Chapter 3

JOINING THE NATIONAL HERALD

The year 1968 was another turning point in my life. After putting in around 17 years as a stringer for half-a-dozen English dailies, I moved from Ludhiana to Chandigarh as staff correspondent of the Nehru family-owned National Herald newspaper when its Delhi edition was launched. National Herald (now defunct) had been established in Lucknow on 9 September 1938 by Jawaharlal Nehru, who was then a freedom fighter and a tall leader in the Congress Party. He was the paper’s first editor during the freedom movement years. The paper carried the words ‘Freedom Is in Peril, Defend It with All Your Might’ on its masthead taken from a cartoon by Jimmy Friell (whose pen name was Gabriel) from Brentford, Middlesex, which Indira Gandhi¹ had forwarded to Nehru.

A tenure of almost two decades at Ludhiana made me realize how professionally crucial it was for a journalist to work as a district-level stringer. Unlike today’s district-level staffers, who are given specified beats, in the earlier era, a stringer gained the experience of covering almost all fields of activity, including politics, economic matters, courts, sports and social and cultural events.

The story of my moving from Ludhiana to Chandigarh was preceded by the Tribune trustees not accepting the editor’s, R. Madhavan Nair’s, choice for the post of staff correspondent of Punjab’s premier English newspaper at Shimla (now the capital of Himachal Pradesh). The episode needs elaboration.

When I was working as the Tribune’s stringer at Ludhiana, Nair asked me to apply for the post of the newspaper’s staff correspondent at Shimla. On the day of the interview (sometime in 1967) with the paper’s trustees at Ambala (now in Haryana) – from where the newspaper used to be published before shifting to Chandigarh in 1969 – Nair told me that I should not put forth any demand about emoluments during the interview and that I should just say: ‘Whatever the Tribune would pay would be acceptable to me.’

Tara Chand Gupta, one of my colleagues in the Punjab Working Journalists’ Association, of which I was general secretary, was also among the candidates who had come for the interview. Gupta told me that either of us would be selected and added: ‘If I am selected I will keep my apartment at Shimla open for you and your family and if you are selected, you should keep your apartment open for me.’

Gupta was selected, as I came to learn later, on the recommendation of a close family member of the Tribune Trust’s chairman. Nair later told me that he was sorry that he could not get me selected but assured me that he would ensure that I got a staffer’s job in an English newspaper. He kept his word.

In early 1968, I got a trunk call (remember, this was the pre-mobile phone era) from Nair informing me that M. Chalapathi Rau (popularly called MC), a senior journalist and editor of the National Herald, had asked him to suggest somebody to be appointed as the paper’s staff correspondent at Chandigarh and that he (Nair) had mentioned my name. Without any loss of time, I went to Delhi and met MC. He looked at the clippings of my stories and went through the first one, which was my write-up on Lahaul and Spiti (now in Himachal Pradesh) published by the Tribune under my byline (it needs to be noted that the newspaper had never given a byline on its news pages even to its staffers). It was a sort of literary piece descriptively giving my impressions about the beautiful tribal areas but desolate landscape, which I had described as ‘moonscape’.

After he had finished reading whatever he wanted to, MC returned the clippings file to me and asked as to how much I was earning as a stringer at Ludhiana. When I told him that my monthly income was around Rs 1000, he appointed me in his newspaper at the same salary with the sagacious advice: ‘Facts should be treated as sacred and comments should be free.’ I decided to offer him my ‘guru dakshina’ by trying to follow his advice in letter and spirit throughout my journalistic career.

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During my 11-year stint as the National Herald’s staff correspondent in charge of the Chandigarh office, I came into contact with many interesting people. Among them was a person with the name Rajan Zed. A journalism graduate from Panjab University, Chandigarh, he approached me in the early 1970s with the request to take him on as the paper’s stringer for covering Chandigarh. I asked the shy and introvert Rajan Zed to cover university and local functions. Why and how he decided to choose ‘Zed’ as his surname, no one knew and he himself avoided answering the question. Today, he is considered an icon of Hindu religion in the USA, often described as ‘America’s most savvy Hindu priest’. He is the Nevada-based chief of the Universal Society of Hinduism. In June 2012, the meeting of 17 municipal councils of California began with a Hindu prayer by Rajan Zed.

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1 Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, went on to become the prime minister of India in January 1966.