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.
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