Confessions of an Editor

Humour and honesty, Vinod Mehta knows, are a journalist’s biggest weapons. That’s why his memoirs work

Journalists tend to favour a ‘my-crucial-role-in-the-country’s-history’ approach to the writing of memoirs. Their business is reporting history, not making it; yet, as they grow older, they acquire special glasses that give an extra dimension to their roles. Viewed through these, they see a profundity in what they do, which they share with readers.

They tell us how they influenced prime ministers and presidents, caused or prevented wars, and were the unacknowledged legislators of a generation.

Vinod Mehta is free of such self-importance. The result is a refreshing read that is fun, gossipy, and more in ‘the-country’s-role-in-my-history’ mode. It is not about what a Lucknow boy does to the world, but the reverse. ‘I have never had any illusions,’ Mehta confesses, ‘about being anything but a journalist. The kind who  knows something about everything. If pressed I could produce 800 serviceable words on the sex habits of dolphins, or the monkeys of Mussoorie, or climate change in Cherrapunjee or the existential dilemmas of Calcutta’s communists. I need no reminding that, finally, I am a journalist, a journalist who may have prospered a bit.’

This is a book of events and people rather than ideas and theories. It does not take much to join the dots.

The novelist Henry James urged a writer to be ‘a person upon whom nothing is lost’. In nearly four decades as editor (Mehta started at the top with Debonair), very little was lost on the man who brought a signature style to the publications he edited.

The late Dhiren Bhagat once painted a picture (available in his collection The Contemporary Conservative) that captures Mehta more brilliantly than the autobiography does. There are two reasons for this. Mehta’s work speaks for itself and needs no endorsement from him, which places this book at a disadvantage. More importantly, Mehta is attracted to humour and self-deprecation rather than lectures and trumpet-blowing.

‘In the Lucknow of the 60s, we asked some fundamental questions with respect to an individual,’ he writes. ‘Was he a bore or was he funny? Could he spin a decent yarn and keep us entertained? Did he know one or two girls? Could we get a good meal at his house? Was he prepared to make the odd (minor) sacrifice for his mates? Could he be trusted?’

That is the closest we get to Mehta’s philosophy, both as a person and a professional.

This reluctance to reveal himself, this diffidence, has been a hallmark of the man who must rate as one of our finest all-round editors. And despite his confessions here, including the fact that he fathered a child in England whom he has never met, you are still no closer to understanding what really makes Mehta tick. This is both the strength and the weakness of the book—there is candour here and reticence; it is both non-judgmental and teasing.

Luckily for the reader, the reluctance does not extend to others. It is as if the light Mehta attempts to shine on himself brings into sharper focus the writers, actors, journalists, newspaper barons, the high and mighty around him—from Naipaul and Rushdie to the late Meena Kumari and Sonia Gandhi.

In a recent book on the subject of gossip, the essayist Jason Epstein says,  ‘A man or woman without any interest in gossip may be impressive in his or her restraint, but also wanting in curiosity, uninterested in the variousness of human nature, dead to the wildly abundant oddity of life, and thereby, in some central way, deficient.’ No one can accuse Mehta of being similarly deficient; his book gains as a result. 

As he says, ‘Like most sinful and salacious human beings, I enjoy gossip. As long as confidentiality is maintained and sources protected, I receive and transmit gossip without compunction. In Delhi, when you brand a person as a ‘big gossip’, you are actually paying the person a compliment.’

In the early 1990s, when despite, or as it happened, because of, the then India Today editor Prabhu Chawla’s suggestion that an ‘arty-farty’ Mumbai editor would not survive in political Delhi, Vinod Mehta shifted out of his comfort zone to edit The Pioneer. His talent for picking gifted young people was already legendary. As I prepared to leave the security of an established newspaper in Chennai to join him, a senior editor told me: “If The Pioneer succeeds, it will be Vinod Mehta’s success; if it fails, it will be your failure.”

For weeks, we had editorial meetings, planned, recruited, argued in the conference room. Young sub-editors had to get used to the new software as well as the editor, who was a shouter and screamer in the highest class, and whose language was on the more colourful side of purple. His highest term of praise was to say that someone was a “real bastard”—it was an encomium looked forward to.

Occasionally, he would invite senior editors to his room, magically produce a bottle and glasses, and pour out  a drink or two, no more. I was in my twenties then, and was startled when he told a senior journalist who wanted more, “No. Back to work with you.” And even more startled when the worthy left the room without a murmur. Nobody wanted to be in Vinod’s bad books.

He wrote a popular diary column. “A diary item,” he said, “needs to be only 60 per cent accurate.”

It is advice he followed in his first collection of articles (Mr Editor, How Close Are You to the PM?), where he claimed to have become editor of Debonair at 25. Neither of the dates of birth in his autobiography bears that out. He was either 32 or 33 then.

The saga of Mehta’s professional journey is fascinating—he converted Indian newsmagazine journalism from a unipolar world dominated by India Today to a bipolar one shared with Outlook. Yet, the most moving parts of the book are the early years.

At 20, he arrives in London, and goes about educating himself. The discovery that Somerset Maugham was not the greatest writer ever (as taught in Indian schools), or that Jonathan Swift and William Blake were more than children’s writers come as shocks.

The irreverence that runs like a golden thread through his career is fostered here, as is his sex life (‘Philandering should be like stamp collecting. It is done at a certain age and then it is over.’). Mehta evolves into a natural teacher unafraid to break his own rules. Not since Khushwant Singh has an editor shown such delight at publishing letters against himself. He continues to plunge headlong into controversy with Outlook, now exposing an unhealthy nexus, now carrying a pin to the balloon of pomposity.

The fundamental questions of half a century ago all have the right answers. Vinod Mehta is funny, spins a decent yarn and keeps us entertained, has known one or two girls, is prepared to make the odd (minor) sacrifice for his mates, and can be trusted.

Like a good editor, Mehta knows more than he is telling, but Lucknow Boy succeeds because it is written with the honesty and humour of a man who knows these are a journalist’s biggest weapons.

About The Author

Suresh Menon

Suresh Menon is Editor, Wisden India Almanack