Dr Suresh Mehrotra, the ace whisperer

Rakesh Dixit

His index finger of the right hand up, eyes twinkling and face smiling, septuagenarian editor-in-chief Dr Suresh Mehrotra quipped, ‘the God is our CMD’.   The finger was pointed at the portrait of Sai Baba just above his chair in the small office room abutting Dr Mehrotra’s residence in 45 Bungalows locality in Bhopal.

This affable, if somewhat narcissist, teacher-turned-journalist owns a website, which has been offering staple diet of gossips to thousands of All India Service officers, corporate honchos and politicians about transfer-postings in the top echelons in India for the last 13 years.

Over 2.56 crore hits on the whispersinthecorridor.com suggest only a part of the website’s phenomenal success. A plethora of government and corporate advertisements cluttering the website too don’t fully explain its enormous popularity.

If the daily feedback from the targeted readers is anything to go by, the top Babus in the North and South blocks in the national capital start their day in the office with visiting the whispersinthecorridor.com every day. Feedbacks also come from states across India.

Dr Mehrotra himself is dazzled by its success. With a child-like glee he attributed it solely to the blessings of Sai Baba, whose photograph adorns the website. “That’s why I say the CMD of my website is the God’, he averred, again raising the index finger upwards to the Sai Baba’s portrait.

“ You will be amazed over the kind of feedback I get every day. Top bureaucrats I have never seen, much less met, provide information about themselves and their colleagues. Have a look at this bit of information. A newly appointed high commissioner has requested me to put information about his posting in the website”, Dr Mehrotra gushed, showing feedback on his personal mail account.

His enthusiasm didn’t stop there. Next moment, he quickly got up from the chair and rushed to his drawing room. Within seconds he returned carrying three books. All three had mentioned his website. The books were Dr Sajnay Baru’s ‘An Accidental Prime Minister’, PC Parekh’s ‘Conspirator or Crusader’ and PM Nair’s ‘My Years with the President’.

Former media adviser to the then PM, Dr Baru and former coal secretary PC Parekh have mentioned the website as a source for goings-in in the PMO of Dr Man Mohan Singh. Former secretary to the then President APJ Kalam has written in his memoirs that ‘his heart sank on not finding his name in the whispersinthecorridors.com.

“ I know none of them. But they trusted my website as a source. That is the secret of its success’, averred the editor-in-chief, putting down the books on the table. In fact, he added, he didn’t know most of the people whose names figured in the website.

Amazed by success of the website, two scholars of the Indian institute of information technology and management , Gwalior, Manoj Kumar Dash and Ajay Singh undertook a case study to ascertain secrets of its popularity in 2011.

Their study–, Innovation approaches of whispersinthecorridors.com” in the field of Indian bureaucracy– concluded that   main reason behind the success is targeting the bureaucracy and corporate elites.

Dr Mehrotra’s candour only serves to deepen the mystery of the website’s success. He remains largely confined to his house-cum-office. Once, he was an active journalist who could be spotted at the secretariat and the state police headquarters every day. But for a last decade or so, his main sources of information are newspapers and feedbacks. He is seldom seen outside the house.

The wealth of information he has acquired came gradually, as the website’s popularity grew. Foundation of the website had been laid 32 years ago when Dr Mehrotra started a gossip column in the Free Press, Indore, as its Bhopal bureau chief. Title of the column was the same- whispersinthecorridor.

In those days, the column was a novelty. Hindi newspapers would eschew writing such gossips. And Free Press was the only significant English newspaper in Bhopal. The column was an instant hit with the bureaucracy.

Of course, not all bureaucrats liked the column. Many sneered at what they called gossip-mongering in the name of journalism. But they found it irresistible.

A retired IAS officer said he always considered the column a low-brow stuff but would read it all the same.

“ That holds true even now for the website. Most bureaucrats surf it out of curiosity. The one-liner information on peers’ and colleagues’ transfer-postings are easy on eyes,” he remarked.

Despite its clumsy and monotonous style, the column was seen as a barometer of the incumbent chief minister’s mood in Madhya Pradesh. Dr Mehrotra reveled in his popularity, so much so that he would seldom write other reports. He is, self-admittedly, not of an intellectual type. Long or analytical stories are not his forte, to put it mildly.

His years as history professor in Ujjain have hardly distracted him from pursuing one-line journalism in the website which he proudly dubs his USP.

He has steadfastly rejected proposals to tweak with the template of the website to accommodate long articles and profiling of the persons featured in it.

It was essentially his column and the contacts it accrued to him that helped Dr Mehrotra go places.

From Free Press, he moved to Hindustan Times as its Bhopal correspondent in 1991, presumably due to cordial relations with late Madhavrao Scindia. Three years later, his resourcefulness attracted Bhaskar group’s chairman Ramesh Agrawal. Dr Mehrotra joined the group first as executive editor of Dainik Bhaskar and then editor of National Mail.

As editor, however, he was not very successful. Encumbrances that the editor’s job entailed did not fit in with his journalistic skills. His last stint in print journalism as editor of little known Naveen Dunia of Bhopal ended in a near-disaster in 2001 and he decided to quit journalism.

“ My last employer would not hike salary. The paper was sinking. I saw no point in hanging around for long. So, I decided enough was enough”.

Unemployed for a while, Dr Mehrotra hit upon the idea of launching his own website. He chose to retain the name of his column for the website.

In those days, website was not in vogue. Dr Mehrotra was nervous.

“ But I had great faith in the god. I persevered single-handedly. The contacts I had cultivated all these years stood me in good stead and the website began to grow in volume and popularity”, he wistfully recalled.

When he started the website 13 years ago, Dr Mehrotra mostly relied on his own network in the bureaucracy that he had cultivated during his 18 years in print medium in Bhopal and New Delhi. His guileless demeanour had earned him a legion of movers and shakers in the corridors of power. All India service officers and politicians would flock to his house. It took a while for a mild-mannered Dr Mehrotra to overcome the awe that visitors inspired in him. For, before shifting to Bhopal in 1982, Dr Mehrotra used to teach history in Madhav college, Ujjain. He was a part time journalist too.

Bhopal transformed his personality from a shy, small-town youth to an influential English journalist. His childhood friend late Sudip Banerjee, IAS, who was a close confidant of then chief minister Arjun Singh, contributed a lot in Dr Mehrotra’s makeover.

The friendship got Dr Mehrotra close to Arjun Singh. Within a couple of years, he became a frequent visitor to the CM house. Arjun Singh also reciprocated the gesture by frequently visiting Dr Mehrotra’s house, an honour the late Congress stalwart had shown to only a few journalists in Bhopal.

However, unlike other Arjun Singh-loyalists in the media, Dr Mehrotra was not hypocrite about his relationship. “ I never concealed my thick relations with Arjun Singh , or, for that matter, any politician. I never bothered what people said about me”, he averred.

However, even his bitterest critics could not discover a trace of personal corruption in him. His neighbor and former journalist ND Sharma admits that Dr Mehrotra belongs to that rare breed of journalists who did not exploit their contacts to   feather their own nests. ND Sharma has been an inveterate anti-establishment journalist in his days in the Indian Express  from where he retired in 1999.

Despite success, Dr Mehrotra is acutely conscious of the fact that he has crossed 70 and not getting younger. He is willing to sale his website for a good price.

“ Many offers have come to me. Several media barons approached with the offer as high as Rs 10 crore but they want me to continue. They say they can’t run the website without me on it. If that is the condition, I am happy running the website on my own.”, Dr Mehrotra said.

He works 10 to 12 hours every day. “ My day in the office begins at 7.30 and continues till night”. He has a staff of eight persons including two marketing personnel.

The whisper in the corridor also comes out in print every month.

However, its format is unchanged. No long write-ups, no interviews, no analyses. He does not see merit in stuff beyond one-line gossips. And the website’s success has proved him right.