field, sometimes pointed out remarks I should not have made, Vinod never changed a word, even if the review was critical of his friends’ movies.
Working with Vinod was fun. He once flung his glasses down in exasperation then got up to laboriously fish them out of the waste paper basket. To avoid a talkative bore, he dived into the photographers’ dark room, then, as we had just finished telling her he was out, he emerged, hands in pockets, and greeted her with a nonchalant `Hi’.
Once, some irate saffron-clad Anand Margis came looking for him. Vinod pointed to the junior-most sub, a painfully shy guy who’d just come from Chennai, and told them: ``Editor who hai.’’ While the poor man dealt with them in his broken Hindi, Vinod pottered around at the layout artistes’ table.
Under Vinod, there was no concept of privacy, at least where we juniors were concerned. Sometimes he would listen in on the extension in his room on our phone conversations. We had to entertain friends with him hovering around. Based on these impressions of our visitors, he would make the most outrageous comments on people he barely knew.
Twice Ammu Joseph dropped in to see me, and found that I was out. (Vinod hated seeing us in the office during the week, we were supposed to be in the field all day and report back only in the evenings). Ammu and I had worked together at Eve’s Weekly, where no one could step out without the editor’s permission.
Contrasting that situation with my apparent freedom at the Observer, Ammu left me a note saying: ``You’ve come a long way baby.’’ Of course Vinod read it. Handing it over to me on my return, he remarked: ``She’s really jealous of you!’’ In vain did I try to explain this wasn’t so.
Susan Abraham, then a reporter who Vinod knew was a radical Leftist, would often drop in. One day she came with her wedding invitation. As soon as she left, Vinod remarked: ``She’s really looking good, all transformed because of her wedding!’’ Susan always looked sexy, I replied. Besides, she was not one to go in for a make-over just because she was getting married. ``Come on,’’ said Vinod, ``haven’t you noticed what she wears normally’’, and made a motion of pulling a sack over himself.
In time, we grew used to Vinod’s ways. We even learnt to communicate with him in the bare minimum of words. If we spoke more than a minute, he would switch off. I still remember coming back to The Independent office after reporting on the Bajrang Dal’s recruitment of new members in a faraway suburb. I walked towards Vinod who, as usual, was out in the newsroom, to tell him what I’d seen. With a raise of his eyebrows, a tilt of his head toward my seat and a glance at the clock, Vinod made it clear that he had no desire to listen to my prattle. All he wanted was me to file the story asap.
With all his eccentricities, Vinod took one thing very seriously: the basic ethics of journalism. As he showed me the list of Rajiv Gandhi’s cronies whom Indian Post proprietor Vijaypat Singhania didn’t want touched, which included Dhirubhai Ambani, I asked, my heart sinking, ``What will you do?’’ ``Resign of course,’’ he replied, taking out his resignation letter from his pocket.
Most of those who worked under Vinod followed him from paper to paper. Alas, I couldn’t. When he started Outlook, I was in no position to go to an office every day as I had a baby (something he felt too embarrassed to refer to).
But by then, email had become the norm and I told him that, since the magazine was a weekly, I could manage being in the office once or twice a week. He wouldn’t hear of it, and I never forgave him for it. For years afterwards, I had this recurring dream: being in Vinod’s office but not being allowed to write.