Book Review: Editor Unplugged- Media, Magnates, Netas & Me

Book: Editor Unplugged: Media, Magnates, Netas & Me

Author: Vinod Mehta

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 304

Price: 399

"With a few exceptions, book sequels, both in content and intention, are a rip-of, an exercise in cashing in." Vinod Mehta wrote with disarming candour in the epilogue to this book, a sequel to his 2011 memoirs, the bestselling Lucknow Boy. How did Mehta's sequel, Editor Unplugged, fare by that measure?

Though lively and irreverent, as always the hallmarks of Mehta's style, much of what the veteran journalist wrote here — about Niira Radia and the run-in with Ratan Tata over Outlook magazine publishing extracts of his conversations with the former; Arnab Goswami and the rise of 24x7 news TV; ruminations on a media that would be free and also commercially viable; his mixed feelings for Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal; his admiration for Arundhati Roy and the Nehru-Gandhis — has a ring of familiarity, stuff that we've read in bits and pieces in his signed back-of-the-book musings in Outlook, the magazine he launched and edited with distinction for 16 long years. To be sure, there's been a surfeit of political memoirs published this year that goes into this recent history, which might give to this book an air of some staleness.

The masala that one looks for in books of this kind is missing somewhat in Editor Unplugged. Editors and journalists have a ringside view of contemporary events. Part of their job is to know the people who give them shape — so the expectation is that their memoirs will contain the anecdotes that accompanied the hurly-burly of big events and shed light on the personalities involved, beyond what is already known. But readers looking for these in this book will have to search hard. I did, and came up with a few interesting tidbits — that the acrimonious corporate tussle between Ajit Kerkar, who managed Taj Hotels, and Ratan Tata, after he took over as chairman of the Tata Group, apparently had its origins in the former's refusal to send the latter pastries from the Taj Bakery as he regularly did to JRD.

There's another interesting detail, recycled from Mehta's earlier book on Sanjay Gandhi — that the latter had been wearing Kolhapuri chappals on that fatal June morning in 1980 while doing merry jaunts in his biplane over Lutyens Delhi, and that, perhaps, was what led to the crash. The other little nugget is about Sonia Gandhi, whom Mehta unabashedly admits to admiring. Apparently, the first interview that Sonia gave, at Rajiv Gandhi's insistence, was in 1985 to the Hindi weekly Dharmayug in which she said: "I grew up believing my husband would be superior to me and my mother-in-law, being his mother, would be so much more superior to me."

One section — actually, a paragraph — of this book, where Mehta was accused of mounting a 'defence' of Tarun Tejpal, has been widely decried. Mehta did not actually defend Tejpal. He only admitted to knowing that he "was known to use his official position to hit on interns and juniors for both consensual and presumably non-consensual carnal favours". The admission, phrased carefully, is damning enough of Tejpal and Mehta, too. It speaks of an unspoken exploitative consensus among senior male journalists: predators can continue as long as no one complains. Mehta's admission, honest as it may be, did no one credit.

Plainspeak has always been a characteristic of Vinod Mehta's writing, and he applied it to himself as much as he did to the world. But he sometimes tended to make a fetish of his apparently pedestrian writing style. Truth be told, you make a jolly good read, Mr Mehta!