Remembering Dileep Padgaonkar

BY USHA RAI, HK DUA, NITIN DESAI, ASHOKE CHATTERJEE, S NIHAL SINGH| IN Opinion | 26/11/2016

Dileep Padgaonkar was a gifted interlocutor on television. 

Usha Rai

It was a farewell to remember! The Times of India Bureau gave me a farewell when I quit after being 27 years on its rolls at the home of Bureau Chief, Subhash Chakravarty.  Apart from all my colleagues in the Bureau, Dileep Padgaonkar, a rising star of the newspaper, was also there and at his entertaining best.  Dileep was not just a good journalist. There were many facets to his smiling, genial presence and I learnt about them that night.

Dileep was a good mimic and he had no qualms in mimicking the host, Subhash, among others. I and my colleagues were embarrassed because Subhash was our boss, our host and a pucca sahib but were in splits at Dileep’s imitation. He was also a good singer and entertained us with Hindustani classical music. Then to everyone’s amazement he disappeared into the kitchen and prepared fish that my friend Anita still swears by as the best fish that she had tasted in a long time.

Apart from music and good food, Dileep loved books and found time for all three passions. He was also a connoisseur of art and having studied and worked in France, he began collecting works of art quite early in life. His home in Defence Colony had Raza, Swaminathan and works of other artists and they breezed in and out of his home.  

Till the arrival of Dileep Padgaonkar, the assistant editors in the Times had studied in Oxford and Cambridge and this gave them direct entry to upper echelons of journalism in the Old Lady of Boribunder as TOI was called. But as a colleague pointed out Padgaonkar had his pedigree too coming from Sorbonne University.

An easy going informality made Dileep easily accessible to colleagues when he became editor. The richness of his own background, his interest in arts and literature was reflected in the newspaper. Journalists of the old school were particularly proud of him when as a member of the Editors Guild of India, he along with George Verghese and Aakar Patel produced the fact finding report ‘Ordeal by fire, the killing fields of Gujarat’ after the riots of 2002.

Padgaonkar left his stamp on journalism and will be missed.

Usha Rai  is a Delhi-based senior journalist.

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 H K Dua 

Dileep Padgaonkar passed away earlier than he should have. He always looked young and ready to pick up a cause. He was there in Paris as a young man in Sorbonne University, he witnessed, possibly participated in the 1968 Revolution of Europe’s restless youth.  The Chief Editor of the Times of India Sham Lal was impressed by his writings from Paris and inducted him into the paper.  Dileep took interest in writing on a variety of subjects – arts, literature and politics. He was founder of Biblio, a journal featuring articles and book reviews which reflected his eclectic tastes in works of fiction and books on serious political and social issues. It is a remarkable addition to Indian journalism.

Lately, he had taken interest in sorting out the Kashmir situation when the UPA government appointed him as head of a three-member team of interlocutors.  Besides, Dileep, the other two were Ms Radha Kumar and Prof M  M Ansari. 

Dileep and his team travelled the length and breadth of the State visiting most places in three regions of J & K --- the Valley, Jammu and Ladakh.  Alas! their report is gathering dust in the Home Ministry. And there are no takers for their report now.

Dileep had fine culinary tastes and any discussion on food and how it is cooked always fascinated him. He was indeed an engaging conversationalist.

H K Dua has been chief editor of the Chandigarh Tribune and a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha

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Nitin Desai

I first met Dileep when I visited Paris shortly before the 1968 events. At that time he was staying in a sixth-floor garret room with no lift access and rudimentary toilet facilities, so that, if the urge came, one had to go down six flights to the local cafe!  He lived through the student uprising of 1968 and remained a 'soixante-huitard',, a 68-er who lived with a nostalgia for the barricades even when he became, formally a part of the establishment.

Our friendship grew in the seventies when, as a bachelor, who had to suffer the indifferent cooking of a Pahari servant, I benefited hugely from a Dileep and Latika's hospitality. Later, when Aditi and I returned in 2004 from a long stay abroad, we picked up the threads of our friendship as if we had only been separated for a few days.  He radiated an easy warmth and, with Latika, always found time for a person in need and never lost touch with any near or far friend.

Dileep had a serious streak in him. He was better educated than many journalists, knew much more about music, painting and culture and had absorbed the French passion for philosophical abstraction. He wrote on politics not just as a commentator on events but as one deeply interested in styles of political discourse and action, what one could call political culture. He had deep convictions particularly about secularism, tolerance and made serious efforts at reconciliation in Kashmir not once but twice.

Dileep and Latika's home was an adda not just for journalists but for artists, filmmakers, writers and anyone who could engage in weighty discussions with a light touch.  He was a foodie whose interests extended upstream to cooking and purchasing vegetables and meat. I have a delightful memory of him squatting on a low stool and cooking a Kolhapuri mutton masala on a primes stove! But besides the delicious food, it is the long conversations over a drink or two that one remembers, conversations that ranged widely over politics, personalities, culture, music and food. But there was always a lighter touch of delicious gossip and his mordant comments on politicians and other establishment figures. 

Lately the way our politics are moving weighed on his mind and his ebullience was a little subdued when we last met. But he still had a lot to give to his family, his friends and to the reading public  and for all of us he has gone too soon.

Nitin Desai is an Indian economist and international civil servant. He was Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations from 1992 to 2003. 

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Ashoke Chatterjee

Dileep is gone, taking with him a voice of sanity, decency and hope that is irreplaceable.

A conversation not too long ago was after I had watched him quietly observing  a slanging match over what ‘the nation wants to know’.  There he was, in a corner of my TV screen, awaiting his turn to be heard. It never came. I called Dileep in Pune to ask why on earth he was promoting the ultimate ‘idiot box’? How he could he submit himself to such humiliating disrespect?

“And so what made you tune in?” Dileep responded, “You had a choice. I have a contract. Well, at least I am being paid to be civilized”.  That was Dileep, a truly civilized human being, an interlocutor in the finest sense --- his journalism compassionate and inclusive, challenging his readers with ideas and choices rather than ideology and dogma.

His brilliant career saw efforts to protect a great newspaper from becoming a shopping mall, and India’s territorial integrity from the crumbling of its democratic institutions. His was a mind free ‘from the desert of dead habit’, as comfortable in Pune as in Paris, and as incisive in political analysis as in cultural critique.

Above all, Dileep was passionate about justice. Years ago I went to him in an effort to protect a fragile institution from political interference. Tucked away in a corner, it was an experiment in learning that few in those days knew or understood.

The situation was desperate. Babus had decided to please their masters by taking advantage of a political hiatus. As one regime was giving way to another, legalities were suddenly invoked to override established norms of governance. The autonomy of an ethos bravely nurtured by educators and students was about to be trashed.

We had only hours to spare. A front-page story might avert disaster, yet it might also turn disaster into calamity. The need was for an impeccable source, one that Prime Ministers past and present would immediately trust.

With a hurried introduction from Nikhil Chakravartty, I went to Dileep. He listened, said he would need to check facts I had shared, and picked up his phone. The first call was to a Ministry Secretary, then to a bureau chief. “Go back to your team tonight”, he advised “I’ll write the story myself. You’ll see it in the morning”. 

I did. That institution is recognized today as one of national importance. Few know that Dileep Padgaonkar’s intervention helped make it one.

When I called  to thank him, he said “What for? I am a journalist.”

Ashoke Chatterjee served as Executive Director, Senior Faculty, Distinguished Fellow and Professor of communication and management at the National Institute of Design.

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S.Nihal Singh

Dileep was more than a competent journalist. He was a man looking for other opportunities in India and the wider world. As editor of The Statesman, I had once offered him an assistant editor’s job, but he preferred to stay on in The Times of India.

   Dileep spent many years in UNESCO, the United Nations’ educational and cultural organisation, ultimately graduating to become the chief information officer to the director-general, Amadou-Mahtar Mbow, a vainglorious Senegalese. It was in the 1980s when I was living in Paris to undertake research on the organisation for a book I was writing on the subject, that I saw him in rapt attention when his boss spoke.

   Returning to India, he dipped his finger in the Kashmir imbroglio leading a team to study and recommend measures for a resolution of a contentious problem. For the then Government, it was more a question of buying time.

   Dileep’s interests extended to art and culture. In Paris, he was fond of making fun of novice Indian visitors seeking the stamp of the Eiffel tower on souvenirs they bought. All in all, he was an engaging intelligent man full of joie de vivre.

Surendra Nihal Singh is a columnist and journalist, and former editor of The Statesman.