India uncut
Vinod Mehta’s memoir is a rollicking, voyeuristic read.
Perhaps the biggest insult you could give Vinod Mehta is that he is a bore. Thankfully, his biography, Lucknow Boy, is anything but boring. Mehta tells us that the chana-eating former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar used to break wind right after lovemaking, which was a little disconcerting (to say the least) to his consorts. P V Narasimha Rao and Atal Behari Vajpayee both had a keen eye for pretty ladies. (When Rao wrote a raunchy novel, Mehta managed to pilfer a copy and promptly printed excerpts as a major feature in his debut issue of Outlook.)
Mehta himself admits that “Like most sinful and salacious human beings, I enjoy gossip,” and certainly there’s lots of it in his book which is reason enough to read it. But for anyone who’s interested in the life of someone who slept with many European women (most of them au pairs), edited India’s one and only “girlie” magazine Debonair (leafing through it now would make Mehta weep with despair), revolutionised the newspaper, and later, the magazine business with new formats and had a ringside seat to what is arguably the biggest circus in the world (Indian politics) — which he frequently orchestrated with sensational scoops — then, this is your book.
In a more saffronised India, many probably detest Mehta as a “pseudo-secularist”. But it’s not his fault. After all, he grew up with both Muslim and Hindu friends in Lucknow, in a bygone era where you were judged solely by your ability to tell a decent joke or a story — told with aplomb and the right pacing — and, of course, your talent at pulling chicks. Mehta’s impulses are sometimes contradictory. He self-deprecatingly refers to himself numerous times as a “dud” and not very bright, which I suspect is a clever set-up, considering that later on in his book he proclaims that “I could conceive and create all types of publications from the drawing board to the hawker stage. Someone called me ‘the ultimate launch man of Indian publishing’.”
He may be right. Mehta did have a unique brain to soak up the best of the world and distill it into a new publication for the masses. The Sunday Observer, India’s first Sunday paper, the Indian Post (whose new, pioneering daily arts page, Mehta says, the Times of India and the Indian Express promptly ripped off) and the reconfigured Pioneer, India’s oldest newspaper. With this came the inevitable collisions with the owners of these papers — Vijaypat Singhania and L M Thapar, to name two — and the equally predictable sackings for which Mehta was soon deemed a risky hire.
Ironically, it was the pseudo-secularist’s eventual arch-rival Prabhu Chawla who suggested that the Bombay-ised Mehta with his “arty-farty” predilections not go to Delhi, suggesting he was too soft, which naturally galvanised Mehta to do exactly the opposite. In Delhi, Mehta truly came into his own. After being sacked by Thapar, profoundly broke and with no prospects, Mehta reached his nadir — literally — by falling into a manhole while walking to find a taxi to save cash, which he had never done. When Rajan Raheja approached him to take on India Today, it was like a miracle. Mehta, in his usual subversive manner, launched a weekly, eventually forcing Aroon Purie to adopt the same schedule.
With Outlook, Mehta reached the pinnacle of his game and some of the anecdotes in his book are superlative. Like, for instance, the fascinating intrigue in the PMO which was then being controlled by the daughter of the woman Vajpayee was seeing, Namita, as well as her husband Ranjan Bhattacharya, along with Vajpayee’s right-hand man Brajesh Mishra. Apparently, Bhattacharya was jockeying to get a piece of the action from several lucrative contracts being doled out, including for the Rs 58,000 crore national highways project.
Mehta also presided over highly entertaining editorial firefights (which he stoked and enjoyed) between India’s rock star academic Ramchandra Guha and Page 3 writer-historian William Dalrymple, both of whom vented their spleen about each other over the origins of Pankaj Mishra’s prose. Also enjoyable is a takedown of Shashi Tharoor, revealing his desperation to become the UN Secretary General and his machinations towards that goal. Yet, Mehta presents the entire distasteful episode elegantly, while cheekily declaring that he has enjoyed many a sumptuous meal at Shashi’s and hopes to do so in the future, too.
There are some things that I wish weren’t in the book. His do’s and don’ts for journalists towards the end is preachy and tedious. When he talks about taking in a mutt off the streets, which he named Editor, he says that he always wanted to adopt a “bastard”, perhaps playing for laughs. Yet, he doesn’t have the emotional intelligence — or the memory — to realise that in the early part of the book he admits to unwittingly siring a child on a European woman who decides to keep it, contrary to Mehta’s wishes, a child of whom he has no knowledge today.
But this is quibbling, because all in all this is a rollicking, voyeuristic read from a man who is widely known for many things: wit, an instinctive sense for story, a sophisticated understanding of the arts, a suspicion of power (his favourite author is Orwell), a keen mind and a passion for constant innovation within the medium. He is someone who ignited debates that were long ignored by the mainstream press (Arundhati Roy was his muse on the issue of big dams, nuclear bombs and Naxalites) and is genuinely invested in the fabric of the India he believes in, rather than fomenting a cult of his own personality.
Considering the screaming faces on television who make a point through decibel levels rather than argument and logic, and considering the dreariness of many of our publications whose editors have undoubtedly not savoured the world in the way that they should in order to turn out a readable publication, Mehta already seems like an anachronism, with no bona fide heirs to take over his mantle. India desperately needs another Lucknow boy.
LUCKNOW BOY
A Memoir
Author: Vinod Mehta
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 372
Price: Rs 499