It all began in a suite of dusty rooms at the then-government-run unglamorous Lodhi Hotel on a couple of tables and chairs, random couches with mouldering upholstery. A makeshift office where a pouty-mouthed Vinod Mehta would interview us before grunting, “And when can you join?”
Every morning was about coffee, joyous whoops of welcome to yet another new recruit from the fraternity, excited chatter at the Press Club of India and hotel coffee shop lunches. And then we moved to our office! Cheek-by-jowl with Kamal Cinema and, more happily, right next to Rajinder Dhaba: home of legendary tandoori chicken.
We tumbled into the three-storied building like excited school kids: racing up and down the staircase checking out our desks, swivel chairs, PCs, a library stewarded by the whip-wielding Alka—“No, you cannot take this copy of Esquire, Sunil, because the design section wants it”—and the all-important Accounts section where our taxi/ travel bills were reimbursed as we tore around town gathering material for our inaugural dhamaka.
And what a resounding dhamaka it was!
Vinod set the cat among the pigeons with that controversial Kashmir poll story: an overwhelming Kashmiri majority did not want to be a part of the Indian Union. They voted for Azadi. We used that as a headline on our cover. He/ We were not dubbed seditionists/ anti-nationals (this was 1994, remember? The vocabulary of political discourse was… ahem, different), but TV talking heads and rival editors went batty. We’d given them much to natter about!
We’d tasted blood!
We were on a roll!
The late Nikhil Chakravarty, Vinod’s mentor, slipped us salacious bits from PM Narasimha Rao’s unpublished book. Sagarika Ghosh (now an MP for TMC) wrote the story.
Whoa!
Hurricane unleashed!
This was writing by the reigning PM that would rival the pinkest pages of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty!!!
We exulted. Detractors cursed. Each edit meeting was a roller coaster of ideas punctuated with much laughter, storytelling, excited disclosure of forthcoming scoops. Each cover a triumph to be jointly celebrated.
The chatterati went berserk; from Lutyens Delhi to South Bombay to Banjara Hills to Poes Garden, drawing rooms buzzed excitedly with: did you hear? Congress-walas reached out for smelling salts and proprietors fumed at rival India Today edit meets, confounded by this pesky new challenger that was making waves, flying off the stands in an environment that doomsayers were predicting was the death of print. Many of us ex-India Today journos were soon being made gharwapasi offers! When that failed, India Today keeled: lowered its price, turned weekly. Like us! Now, that felt good!
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. We exulted. Detractors cursed. Each edit meeting was a roller coaster of ideas punctuated with much laughter, storytelling, and excited disclosure of forthcoming scoops. Each cover story was a triumph to be jointly celebrated. No department worked in a silo. Excited photographers contributed to intelligent evocative storytelling, design/ layout teams sat with writers to devise eye-catching graphics, highlight provocative blurbs; eagle-eyed copydesk editors excitedly collaborated in devising catchy headlines/ strap lines/ reigning in habitual alliterators/word-length violators! And of course there was always the Stealth Bomber, the Ghost Who Walked aka Vinod. You’d be totally engrossed writing your story when suddenly he’d creep up behind you, “What’re you working on?” Enough to make you bloody well jump out of your skin!
Cover stories flew fast and furious. Best sellers, all! The one on Kashmir Azadi, Kargil.
The Cricket Betting Racket, the special issue on 50 years of Partition, my own on The Great Indian Fashion Fraud and countless others. Each landmark issue was raucously celebrated on the grotty terrace upstairs. But who cared? We were young, heady, the beer was chilled, Rajinder’s chicken tikkas were delish and in-house songstress Pritha Sen (now celebrated food historian, globe-trotting celeb chef) was in full cry. Surreptitious office romances, good natured ribbing, recounting of the latest shenanigans of the office piranha loaned the necessary edge!
“Oh lady, we receive but what we give,” sang Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Rightly so! We gave everything we had to Outlook. It was our baby. Vinod was benign; the head of a family who let you be and was always willing to think out-of-the-box, put his neck out, a man of the say-it-like-it-is school of journalism (yes, such men did exist); we had the best gift any journo could ever wish for: leeway, freedom, editorial trust.
Outlook grew. Became a case study of many a media dissertation on the viability/ indispensability of print in an environment where most had predicted its demise.
And we grew. On the strength of our work. We built our reputations, consolidated them. Outlook became the launching pad for so many of us: Sagarika went into television; thence back to print, and finally to the Rajya Sabha, Tarun Tejpal went on to make Tehelka of the right kind (later, tragically of the wrong kind), Aniruddha Bahal went on to found Cobra Post which did some explosive investigative journalism, Pritha Sen went on to the NGO circuit before finding her place in the sun as celeb chef, food historian; yours truly went on to do his own long running TV show, become a dastango…After all, I was a story teller!
We gave it all we had. And were rewarded in full measure. The sepia memory of that misty winter of 1994, of Outlook, will always remain a cherished one.
Sunil Mehra is a Delhi-based Journalist, TV Producer and Anchor
(This appeared in the print as 'All It Takes')
