The charmingly old-fashioned and admired Jug Suraiya has written a funny and perceptive account of his career
Khushwant Singh has described Jug Suraiya, the author of JS & The Times of My Life, as India’s Art Buchwald. Maybe, but I see him more as a successor to Behram Contractor, who was better known as ‘Busybee’, the pen name under which his column appeared in the evening paper of The Times of India. That paper closed down when he moved to Mid-Day and his readers followed him there. The column appeared six times a week for thirty-six years, an incredible feat worthy of The Guinness Book of Records. He died ten years ago.
Behram’s style of writing was deceptively simple but was inimitable. Everyone read Busybee but the biggest fans were commuters in local trains on their way home from work—‘the man on the Clapham omnibus,’ as they say in England. I suspect Jug Suraiya’s columns are more for people sipping their morning coffee in drawing rooms, more Defence Colony than Karol Bagh. What the two have in common is that both make fun of the foibles and follies of the rich and the powerful, without being malicious.
Jug’s real name is Jagdish though no one has ever called him that, probably not even his mother. He is Gujarati but there is nothing Gujarati about him. His family settled in Calcutta generations ago and he has some very Bengali traits. He loves everything British. When he was down and out in London, he found employment in, of all places, Harrods. He enjoys a good cigar, I have seldom seen him without one, and he can be fussy about his drink. He stopped going to book launches of his publisher, OUP, when they began serving bad whisky.
Soon after he left college, he found employment in Junior Statesman, edited by the legendary Desmond Doig. The magazine had a short life despite changing the name to JS in the hope of finding a wider readership. He then joined the parent paper, The Statesman, until a headhunter brought him to Delhi when The Times of India shifted its headquarters from Bombay to the capital and was in search of extra staff.
His new editor, Girilal Jain, ignored him completely until he happened to read a piece by Jug in The New York Review of Books. Now he was suitably impressed and began addressing his remarks to Jug at editorial meetings. Indian journalism was like that at one time; you had to be published abroad to be taken seriously at home.
Jug has been with TOI for the past twenty-five years. In this very funny autobiography of sorts, he is particularly good at observing the eccentricities of various editors who join and leave the paper in rapid succession. This is the book to read if you want to know how a newspaper can be run without an editor-in-chief. You create fiefdoms!
Besides his humour column, ‘Jugular Vein’, Jug, at one time, was in charge of the Sunday edition. He currently oversees the edit page. Jug hates television and at one time it got him into trouble. He was not aware of the death of Princess Diana since it happened on a Sunday. It left the proprietor of TOI wondering next day why there was no editorial on it. Jug belongs to a dying breed of journalists who still writes with a pen. He does not know how to use a typewriter, let alone a computer.
Samir Jain, the big boss of TOI, has a fondness for Jug and his lovely wife Bunny. They get invited to the mansion often. The food served can be described as fusion: a vegetarian thali consisting of pizza, pulao, pasta, two subzis and daal.
This description of Surendra Nihal Singh, his former editor at The Statesman, will give you an idea of Jug’s wit: “Nihal looked like what all India’s ambassadors should look like and seldom do: distinguished, polished of manner, and emanating a nimbus of benign intelligence. You’d buy a foreign policy from him like a shot.”