Piyo Chai Suno Kahani

Loss sharpens gratitude. The passing of Pritish Nandy takes me – and the family of colleagues under his editorship of The Illustrated Weekly of India – back to the 1980s. An unforgettable experience working my way up from sub-editor to assistant editor over six years.

Fresh from college, hungry for journalism, we lucked out with this helmsman. Who brought politics and poetry to the post in good measure. Who called a spade a spade, damn the consequences. Who believed enough in the youngest team members, sending them to confidently interact with the most famous and fearless. If he broke candid interviews with every reigning public figure, he as generously trusted us with those we held in gawping awe, typical of journos wet behind the ears. 

I trod with trepidation filing a first half-pager on Aubrey Menen, whose Rama Retold was among the earliest books the country banned. Followed by a detailed profile of Pranab Mukherjee on becoming Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha after his finance minister tenure. “What’s to worry? Just get your facts right, you’ll ace it,” Nandy said, emboldening rookie reporter me.

When Wole Soyinka won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, I was assigned a salutary story. His editorial brief suggested going with the Swedish Academy’s statement: “In a wide cultural perspective with poetic overtones Soyinka fashions the drama of existence.” He loved my title to the piece. “The Maverick”. After all, wasn’t that quintessential Nandy too? 

That was the time I handled the copy for Maneka Gandhi’s column called “Heads & Tails”. I enjoyed the fire and ire with which she championed animal rights. Yet, quaked to the tips of my Kolhapuris when she strode into the magazine’s fourth floor office unannounced one morning, “to meet the person producing my page”. I needn’t have shivered. Standing beside my table in a simple blue chikan kurta, she pronounced, “Nice”.

Pritish Nandy

Besides the brash and brazen, a beautiful elegance of prose flowed in his “Editor’s Choice” text tail-ending the issue. Nandy had a decided penchant for words like “serendipity”, for phrases like “the audacity of hope”.

He would holler, “Not a movie title again please!” Desperate to close copy within tight deadlines, we rushed to thumb through a book of classic film names lying somewhere between Nikhil Lakshman’s desk and mine. Any article on persecution or despair ended up headed “Long day’s journey into night” and… you get the drift. Till we were yelled at for succumbing to cliche.         

Expectations ran high at the Weekly. Parallel with the insistence on rigour of thought and expression, Nandy (with deputies Sailesh Kottary, Sherna Gandhy and Nikhil), dinned into us the vital importance of thinking visually. Nothing available online; even chunky box computers hadn’t made an appearance. We scurried to the reference library in search of pictures. Alongside, brilliant photo essays were commissioned by lensmen and women of the international ilk of Ram Rehman and Jaywant Ullal. A very young Dayanita Singh would quietly visit. Not to mention our ed’s several painter friends, led by Husain himself.

So, we figured it wise to surrender writers’ darlings with ease. Till today, seldom will Illustrated Weekly proteges get huffy about cutting their own text in order to fit a fine photo or other artistic image. We wound text compatibly around the creativity of in-house illustrators and caricaturists. Equality over ego. Rare in subsequent editorial and art departments we worked with.   

Thinking visually is a lasting lesson. At the core of being a Weekly-ite was also another quality exhortation: think laterally. Out-of-the-box hatke. He’d say, “Think laterally” at the start of each gathering in his cabin to plot the next week’s pages. A fat 72 of them. Packed with inspiration. Replete with exposes of crooked chief ministers, fake godmen and similar holy cows. Conceived by a man in his brave prime then.

No doubt, certain later exposes slanted towards personal ambition and controversial scoops. We manage to separate the debate and questions surrounding some of his editorial policies, to appreciate much else. Mainly, how he had every writer’s back. The readiness with which he granted carte blanche to features writers and investigative reporters helped critique innumerable establishment excesses.

Never did we dare submit sloppily dashed off opinionated pieces. “What are you really saying here!” he’d storm. The rage was undeniably there. But as strong came the compliments on a job well done.

It was great learning which has stood us in amazing stead. Mere months before the death of AFS “Bobby” Talyarkhan in July 1990, I panicked. Nandy had slotted me to write a 10-page cover story on the legendary commentator at the Cricket Club of India over a series of Sunday afternoons. “I know little about sport, especially this game,” I protested. “Exactly why you should be doing it,” he responded.

Touche. Thank you, man of many surprises and mentor to more than you realised.


MEHER MARFATIA

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One Comment

  1. Brilliant Meher!!
    Quintessential Nandy!!
    Thanks to him, I Illustrated SALMAN RUSHDIE’S first novel GRIMUS that was serialised in 3 issues!

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