He was colourful. He was dramatic. He was The Master of His Craft. There never will be an editor as versatile as Pritish Nandy, notes Nikhil Lakshman.
No one yelled at me in my life more than Pritish Nandy did.
He hollered at me over a long distance phone call from New York, telling me that an error I'd made on the cover of the Weekly had made it "impossible for me to walk in Manhattan."
He once called me at 3 am from Santa Cruz airport and screamed that I was a traitor because I'd passed on a story that he had rejected the previous day for the Evening News newspaper (which he also edited) to the Navbharat Times.
I lost count of the times he ripped me apart for sundry errors and omissions, all of which I confess I made.
And yet those 64 months and 9 days I spent with Mr Nandy at The Illustrated Weekly of India remain the most memorable years of my work life, and I will try and tell you why.
Soon after Operation Bluestar, I wrote a cover story tracing how Indira Gandhi's Congress party had nurtured Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale through the mid and late 1970s to muzzle the Akali Dal.
No sooner had the Weekly appeared on the newsstands, Mrs Gandhi called the owner of the Times group and ordered that every copy of the Weekly should immediately be pulled from circulation. Imagine the losses involved. Surely, the proprietor must have made their displeasure known. I never got to know about it.
Since the Weekly -- once Asia's oldest weekly magazine -- perished in the early 1990s, few Indians may recall the impact it had in the years Mr Nandy was editor.
It was Mr Nandy who exposed how an American mercenary named Frank Camper was training Sikh wannabe terrorists in the forests of Virginia in 1985.
Countless leaders were banished to political Siberia because they let their candour triumph over caution and better judgement when they sat down with Mr Nandy for an interview. Like Pranab Mukherjee, for instance, who Rajiv Gandhi ejected from the Congress party days after a Nandy interview.
One summer Mr Nandy was off to Rajneeshpuram in Oregon in the States to ensnare Osho for an interview. There he spotted a familiar face in the gardens, and that became another big story. 'Cause said gardener was Vinod Khanna who chucked up his superstar movie career to tend to Osho's plants.
And then there was Chandraswami, long before he became nationally known as P V Narasimha Rao's resident godman. Chandraswami was in the news in 1986 for some deal he had cooked up for Tiny Rowland, the British businessman. Mr Nandy requested an interview; Chandraswami, wary of Mr Nandy's reputation for spearing his prey, refused.
No problem. Mr Nandy accompanied Rajat Sharma -- then the editor of Onlooker magazine -- to meet Chandraswami, masquerading as Sharma's secretary. Chandraswami didn't recognise Mr Nandy who even asked him during the chat why he didn't "give Nandy an interview" to which the 'godman' let loose a torrent of invective about Mr Nandy. The interview was a blockbuster and should have finished Chandraswami's cred with the rich and powerful. Unsurprisingly, it didn't
From Mr Nandy I learnt many, many things, but most of all that perseverance is essential ammo for a journalist. Even if he was rebuffed by a potential interviewee numerous times he persisted, and persisted. Until the man or woman gave in. Like Gopi Arora, one of the influential officers in Rajiv Gandhi's inner circle, did, delivering Mr Nandy a coup on Bofors.
The elusive Kishore Kumar -- who hadn't given an interview in years -- was won over by Mr Nandy's relentless wooing. A scoop (in fact, the word scoop appeared so often on Weekly covers that an envious rival editor grumbled that the Weekly sounded like an ice cream factory) ensued, but then Kishore Kumar had doubts about the content.
Mr Nandy asked me to tag along with him to the great man's home in Juhu. My job -- to distract the legendary singer while Mr Nandy convinced him that the conversation was good to print. Each time Kishore Kumar began in Bengali, "Pritish...", I would jump in with a question.
The question that finally extinguished his misgivings about the interview was "Which are your 10 favourite songs?" That sent Kishore Kumar into deep thought. He would warble a couple of bars of a song, shake his head in approval, then almost immediately shut his eyes, make a face and say, "No, no, not that one." Not once did he notice Mr Nandy wink. The 10 songs appeared as a box in the cover story which had Kishore Kumar holding a skull on the Weekly cover (KK loved horror movies and had an entire wall of spooky video cassettes).
Mr Nandy gave his staff unbridled freedom. It didn't matter at what level of the editorial pole you were perched you were encouraged to take ownership of the magazine. You were as much editor of the Weekly as he was. Of course, it didn't always go well. Once a colleague offered to illustrate a Nandy cover story on Kashmiri militants he had interviewed in England and of whom no images existed.
Our illustrators in residence -- one already a well-known artist, the other who has gone on to be a major painter -- both shrugged their inability do justice to the subject. This colleague should have known better, poor man didn't and then didn't recover for weeks after Mr Nandy tore up his sketches and stormed away, muttering unprintables under his breath.
But that was Mr Nandy. The duke of unending drama.
His office was a salon with personages flitting in and out, often taking up position on his couch for hours. One afternoon, it could be Mr A G Noorani, the distinguished lawyer and writer, all suited and very serious. Another afternoon, it could be Ms Parmeshwar Godrej, a vision in red, as the tyros outside sat agape in wonder. Or it could be Dr Rafiq Zakaria, the scholar, full of serious argument (his sandals, I can confess now, I often hid).
One morning, holding up a finished double spread, I stormed into Mr Nandy's chamber and bitterly complained about his brother, the thinker Ashis Nandy's dense and incomprehensible prose. After I ended my acerbic monologue, he turned to the lookalike gentleman sitting on the sofa and asked, "By the way, have you met my brother Ashis?"
One mid-morning, Maneka Gandhi turned up and sequestered herself in Mr Nandy's office for a few hours, writing a story on his teeny typewriter. The story was a stinging indictment of the system that had led to Kehar Singh being a fall guy in the Indira Gandhi assassination case. Alas, despite the power of the argument, it didn't stall his execution.
Maneka Gandhi was one of many well-known names who appeared on the Weekly's pages. A panoply of India's finest minds were regularly present: Rajni Kothari, Claude Alvares, Romesh Thapar, K G Kannabiran, Jaswant Singh... and the peculiarly named Akbar Krishna (who I can now reveal as Shashi Tharoor).
Satyajit Ray wrote fiction for the Weekly. One afternoon I picked up the phone in Mr Nandy's office to hear that famous baritone ask, "Is Pritish there?" A colleague had apparently changed a word in a Ray story because she couldn't find the original word in the dictionary and Mr Ray had called to complain. That was a rare occasion when a lady sub was caned, verbally of course; it was usually me who ended up getting six of the best, again verbally of course.
And then one day an offer to edit The Indian Post arrived. Mr Nandy was in a meeting with some management types so I sent a chit in via his secretary saying I needed to speak to him that day. He came out immediately and took me across to the Dharamyug editor's then empty cabin where I told him I wanted to leave the Weekly. He didn't stop me. In fact, he let me go almost instantly.
Some days after I had begun my new job, Mr Nandy turned up in the newsroom one afternoon, saying he wanted to find out how I was doing, though I suspect he wanted to check if any of my Weekly colleagues was working surreptitiously at the Post (they weren't).
Happily, our paths crossed some years after when we occupied different ends of the 10th floor at Tulsiani Chambers in Nariman Point -- the same floor where years prior Mr Dhirubhai Ambani had earned his first thousand crores. It was now the hub of two newspapers the Ambanis owned then, the Observer of Business and Politics and The Sunday Observer.
We schmoozed sometimes in his office; the middle managers had a heap of stories about Mr Nandy, from how he wanted his office bathroom and loo to be dressed up completely in black tiles and adorned with black towels which they couldn't locate much to his chagrin. Or how he once leapt on to the accountant's table and threatened the unspeakable if said gent continued to waffle on some of his requirements.
Again, classic Mr Nandy :))
I didn't know he had been sick for some time. The last time we spoke some months ago his voice didn't have that Nandyesque depth, but I didn't suspect anything was amiss. "When are you coming over to have a cup of tea with me?" he asked. "Soon, soon, Mr Nandy," I replied.
For every one of us who worked with him at the Weekly, he was indestructible. Only he wasn't.
Meher Marfatia, my old friend and colleague, the cherished chronicler of Mumbai, sent me a WhatsApp message a few hours ago. For several minutes, I could not comprehend what Meher had written. "Mr Nandy, passed away?" No! Then different members of the Weekly brother-sisterhood and extended journalists' universe, WA details -- of how he had known he was dying and given his daughters detailed instructions about the funeral (very private, only family attended) and where the ashes were to be sprinkled.
And thus passed this most gifted of editors, equally versatile with words and design, someone who changed the grammar of Indian magazines forever, this most colourful of men, who passed into the eternal night like a whisper amidst the cacophony of unheralded lives.
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