Small kindness

ALMOST ANYONE WHO is anyone in the fraternity of scribes has written an obituary of the legendary editor, author and loveable rogue Khushwant Singh who passed away on March 20 at the age of 99. Ergo it’s obligatory for your editor to also opine on the life and times of this iconoclast who shook up the world of Indian journalism in the 1970s by transforming the staid old Illustrated Weekly of India (IWI) into the country’s first mass-selling magazine. Following IWI’s success, a host of new magazines including India Today, Sunday, Stardust and Bombay among others, flooded the market and opened up career opportunities for a large number of celebrity journalists such as Aroon Purie, M.J. Akbar, Shobhaa De and Vir Sanghvi. Your correspondent also clambered aboard the bandwagon as the first editor of Business India and later Businessworld, magazines which catalysed the liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991. Although acquainted with Khushwant at the time, I was never a court favourite invited for the celebrated shot of Scotch between 7-8 p.m. My genre of new journalism — focused on wealth creation for national development — was contemptuously dismissed by mainstream journalists as public relations for industry leaders. However I do remember a kindness before I became a full-time journalist. On the recommendation of his son and friend Rahul, Khushwant gave me a letter of assignment to cover the 1976 US presidential election, on the strength of which the Reserve Bank of India magnanimously allowed me to purchase $500 from its vaults to travel to the US. I diligently wrote and submitted a 1,500-word feature on the subject. But it was promptly returned to sender with a cryptic scrawl “not suitable” on it signed by assistant editor Fatima Zakaria. Frenemies profession The ethos and culture of Indian journalism is not very different from the world of Indian politics. In journalism too, there are no permanent friends or enemies. At best the relationship between publishers, editors and journalists who drive the fourth estate can be described as frenemies or friendly enemies. Once you put in your papers or are fired, all the blood, tears and sweat you may have put into the publication are forgotten and you become a non-person. The accuracy of this observation was impacted upon your correspondent rather forcefully last month, when invited to Delhi to chair a panel discussion at an education seminar organised by Businessworld, the well-known fortnightly conceptualised and launched by your correspondent for the Kolkata-based Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) group way back in 1981, and painstakingly developed into a Rs.50 crore brand during the seven years I served as founder-editor. Early this year, BW was sold for an undisclosed sum by ABP to NKM Holdings, a company promoted by the Delhi-based Anurag Batra, publisher of several niche magazines including Pitch, Franchise Plus and Impact among others. All hopes of being accorded a homecoming of sorts were dashed, when upon arrival Batra “forgot” to introduce me as founder-editor of the publication. Moreover…