Vinod Mehta was the best editor I worked with

Like all the best things in life, working with Vinod Mehta happened unplanned. For three years he was my editor at The Pioneer, which he revamped with a Delhi edition launch in 1991. The cartoonist Sudhir Dar, who left Delhi's largest paper where he had catapulted to fame to join Vinod's "start-up", did not exaggerate when he gave a name to those three years: Camelot.

The first time I met Vinod was during lunchtime. I was desperate to get out of Dhirubhai Ambani's failed foray into media, Business & Political Observer (aka BPO, a name way ahead of its time), and one day somebody said that The Pioneer of Lucknow was launching from Delhi and that Vinod was interviewing people at a first-floor office in Connaught Place, so I immediately walked across with some clippings. All I knew of him was his launch of a couple of great though short-lived newspapers, and that he had lost his job over a phoney RAW story about YB Chavan. Most of the editors I had met till then were flatulent fools so I did not expect much of the meeting. I can't recall much of a conversation except that Vinod stopped looking out the window and looked intensely at me for a minute or so, and then hired me for the Pioneer's political bureau; perhaps because I was young and energetic and not very expensive.

I have never had as much fun in my working life as I had in The Pioneer under Vinod Mehta, even though I have since had higher-profile jobs in higher-profile papers. Besides the fact that he launched a great-looking paper with new elements such as an engrossing "theme page" opposite the edit page, he collected an odd bunch of people who would never have been thrown together in any other circumstance: half the sports department were teleported straight from Chennai, somehow surviving the culture shock; Anurag Mathur, the pre-Chetan Bhagat mass seller, was our magazine editor; and in a show of how he accommodated all views, Kanchan Gupta was an integral part of the team. And he gave us the kind of editorial freedom that may have already become extinct, in this day and age of editors having to answer to the charlatans of marketing. I personally benefitted from his liberal attitude to my sympathetic reporting from Kashmir - if Narasimha Rao ever told him it was anti-national, Vinod never let me know - and it amazes me given the current atmosphere of competitive hypernationalism, in which ideology is more important than facts on the ground. Indeed, I remember him giving me several pats on the back.

I have never laughed as much as I did in The Pioneer. And it was not just because there might have been an unusually high aggregation of wiseacres while he was there - for instance, Prakash Patra harassed every hapless person delivering a press release, and Kajal Basu made an art of filthy jokes. For some reason, Vinod's irreverence was infectious. The other side of the newsroom, where the Sunday, World and magazine teams sat, brought out a mock front page one day, one of whose headlines I can never forget: "Nuclear reactor blows up in Deng Xiaoping's face". (Try and visualise it before you dismiss it as corny.) Journalism, and indeed life itself, if filled with funny people, and most people have a lighter side to them; but most jobs nowadays encourage everyone to repress their humour; no wonder most jobs are seen as soul-crushing. I suppose what Vinod did was to bring out the best work by each of us, by bringing out the best aspect in each of us.

The mark of a great leader is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the fact is that The Pioneer never recovered after he left, three years later. Though he offered me a job before he launched Outlook, I went my own way; and once I became Editor, I followed many a rule-of-thumb that were straight out of Vinod's book, like publishing a robust letters-to-the-editor column. He truly believed that the newspaper had to be a watchdog of democracy, and not a lapdog of any particular party. He set an example to the rest of us as journalists and as citizens, and I only hope that those of us who worked with him can carry on his legacy.