The write stuff: Vir Sanghvi's memoir is an easy and entertaining read

A Rude Life: The Memoir

Author: Vir Sanghvi

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 427

Price: Rs 699

I knew Vir Sanghvi somewhat at the start of my career. I was with India Today in New Delhi when he wrote for the magazine out of Bombay (now Mumbai). As a subeditor, I was learning to appreciate good writing — by the definition of my overworked colleagues and myself, this was an article that didn’t make any demands on us. We liked Vir.

His writing was effortless then — as now. No wonder his memoir, A Rude Life, is such an easy and entertaining read.

Magazines were at their peak in the 1980s and Vir was one of the youngest editors ever, first at Bombay magazine (he was only 22) and then the powerful but declining Sunday (at 30). Like others, I wondered what made him so special. It is only while reading Rude, so many years later, I realise that he was an outstanding student from a privileged family.

It allowed him a shot at Oxford. That opportunity nearly slipped out of his grasp, though, because his father died unexpectedly. Vir, only a teenager, managed to talk his way into a public school in London all on his own. It was extraordinarily brave.

Most journalists of Vir’s vintage faded out a long time ago because the media business changed faster than they could themselves. As the decline of magazines set in, he recognised that his career might be ending prematurely. Vir worked towards creating an alternative career for himself in an exciting new medium — television — and hosted shows for a wide variety of channels. TV helped him explore his interests beyond politics, in travel, food and wine. Online, he has a vast following on Twitter.

Always a great networker, Vir occasionally met K K Birla, then boss of Hindustan Times (HT), one of India’s largest newspapers. Birla and his daughter — and now chairperson — Shobhana Bhartia soon decided that they wanted Vir on board to pull HT into the present from the past where it was stubbornly lodged.

Vir modernised the paper editorially in the face of resistance from the old guard. Four years later he decided to quit as editor much to the surprise of the owners. He didn’t want to stay so long that he got “editoritis”, he explained. He described this as an affliction where a journalist gets so addicted to power that he is no longer good to be anything else but an editor.

Because he has worked so long on his own, Vir has dodged the other ailment common to editors, “pontificatitis”. Rude is amusing and I actually caught myself chortling repeatedly. Even when he is at the high table — he was especially close to the Gandhis — he remains, for the most part, the detached observer.

The vignettes of successful people are enjoyable. He was friends with Atal Bihari Vajyapee’s daughter and son-in-law and spent many a casual evening with the prime ministerial family. Duties done, Vajpayee enjoyed nothing better than to put on a lungi, sit with a mug of soup in his hand and enjoy the antics of his granddaughter. Politics was taboo.

On one occasion Vir, balancing budget papers and hand baggage, is trying to get off the Delhi-Kolkata flight. An out-of-power (and former finance minister) Pranab Mukherjee seated next to him offers to help, “Would you like me to carry the budget papers? I have done it before.”

Vir has saved his best to portray his one-time employer (at Sunday), Aveek Sarkar, the eccentric and highly opinionated then boss of media company ABP who once told a visiting western author, “Calcutta is like Paris.” This, at a time the city was universally renowned for its squalor.

Vir recalls an evening when the guest of honour at the Sarkar home was the celebrated Amartya Sen: But instead of trying to understand his guest’s point of view, “Amartya Sen was taught economics for two hours by Aveek Sarkar.”

Vir’s reputation took a terrible knock about 10 years ago when his name came up in the telecom scandal known as the “Radia tapes”. Outlook magazine ran a cover story featuring him (among others) as one of the people trying to influence telecom policy. An outraged Vir sued Outlook, and persisted with the case for nine years, much after everyone had forgotten the scandal. Outlook finally expressed regret and withdrew the allegations.

Vir’s special skill has been an ability to make complex issues easy to understand. He simplifies rather than complicates — a temptation that can be hard to resist.

I understand that this is a memoir and not a recounting of modern Indian history. Still, he could so easily have woven in the dramatic changes that have reshaped urban India over the past 40 years. Coming from a writer so prominent, the book is oddly devoid of a single statistic in its 400+ pages — not even basic stuff like GDP, growth rate, population, per capita income, nothing at all — to convey just how far we have travelled.

Had he done that, it might have set a better context for his own fascinating story.