Delhi has always been an enigma to me - an intense interest that is extremely difficult to overlook. The first time I landed in Delhi in 1995 after putting in my papers at the Financial Express and not to return to journalism again, I could hardly resist the temptation of visiting The Hindustan Times office at the Kasturba Gandhi Marg to handover a resume to Dr Chandan Mitra, then its Executive Editor. Dr Mitra, then a firebrand journalist delving between political reporting and speaking out his mind on any issue be it a personal tribute to Salil Chowdhury.
He suggested that I see A K Bhattacharya of The Pioneer at the Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, Delhi's equivalent to the Fleet Street. As I popped in at the swanky office of The Pioneer, I first came across Paranjay Guha Thakurta, with his ponytail brand. Visit to The Express Building around the same road near ITO the next day to collect an unpaid cheque was equally exciting.
About six months later, when I was employed by the Press Trust of India - PTI in Delhi, walking in its Parliament Street office was like living a childhood dream of coexisting with the reverberations of unfolding politics in the national capital. Every day, a Greenline DTC bus dropped me either around the Parliament Building or some government office along the Raisina Road or the Rafi Marg, which housed the INS Building, as I walked to work.
Inside the PTI office, I would gaze in reverential silence as senior journalists covering Parliament, important departments and ministries dictated copies to make sure that we were ahead of time, and the aspiring journalist in me waited for an opportunity to cover a political event, be it ceremonial or of lesser importance.
First, I was assigned to cover a tea-party hosted by the then Vice President K R Narayanan at his residence in New Delhi's Maulana Azad Road to welcome some young bravehearts ahead of the Republic Day. A few months later, PTI's then chief reporter Amitabha Roy Chowdhury deputed me to cover a presser of the Communist patriarch Jyoti Basu at Banga Bhavan in New Delhi's upmarket Hailey Road. Being from Kolkata, no political assignment could be more self-gratifying than covering a press conference hosted by the then Bengali chief minister, but Amitabha Da would soon diffuse the tension, and with it the excitement, by stating that Basu might be one of the tallest leaders in Bengal but in the national capital he was one of the many chief ministers.
The South Indian canteen at the INS Building on Rafi Marg was portrayal of a mini-India, as journalists from all over the country trooped in after a day of hard work to share a moment or two before filing stories, demonstrating fiesty journalism. It was there that I came across many journalists who would later become my interviewees during the BBC days in London.
Soumya Bandyopadhyay, Suman Chattopadhyay, Jayanta Ghosal, Chandan Mitra, Ajay Bose, Diptosh Majumdar, Swapan Dasgupta, Nitya Chakraborty, M J Akbar - all narrating stories of an India that was transforming with every passing day and in remarkable speed. Coalition of multiple shades was then teasing India's polity and the political experimentation that went beyond the conventional mould of anti-Congressism gaining ground. The rise of the Hindu nationalists and the reinforcement of identity politics alongside the success story of the national economy, coupled with the exponential growth of the service sector rendered the Indian narrative to a description that probably could be best encapsulated by the term dualism - the co-existance of traditionalism and the modernity.
Then there were the likes of the late Nikhil Chakraborty and later his son Sumit Chakraborty, Bhabani Sengupta, Dipankar Gupta, Amitabh Kundu, Asish Nandy - who religiously held the time tested frameworks and parametres of political and economic analyses rather than allowing them to go haywire.
Stains of post-ideology and nihilism were gradually entrenching themselves in Indian polity but it was a defining moment in India's political and economic history. The excitement and euphoria of a romanticised polity, in line with the global ascent of Neoliberalism and an aspirational society, was not without its share of pain, hesitancy, scepticism and doubt. Nontheless the narrative of a new India unfolded with its many shades of grey. The story of the euphoric excitement lives with the memory of the story-tellers.
The news of the passing away of Diptosh Da (Majumdar) reignited the memory but not without its share of sadness.
Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant.
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com
All comments are personal.
No comments:
Post a Comment