#lucknow boy

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Arnab Goswami and Vinod Mehta at the Delhi launch of Lucknow Boy

By Arcopol Chaudhuri

You may not be a loyal reader of Outlook, but that doesn’t mean you’ve not come across Vinod Mehta.

The editor-in-chief of one of the best general interest magazines in India, Outlook, Mehta makes an appearance regularly on news channels and is seen looking at the viewer, but ends up instilling some sense into a hysterical Sagorika Ghose or an agitated Arnab Goswami. An extremely quote-worthy newsman, he often amuses you with his tongue-in-cheek remarks in the middle of a heated argument.

He is also, as it turns out after reading his memoir, Lucknow Boy,  the only editor with an outstanding sense of humour and besides being a fine storyteller. He succeeds in telling his life's story generating deep empathy for his experiences, and had it not been for this book, we wouldn’t have know what an extra-ordinary life he’s lived.

He is, going by his own admission, "the most sacked editor" in Indian media. After he resigned from Debonair (Atal Behari Vajpayee once told him, "You magazine is very good...but I have to keep it under the pillow."), he launched four different newspapers over the decades - The Pioneer, The Sunday Observer, The Independent, Indian Post. He was sacked from each of them.

His career as an editor forms the core of the book (He was so short-staffed, he wrote the entire first issue of Debonair himself, under various pseudonyms) and are absolute page-turners, ("My Lucknow friends believed - wrongly, alas - that I was screwing every Debonair centre spread") where the reader will not only enjoy Mehta's adventures editing a nude magazine, but also get some insight into the genesis of some important newspapers in the recent history of Indian journalism, and the big stories they broke.

Above: Mehta, at the Outlook office

Unfortunately, one learns in this memoir that an editor, when not at loggerheads with marketing and ad sales, risks his independence if he has to be in the best books of his proprietor. Mehta, for most of his career, has been a victim of the latter. His longest and most assured stay has been at Outlook - a magazine that challenged a comprehensive market leader India Today and is today, gnawing at the magazine's number one spot. It is understandable why Mehta dedicates his memoir the only man who let him stay afloat - Rajan Raheja, the proprietor of Outlook.

What also makes Lucknow Boy more endearing is Mehta’s descriptions of the charming city of Lucknow, how it made him a ‘pseudo-secularist’ and also how it shaped him to be a man of such varied interests.

"In Lucknow at that time, you could be a liar, crook, bigot, miser, ugly, lower caste - that was okay. What you couldn't be was a bore. When we wanted to damn somebody, call him the worst possible name, we would say, 'bore hai'. That automatically earned the person pariah status. Such a person was to be shunned like the plague, and I am sorry to report that in our wondrous city, there was no shortage of the species...A talent to amuse was considered vital. How to tell an amusing story, the precise technique of narration guaranteed to hold an audience was, for us, critical."

The experience has also made him candid about his mistakes. About his experience at The Sunday Observer, he writes:

"I was under the misapprehension that all great editors had to be ‘difficult’. It was a sign of their greatness. How wrong I was. If in the newsroom or at the edit conference, the editor is tearing his hair out, is visibly enraged, he simply passes on the tension to his staff. They too become agitated. It is, in fact, the editor’s job to stay calm and steady, especially when the office is stressed."

Further he adds in the next para:

"Most of all, I did not make time for my wife. I was an uncaring husband. I assumed stupidly she would understand that her husband’s enterprise represented some vital public purpose. Yes, I was that far gone!"

I also read with much fascination Mehta’s interaction with the Ambanis, when Dhirubhai himself expressed his interest to ‘discuss politics’ with him. Mehta accepted, only on the condition that the two meet at Sea Lounge at the Taj Hotel, a neutral venue for both. Turns out, Ambani chickened out.

Mehta (R) with Afternoon's Behram Contractor a.k.a Busybee

Right from the first expose that introduced India to the malaise of match-fixing, to the discovery of Narasimha Rao as a closet writer, to a blunder about YB Chavan in The Independent, to the Niira Radia tapes controversy - Mehta has been associated with big stories, grooming the likes of Tarun Tejpal and Anirudh Bahal, who are now outstanding investigative journalists in their own right.

Lucknow Boy, despite being a memoir - a genre that is considered boring - is extremely engaging, entertaining, racy and immersive. I just couldn't put it down. 

There are also a few more reasons why this is a significant memoir especially for journalists and future editors-to-be. 

One, is because Mehta proves that you can reach where he is today, despite not being trained in a journalism school, or having a professional degree for that matter. Mehta is a BA-third class degree holder, self-taught, enriched by the experiences life has brought his way (including fathering a girl who he has never met) and has time and again learned to pick up the pieces and reboot his life. Clearly, there is no better man in India, to launch a magazine or newspaper than him, he has done it so many times.

Two, to gain from a rich chapter titled ‘Sweeper’s Wisdom’ where he offers his piece of mind what maketh a good journalist, gathering his learning from a 40-year roller-coaster career in the news business. Some pertinent questions he asks: Can journalists make a difference, should a journalist be a cynic or a skeptic, are there always two sides to a story, should a journalist try and be a rebel, can journalists and politicians be friends, what should a journalist do with his ego...

But more than that, Lucknow Boy is a rich reading experience for anyone who is particularly fascinated with how the news business works, how it was in the 70s and 80s and what it went through to become what it is today. Most importantly, it depicts how Mehta became a casualty of such change, but still emerged triumphant, thanks to his ability to restart things all over again.