Aditya Sinha reviews Vinod Mehta's Lucknow Boy

Book: Lucknow Boy: A Memoir
Author: Vinod Mehta
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Pages: 325
Price: Rs499

Vinod Mehta was one of the best editors I worked with (the other being Vir Sanghvi, regardless of the Niira Radia episode) and so I was eager to read his memoir Lucknow Boy. In 1991, Vinod launched the Delhi edition of The Pioneer and I joined him as a special correspondent. Though it was not my first newspaper start-up — I had just left the now-defunct Business and Political Observer, a disaster launched by Anil Ambani’s cronies and henchman — it was the first newspaper that had the atmosphere of a sense of adventure; an atmosphere Vinod created.

I recently watched a documentary, Man on Wire, about a Frenchman who strung a wire between the two 110-storey towers of the World Trade Centre in August 1974, and did a tightrope walk (back and forth, eight times, for 45 minutes). That Frenchman and his crazy sense of adventure reminded me of Vinod and The Pioneer.

As the memoir makes clear, while Vinod is no doubt nowadays famous as the Editor of Outlook, his truly formative job was as Editor of Debonair, the sort-of Indian version of Playboy, in the 1970s. Vinod reveals that it wasn’t as glamorous as people thought, and not just because the models were, well, “cheap”: “Hippies, film extras, whores, out-of-work cabaret dancers and occasionally girlfriends of photographers.” Still, Vinod’s Lucknow friends thought he had a ready harem: “One school buddy who came to my flat was sorely disappointed to see me without a luscious babe in my arms. ‘Where are the girls?’ he asked as he went looking from room to room.”

More than the naked girls, Vinod’s great idea with Debonair was filling the magazine with classy and/or edgy writing. He had just returned from an eight-year stay in London (after procuring a BA “Third Class” from Lucknow University), and the city in the 1960s was buzzing with change: intellectual, social, political, sexual.

We’re all aware of the ‘60s but Vinod lived it, and gives us an intimate account about it. (I would have accused him of bragging about his Nordic conquests, except that he confesses to having fathered a half-Swiss daughter, and to having wretchedly treated his girlfriend who refused to get an abortion. I hope an extract of Lucknow Boy is published in a Swiss newspaper so that Vinod gets to meet his daughter someday.) One aspect of the ’60s London was the robust magazine tradition and the back of the book sections in New Statesman and the like: Vinod’s genius was to recognise how 1970s Bombay was ready for similar back-of-the-book reading. So he jumped upon the opportunity afforded by Debonair.

It was here that his friendship with the notoriously prickly VS Naipaul began; it was here that many of Bombay’s now-big names began to write. It was here that Vinod allowed Saeed Mirza to attack Satyajit Ray in print: hosting one intellectual’s attack on another became a hallmark of Vinod’s journalism (like the Ramchandra Guha — William Dalrymple row in Outlook). Vinod nearly published Protima Bedi’s nude photos (until her husband Kabir threatened to divorce her if they were printed) in Debonair, something that was mirrored when he got a hold of Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao’s novel at the time Outlook launched. Vinod attracted talent, and not just because they admired him for running a skin-magazine and trying to do a decent job of it; it was more of Vinod’s uncanny ability to spot talent and new writing, a skill he honed at Debonair and that became his hallmark wherever he went and worked. I also think Vinod wore as a badge of honour the notoriety that Debonair gave, and that probably earned him greater goodwill.

Perhaps the sweetest chapter is that of his childhood in Lucknow and his friends: it is frank, poignant and at times bawdy, as this recollection about the great Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri: “On one occasion, a bottle of beer we had been saving up was left behind in the room. Who was going to fetch it with a sizzled poet on a homosexual rampage? Unfortunately, I drew the short straw....Firaq, mercifully, was in his cups and pyjama down, I caught him masturbating. He saw me, winked and continued, while I hastily retrieved the beer bottle.”

Vinod is a raconteur and has great humility, necessary ingredients for writing an engaging book. It serves him well when he writes of interesting episodes such as his big mistake at The Independent in 1989, which cost him his job, and his soured relationship with the late LM Thapar, which cost him his job at The Pioneer. The longest chapter spans his tenure at Outlook, the highlight being the arc of his relationship with former Prime Minister AB Vajpayee, another one gone sour. Vinod closes the book with some thumbnail sketches of his uncle-in-law and communist Mohit Sen; his colourful grandfather; Naipaul; Salman Rushdie who took a bad review in Outlook personally; the vapid Shobhaa De; and Sonia Gandhi, who apparently serves the best chocolate this side of Belgium.

My complaint? In the memoir’s second half we get to hear little of Vinod’s personal life; both his wives seem to be low-profile background presences. I’m sure it was never so. That aside, his anecdotes about his tenure at Outlook shows a tenure marked by a freshness of approach absent in contemporaries like MJ Akbar, Prabhu Chawla, Shekhar Gupta, etc. Like our politicians, these Editors refuse to retire, despite each being past his prime. Now I see why Vinod Mehta named his beloved mutt ‘Editor’. Highly recommended.