Kasab Amitabh, Nida and Gyan Ranjan

I am trying to insinuate myself in the Amitabh-is-like-Azmal Kasab controversy triggered by noted poet Nida Fazli. I have at least four plausible reasons to do so. One, I have been close to writer-editor Gyanranjan   who was foolishly compared with Amitabh Bachchan by the editor of the literary magazine  Pakhi in its September issue ; two, I am huge fan, like millions of other Indians, of the Big B ; three, I have read enough of Nida Fazli to believe him that his write-up in the Pakhi was distorted and sensationalized  by the media; and four, I have not only completely read the Pakhi issue on Gyan Ranjan but also have written a blog on the writer  based on the magazine’s issue.  

Let me try and put the whole controversy in perspective. Pakhi editor Prem Bhardwaj in his long interview with Gyan Ranjan compared ( rather apologetically, saying he be forgiven for this) ) the latter with Amitabh Bachchan. The interviewer’s idea was to convey that Gyan Ranjan too was an angry young man of literature as Amitabh was on celluloid in the seventies. The comparison, of course, was odious.

Nida Fazli, a close friend of Gyan Ranjan, tried to stress this odiousness in his write-up in the magazine. Nida justifiably viewed the comparison as an insult of Gyan Ranjan. For, Gyan’s anguish was his own, Amitabh’s crafted and scripted.

Gyanranjan had accumulated the anger through honest observations of the societal decadence, Amitabh had only simulated the anger his writers ( Salim-Javed) had cozily imagined in the film scripts for him.

Gyanranjan does not betray a fascistic streak through his characters like Amitabh did in the films of that era.  man A littérateur, however bad, is not a puppet, unlike a film actor.

So, where was Nida wrong? He merely pointed out to the puppet-puppeteer interrelation vis-à-vis Amitabh-Salim-Javed and Azmal Kasab-Hafiz Sayeed binary. Maybe, the analogy was a bit shocking, given the status of the superstar and the notoriety of Azmal Kasab. But, his point was valid.

Now coming back to Gyan Ranjan and Amitabh Bachchan. If you leave aside the angry young man epithet, both had many things common too.

They belonged to Allahabad; both are Kayastha and both were sired by litterateur fathers.

However, while Dr Harivansh Ri Bachchan was close to Pt Jawahar Lal Nehru, Gyanji’s father Ram Nath Suman was a hardcore Gandhiite.

Sanjeev Majupuria RIP ( 1964--2013)

George Eliot famously wrote our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.

I can never forget Sanjeev Majupuria , so he will never be dead to me.

Barely 24 hours ago, I watched mournfully with hundreds of others Sanjeev’s mortal remains getting reduced to ashes at Bhadbhada crematorium in Bhopal. He had died the previously day due to multiple organ failures. What exactly caused the death of the 49-year-old zestful, if somewhat pudgy, man so suddenly in the BMHRC is still in the realm of conjecture.  

Memories of our 25-year-long friendship are still haunting me. All through the three-hour taxi ride from Bhopal to Indore today, I kept recalling the moments I shared with Sanjeev.  

We were not the best of friends but Sanju was someone whose friendship I will cherish forever, infrequency of our meetings, of late, notwithstanding. He had so many lovable qualities.

The most outstanding attribute in Sanju that his friends never ceased to admire was his absolute commitment to his mentor Dr Suresh Mehrotra.

In fact, the word mentor falls way short of defining their unshakable bonding. Dr Mehrotra was a lot more than just a mentor for my departed friend.  

We fathomed depth of his devotion to Dr Sahab in one of our drinking sessions ( we used to have such sessions frequently in mid nineties).

Some one among us made a not-so-charitable remark about Dr Mehrotra amid drunken frolicking. All of us took it as a passable banter in keeping with the mood of the party. Not Sanju though.

Not otherwise known for being sentimental , Sanjeev was in tears. All of a sudden he got up and moved out of the house. The suddenness took us by surprise. Before we could stop him he was gone.

The party went completely sour. Without saying a word to each other, we silently resolved then and there that no one will utter a word about Dr Mehrotra when Sanjeev is around. His sentiments for Dr Mehrotra must be respected at all costs. The unanimous resolve was never breached.

The sanctity of the resolve has genesis in our common deference to the emotional history of Sanjeev’s ties with Dr Mehrotra.

Sanjeev’s father , a DSP in MP police, had died quite young.

Sanju, a happy-go-lucky boy of Daly College Indore,  had no one in MP to look up to for guidance. Before he died, his father requested Dr Mehrotra, his friend, to look after Sanjeev as his ward and take him under the wings.

On that day, a new relationship was born. It stood solid through tests of turbulent times till, unfortunately, one of them was snatched away by the cold hands of death. When Sanjeev was declared dead on Wednesday evening by Dr Vashneya at the BMHRC, a completely devastated Dr Mehrotra was heard muttering why the God took away Sanju, why not him ?

“ I am living on borrowed time, on bonus”, Sanjay Sharma later quoted to me as Dr Sahab having remarked.     

Sanjeev was an inalienable part of Dr Mehrotra’s family. When they were in the Free Press, Dr Mehrotra was his boss too. The newspaper’s bureau office was in Dr Mehrotra’s bungalows in the 45-Bunglows in Bhopal.

For others working in the bureau such as Bharat Desai, Joseph John and Late Naser Kamaal, Dr Sahab was just the boss. For Sanju he was and remained later more than that.

Even after both quit the Free Press and the bureau was shifted to another location, their ties endured.

Interestingly, Bharat Desai had soured relation with Dr Sahab in the Free Press for some reasons but that did not affect Bharat’s friendship with Sanjeev. This speaks volume of maturity of the ties Sanjeev maintained with friends without letting his devotion to Dr Sahab diminish one bit.

Sanjeev not only revered Dr Sahab, he imbibed the latter’s journalistic practices too.

All the Dr Sahab’s contacts were Sanjeev’s too and he would zealously guard them.

Some of us were not exactly amused by their penchant to mollycoddle friends in bureaucracy and politics at the expense of  fairness in journalism but we could also not fail to notice that neither Dr Sahab nor Sanjeev milched the contacts to feather their own nests. Moreover, we also admired the fact that they abhorred flaunting the fabulous contacts.

We became friends when Sanju had just quit MP Chronicle and I had joined the paper. Before that we had had nodding acquaintance for five years.

The first step towards friendship was marked by a joke in the MP state assembly building (old Vidhan Sabha) in 1991.

Sanjeev had joined Pioneer then. I asked how it feels to work for a national newspaper after putting in so many years in regional papers ? He laughed his characteristic laugh and said he had worked in Telegraph ( Kolkata) before.

I was intrigued as to why he quit Telegraph, a rising paper under great editor MJ Akbar? He evaded a direct reply and , instead, cracked a joke which, I assumed, he must have shared with many before.

“It so happened”, Sanjeev started the joke in the assembly hall, “ that I ran into an old friend in the telegraph office where I had gone to file my story for the Telegraph”. The friend asked me where I was working.

“ In Telegraph”, Sanjeev recalled telling his friend.

The friend, Sanjeev went on, took some moments to frame his reply and remarked, “ Ye Bahut Badiya Kiya Tumne. Are Kanha Central Government Ki Noukari Aur Kanha Patrakarita?

Sanjeev was intrigued. “ I looked at the friend askance, not knowing what to say,” Sanjeev was warming up to his own joke now, unmindful of the sanctity of the assembly hall ( we were inside the house).

The friend repeated what he had said and as if to clear self doubt asked, didn’t you tell me you are now working in the Telegraph department?

“ I was dumbfounded. What to say,” Sanjeev laughed in anticipation of concluding the joke.

“The poor man thought I was working in the telegraph department and not the Telegraph , the paper. Obviously he did not know a paper of such a name existed”, Sanjeev remarked and looked at me for a while as if to assess if  I have found the answer to my question as to why he had quit the Telegraph and joined the MP Chronicle.   

Our Jabalpur journey to cover the earthquake in 1997 was another hilarious tragedy. Just imagine the predicament that we had a bottle of Whiskey but no place to empty it in our hungry stomach.

Senior journalist ND Sharma was also with us.

For years, Sanjeev would tauntingly call me Mr Guloua after the Whisky misadventure. Incidentally Guloua is a locality in the vicinity of my house in Jabalpur and was also the place where the impact of the quake was the severest.            

So many other memories are flooding my mind but I have to stop it here.

As I started off with George Eliot’s quote I will conclude this with the same--our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.