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title="Latest and Breaking News on News Agency" />For all of Pritish's prodigious talents as a poet, photographer, graphic designer, author, Parliamentarian and entrepreneur, he is best remembered as the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India. Yet, few will remember that Pritish's induction into the offices of the venerable Times of India group in 1983—the Weekly was part of the publishing house—was marked by controversy. The union tried to foist on the management its choice of an assistant editor to the editorship, and claimed that Pritish was an ‘outsider'. The management prevailed, and so Pritish assumed elevated charge as the Publishing Director of the group's magazines, and later as the editor of the Weekly, Asia's oldest magazine.
Right from the start, from facing the challenge of the unions to later tackling resistance to revamping the operations of the magazines, Pritish displayed a rare courage not normally associated with editors. That courage spilled over into his journalistic endeavours and his role as editor.
I was offered a job as assistant editor of the Weekly by Pritish in April 1983, just a few weeks after he had joined the Old Lady of Boribunder. I was his first appointment—that was even before he formally took over as the editor. As a person of varied interests, I was, at that point in time, feeling confined as a journalist of two years working with a business magazine, analysing industry trends and balance sheets. I was looking for a slot at feature writing on a range of issues, and the Weekly seemed like an ideal place to be in. The grapevine had it that the management had wanted to revamp the magazine, and Pritish had been hired for the job.
An Editor To Rely On
I made a cold call on Pritish and we hit it off at our very first meeting. That meeting lasted for over 45 minutes, presumably because Pritish was just a few days old in the city and did not have friends, as I was to learn later. He had a clean desk too, with him just getting down to his role. That meeting ended with a job offer. I was a bit fazed as I did not want to work in the crucible of animosity that was brewing. Pritish let me in on a secret when I told him about my hesitation. "Don't worry, I will soon join you," he said. From then on, till the management decided to shut the Weekly in the early 1990s, and I opted out to join The Economic Times, Pritish always had my back. Indeed, he had the back of every journalist who worked for him.
When SNM Abdi, our Calcutta correspondent, wrote an article about the sexual proclivities of the Chief Minister of a southern state and a defamation suit of Rs 1 crore was filed against Pritish and the management, he fully supported Abdi against political pressures. In a similar fashion, when I exposed the sordid goings-on at an ashram near Mumbai, which resulted in a case of defamation being filed against me, Pritish backed me and made me do a follow-up exposé.
While reporting on the Commission of Inquiry involving two Supreme Court judges, Pritish and I were threatened with Contempt of Court. But Pritish stood firm, against a lot of pressure and advice from senior advocates. When Operation Bluestar commenced, he commissioned me to profile Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in a report that was critical of the Congress Party's policy of initially encouraging Bhindranwale. Predictably, that issue of the Weekly was banned by the Union government.
No Holy Cows
Staffers who were wet behind the ears also recall in gratitude the daring breaks he gave them, something not associated in the tiered hierarchy of journalism. Minnie Vaid remembers that as a rookie, she was sent to interview the formidable heart surgeon, Dr Denton Cooley, on her first assignment.
Apart from the big-bang first assignments that Pritish handed out, the reason he is fondly remembered by his associates is that he never shot down story suggestions on extraneous considerations. There were no holy cows in his book. When the late Ivan Fera wanted to critique the nuclear establishment, he was given carte blanche. Other holy cows that were surgically examined were Dr Verghese Kurien's Operation Flood and Dr M.S. Swaminathan's role in the country's gene banks.
Pritish's intrepid approach to journalism spilled into his endeavours. He went to the US in the late 1980s to interview the mercenary trainer Frank Camper, who had trained the terrorists who blew up the Air India plane Emperor Kanishka in 1985. He also got a rare interview with Ma Sheela, Rajneesh's Woman Friday, in Germany, when Rajneesh claimed she had defrauded him. Perhaps the most fitting epithet to Pritish would be to detail him as a Cowboy Editor!
At the Weekly, Pritish brought about radical changes in the graphic design of the magazine and the use of photographs, all of which drew kudos from various quarters. The visual appeal of the magazine drew photographers of international repute, such as Jaywant Ullal and Ram Rehman, who contributed their best works as photo essays.
Life moved on for Pritish when the Weekly closed down. He turned entrepreneur and founded Pritish Nandy Communications, a publicly listed company that created its own successful niche in the world of the fast-moving image. But for those who remember him, it is his impress on the print medium that will linger on.
(Sailesh Kottary was deputy editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India with Pritish Nandy and worked in the magazine from 1983 to 1991.)