By Mukesh Kumar Sinha/Soumitra Bose
If there’s 1 Person like Mahatma Gandhi in India, He’s Shashi Tharoor undoubtedly — goes the all pervasive saying even today in the United Nations, New York, wherein he nearly became “Ban Ki Moon”. Insiders therein openly confide, had he not been an Indian, thus, pro-Russia-ite, he would be the UN boss today. Nonetheless, Tharoor, enjoys mammoth credibility in UN even today, full credit surely to him. …Today, he openly says he’s full-fledged American-minded, not a bit any other ‘any’-ite. (Does it signify when he was in UN, he was really “The Spy Who Came In from Russia”, a la James Bond).
That he may be, Only He Knows & Can Vouch for That. None Else, for sure. …As for now, Shashi Tharoor has been finally caught off guard. So far, he succeeded (genuine kudos to him for that) in waywarding Master Strategist-Virtuoso Investigator-incommensurable-incomparable-cogent cum laconic to the core, Subramaniam Swamy (imagine The Talent of Tharoor!) of all people who were after him on Sunanda Pushkarna death case and its reason : Him. But not any more.
JUST IN PRINT has found out that Tharoor’s ‘secrets on Sunanda Pushkarna’ are greatly possible with the following : (U r reading Nalini Singh, Vir Sanghvi, Barkha Dutt and few others knowing about that although nothing specific has been obtained from them except theories on circumstantial evidences) Ramu Damodaran, Jug Suraiya, C Y Gopinath, Bunny Suraiya, Aruna DasGupta, Dubby Bhagat, Nondon Bagchi…all full fledged bumchums of Tharoor since 1960s. They were together (whatever that meant then) till various phases in 1970s in JS. Read about it below from Tharoor’s own pen…
Published 8 years ago/February 4, 2007 in The Times of India – By Shashi Tharoor
(Weekly Column “Shashi on Sunday” in “The Times of India”
February 04, 2007)
Jug Suraiya’s generous tribute to me on this page last Sunday didn’t just make my day (and my mother’s, after he extolled her cooking in print, much to the delight of the rest of the overweight Tharoor clan, who have consumed many a creative calorie concocted by her over the years).
It also prompted me to think about the magazine that first brought us together, the first ‘youth magazine’ India ever had, the Junior Statesman (soon reduced, in popular discourse, and then officially, to JS).
It’s a bit unfair on my editors at the Times of India to spend a column praising the offspring of a rival paper, except that, sadly extinct, JS is not a threat to anyone anymore, and the Times’ competitor for young readers, Youth Times, has also long since faded away.
But anyone who was a teenager in India between 1967 and 1976 will not need persuading about the extraordinary impact that JS had on their generation. I still meet middle-aged matrons who wax eloquently nostalgic about the magazine, including people who can quote back at me from memory things I’d forgotten I’d written.
With the plethora of entertainment choices available to young Indians today, it’s easy to underestimate the impact that a single magazine can have on the consciousness of a generation (of course, a largely urban, English-speaking and moderately affluent generation).
When JS appeared, there was, of course, no TV in India (except for a single black-and-white channel in Delhi, largely devoted to agricultural programming, and nothing anywhere else), computers didn’t exist and Play Station wasn’t even a gleam in an inventor’s eye.
Young people could read books or listen to music; the magazines available were by and large turgid, unimaginative masses of dense text, largely devoted to the increasingly unconvincing utterances of politicians. (No Indian versions of Cosmo or Maxim in those days!)
And then JS appeared, with pop-art graphics, wildly kaleidoscopic illustrations, a fold-out larger-than-life blow-up of some teen icon, and articles whose sensibility alternated between Seventeen magazine and Hunter S Thompson on a (relatively) sober day. It rapidly became the must-read mag for Indian teens everywhere.
And it wasn’t just importing recycled PR handouts of Western celebrities. JS didn’t just make space for, it created a dizzying number of Indian artists and writers. M J Akbar and I made our debuts as writers in the same issue of JS back in 1967.
Writing for JS meant sharing space with the likes of editor Desmond Doig, journalist, mountaineer and dandy; Dubby Bhagat, a general’s son who delighted in knocking down every stereotype you might have been tempted to assume about him; Bhaskar ‘Papa’ Menon, who wrote a brilliant column called ‘Bounder’ and became the first JS contributor to go off to New York to work (and write) for the United Nations; Anurag Mathur, who wrote very serious short stories that didn’t prefigure the hilarity of The Inscrutable Americans; Sunil Sethi, who reported from and on Delhi with the easy sophistication later known to legions of television viewers; or C Y Gopinath, earnest, bespectacled and erudite, an editor’s and reader’s favourite.
And of course the remarkable Jug Suraiya, who in those days had to be read with dictionary in hand, since he loved words nobody else had been inclined to use in print before, and who acquired a fan following nationwide that has since grown (and grown up) with him in the columns of this newspaper.
And JS’ eclectic subject matter was similarly nurturing of desi talent. The singer-actress Asha Puthli was first hyped in the pages of JS; so were tabla maestro Zakir Hussein, dancer Swapna Sundari, cineaste Shyam Benegal, and the model-turned-beauty-queen-turned-movie-star Zeenat Aman.
Simi Garewal wrote an advice column; Raghu Rai and Sondeep Shankar took pictures of everything; the wonderfully-named sisters Papiya and Tuk Tuk Ghosh offered witty insights into all sorts of subjects (they were so prolific that many readers suspected they were the figments of the JS’ staff’s fevered imaginations, until late last year came the tragic news that Papiya, by then an eminent historian at Patna University, had been murdered in her home in that lawless city).
They rubbed shoulders (or at least column inches) with the likes of Jatin Das, whose paintings JS vividly depicted well before he went on to national prominence as one of our great modern artists (not to mention father of the lovely and talented Nandita).
Or King Jigme Singye Wangchuk of Bhutan, who, as a teenage monarch, gave JS the exclusive scoop on his coronation (accompanied by the lush photography which JS was known for and which was not yet widely practised in the country outside the somewhat stodgy pages of the Illustrated Weekly of India).
Nostalgia is a middle-aged affliction; it attaches importance to the memory of experiences that mean little to the majority who did not share them. So writing about JS is a little self-indulgent.
The magazine died young, folded while still profitable by The Statesman’s chief honcho C R Irani after a quarrel with Doig, who passed away soon after of a heart attack.
It barely lasted a decade, and anyone leafing through a back copy today (if one can be found) is bound to find it quaint, with its dated 1960s lingo and its calibrated air of cautious rebelliousness, celebrating youthful freedom but within sensible bounds.
And yet JS’ achievement lay in giving a generation of young Indians the sense that they mattered; that their concerns, interests, fantasies and creative outpourings had a place in our society; and that they could, through the simple fact of the circulation of a magazine, link themselves to a network of other young Indians across the country who shared these concerns and interests.
In so doing, JS expanded, for many of us, the world of the possible and that is why, 30 years after either of us appeared in its pages, Jug Suraiya and I are able to greet each other so fondly on the pages of your newspaper today.
Trincas in Calcutta where many a band played in the sixties including Savages, Usha Uthup and Great…
Isn’t this revealing enough ? It is. Sleuths have stumbled upon it and presently are analyzing it ( minus Subramaniam Swamy) threadbare, between lines word-by-word. At the time of writing, they are assimilating facts.
Meanwhile, Tharoor himself is praying for his reincarnation-n-incarnation in his familiar “Dustin Hoffman-Al Pacino-Alain Delon-Masrcello Mastroioni look, now synonymous with him in entire NCR-India-but not at all, Kerala. There in Thiruvananthapuram, he is “holy”, “sacrosanct”, “pure”, touch-me-not bare chested wearing loongee, doing puja, chanting incantations, doing aartee etc. Sleuths are minutely observing him. …What next, when?
