NEW DELHI – As a PTI reporter when I once went to cover an assignment at the India Habitat Centre, I met a charming lady of Gujarati origin married to a renowned Delhi-based psychologist. When I told her that I was a journalist, she took a lot of pride in talking about her brother-in-law, a celebrity journalist in his own right. She was all praise for her brother-in-law. She narrated the story of her dynamic brother-in-law, who was the younger brother of her husband and rose to fame very early in life.
In those days, Wikipedia was not very famous. At least, I was unaware of this digital encyclopaedia, founded by Jimmy Wales. She told me that her brother-in-law was probably the youngest recipient of the prestigious civilian award—Padma Shri at the age of 26. He received the award as a poet, though he rose to prominence as a journalist.
I was immediately reminded of poet and writer, Dom Moraes, son of the famous editor, Frank Moraes. Dom’s first book of poems was published when he was just 19 — it won one of Britain’s oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize, which is now in its 106th year — and he had written his autobiography – My Son’s Father – when he was hardly 30.
Anyway, this lady’s brother-in-law, lived in Bombay, but whenever he visited Delhi, he made it a point to visit his elder brother and spend time holding intense discussions on a wide range of subjects. She disclosed that the house where the elderly couple lived in Nizamuddin East, belonged to her brother-in-law. She shared with me the fact that the renowned media personality’s character was groomed by her aunts, who were school teachers in Calcutta. “He is just like our son,” said Uma Nandy, wife of renowned thinker, Ashis Nandy, the elder brother of Bhagalpur-born, Pritish Nandy, who bid adieu to this world on Wednesday, Jan. 8, in Mumbai, barely a week before his 74th birthday.
Nandy was equally comfortable writing both prose and verse. He had a unique style of interviewing celebrities, making them feel comfortable, as if he was their own and they could trust him in sharing their views and things about their life without hesitation. Little before they realized, they would have let their guard down and their candidness would land them into trouble.
Nandy’s memorable interview with legendary singer Kishore Kumar brought the musical genius’s intrinsic thought process to the forefront for the first time on record. Nandy’s celebrated poem, ‘Calcutta If You Must Exile Me’, emerges against the backdrop of the Naxalite movement, a period marked by political and social upheaval in West Bengal during the late 1960s.
While most of his books are on poetry but there is a book, he edited with Tapan Chaki, an anthology of interviews of, or conversations with celebrities by well-known writers and journalists. It is titled – ‘Peerless Minds – An Arc of Achievement’ and was published a few months before COVID-19 engulfed us all. I recommend it to those who want to learn more about the art of a gentle conversation.
