Salaciousness is something to which the media devotes increasing column centimetres, and hardly unfairly when it is served up by sexual escapades and paternity suits by seemingly everyone from Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi to Narayan Dutt Tiwari. That is news, editors insist, notching it up from an inside page-three report or even an anchor story to the main headline of the day, yet the more scurrilous gossip involving its own dirty linen over which many more hours are spent in discussion is, of course, given short shrift. Part of this nudge-nudge, wink-wink voyeurism has been Bennett, Coleman & Co Managing Director Samir Jain’s penchant for holding meetings in his bedroom, with hacks talking of sharing the bed in the absence of other, or enough, furniture. Are these – could these – stories be true?
Jug Suraiya, too, finds himself in SJ’s bedroom. At first when he joins the group’s flagship paper, The Times of India, and moves with his wife Bunny to New Delhi and straight into the Family’s 6, Sardar Patel Residence (caps his), where, given the vegetarian, teetotalling nature of the household, they manage their evening tot (if they smuggled in kebabs, Jug isn’t telling), only to find the door being flung open to admit their host issuing an edict for dinner. The invitation is for Jug, but like the Salahis, Bunny gatecrashes the event meant for the managers of TOI editions at which SJ at least is polite enough to offer her a chair next to his.
Still again, many years later, he (and Bunny) are invited back for a “family dinner” that is served in the dining room – “pizza, pulao, pasta, two subzis, dal” – but before they’re called to sup, Jug and Bunny find themselves “sitting in SJ’s bedroom”. The purpose? To make Jug the edit incharge allegedly because he had moved Madhuri Dixit’s marriage to first edit spot, and done a spoof “what if” edit on Kashmir — apparently if “fusion” is all right for the Jain family dining table, it is all right for the newspaper’s pages too.
Jug Suraiya’s biographical serving is like that Jain meal, a bit of this and a dash of that, loads of masala, but no main dish. For those of us familiar with Jug’s writings – and many of us are – the book is a pale palliative of his life since most of it has been recounted (and re-recounted) in his own columns and articles (even SJ seemed to have taken notice of his moonlighting). Often, too, those same columns have been regurgitated across inflight and lifestyle magazines – this reviewer having to reject some of these on that count, but which appeared to cause no embarrassment to their recycler – but the recanting of the bulls of Lajpat Nagar and the lack of water in Vasant Kunj, first served up as middles, reek here of stale leftovers.
For those of our generation who found ourselves bound by the defining culture of the youth magazine JS (Junior Statesman for those of the younger generation who, amazingly, haven’t heard of it), the reason for its closure remains a bigger mystery than the existence of the Yeti and a bigger blow than the disbanding of the Beatles. Was it really because the MD of the stuffy The Statesman, Cushrow Irani, found the JS’s editor Desmond Doig’s popularity intimidating? Jug’s version: “With a parent like The Statesman, the JS was doomed before it was born.”
Whether the JS lost money or because of “the sleight-of-hand of tendentious accountancy”, it led to Doig, Dubby Bhagat and Utpal Sengupta seeking nirvana in Kathmandu, where they launched alternate careers, while Jug found himself relegated to the lowly edit job of handling the letters at the “fuddy-duddy” The Statesman where the most challenging editorial requirement seemed to consist of finding whether “apropos” required an “of” or not as correct usage, something that was never satisfactorily resolved, and which Jug sneakily checkmated by sometimes using “with reference to” instead of “apropos”, which he surmounted by using “apropos” and “apropos of” on alternate days.
Jug’s own career at TOI – where he continues to serve on a monthly retainer – may have resulted in some reserve when it comes to talking about the editorial policy of that newspaper (which he defends in a ham-handed manner) and its many editors (with whom he seems to have had a sweet-and-sour relationship), but for what appears to be a biography of his professional life (refer the title), the near-absence of SJ in the narrative, and edit-war room blowouts, is only made up by his honesty in admitting to his own editorial mishaps and oversights which, coated in his characteristic humour, ends up offering – but just as promised – alas, only a skewed “worm’s-eye view of Indian journalism”.
JS & THE TIMES OF MY LIFE
Jug Suraiya
Tranquebar
341 pages; Rs 495
