The World Was Not Their Story — Book Nook

In 1969, nothing better to do while waiting for my final school exam results, I managed to get my first work published in the Junior Statesman. It was an interview with a famous Bengali actor and director. The thrill of walking into the Statesman House through the turnstile door was actually an entry to the dream of becoming a journalist. Two years later, Bangladesh happened next door and there were dramatic reports in the local papers and All India Radio. Oh, what excitement! Reporters were sneaking into East Pakistan, dodging the “Khan Sena”, lunching on a steamer at Goalondo Ghat and finally landing up in Dhaka! If you wished to take up journalism after graduation, there couldn’t be a better impetus. We had no TV, but Dan Coggin and Marc Riboud were pushing your aspiration to a higher level.

Finally, my career took a sharp turn and I landed up in advertising. Often I would sit back and imagine what my life could have been, if… if I had the perseverance and the ability of my senior at La Martinière, Lucknow, Saeed Naqvi.

Like many from the ’70s onwards, I followed Naqvi along with Akbar, Kuldeep Nayar, Vinod Mehta (another school senior) and Arun Shourie, and his memories, just published by Speaking Tiger, are all about what I wanted to be a part of.

It is not just about his career path, a newsman’s scoops, wanglings that happen in newspaper offices, the political path newspapers have to tread, but about the way he has recalled the events. In fact, going through the book, I realised it was more of a revisiting of a history of our times, both national and international, coupled with the backroom games that politicians and media owners play at all levels. One of the most interesting chapters is the one on how he managed to land up at Maharshi Mahesh Yogi’s Ashram with the Beatles (and how a photograph of a smoking Mia Farrow was taken), the Simla Accord, and hello, Sashti Brata!

The second part of the book deals with his actualising a dream, that of setting up a facility for international news coverage. From the Emergency the book shifts to world events, the real background story of many world events, and suddenly from Ramnath Goenka, he is with Gorbachev, interviewing everyone from Castro to Gaddafi to Ortega; the world’s who’s who appears like a cast of actors in a star-studded movie. Memories are refreshed: the KLM hijack, break-up of the USSR, the Americans (as always) scripting international relations only to suit themselves. Importantly, the author explains in detail the complex developments in Eastern Europe and the former USSR and the Middle East, on how the new countries were born, how they played into the hands of the superpowers, so if you have not understood the new world, a patient reading will help give you clarity.

Once in a while such memoirs land up, and not just for an aspiring journalist; it is more than a showpiece in any articulate person’s library. It is not just an Odyssey of one of the most venerable journalists of our times; it is also an Odyssey of the exciting times we lived in.