Nachiketa Desai : Breathing , Eating And Sleeping News To The Very End
BY R.K.MISRA
Journalists are like bile in the body who force out the ‘fats’
ingested by the rich and the powerful and splatter it across news pages with
religious regularity. At least that’s what they are supposed to do. Friend and
fellow-journalist Nachiketa Desai continued to do just this for the bulk of his professional life until he passed on to the
other side at his modest Akhbarnagar home in Ahmedabad on the morning of
February 5.
Breathe, eat and
sleep news and the acid in it corrodes your entrails over time. Seventy two
summers of relentless beating and a multiplicity of profession- inflicted
ailments had frayed the frame though the spirit held aloft until the burden
became a trifle too much to bear. We had last met ,just a week ago, when he was
hospitalised for the umpteenth time.
Aware that time was running out but yet unperturbed , he went about unfolding the blueprint of the
work that needed to be done in disseminating the Gandhian legacy that he had
inherited . Ironically his legacy and professional life remained in conflict
with the latter getting the better of the former for the most part until the
former became an abiding passion with him in the last leg of his life.
I had first met ND, as he was known amongst his
professional peers and dears, in Rajkot on March 21,1983 . He had freshly
switched horses from the United News of India(UNI) to the Indian
Express in Ahmedabad and was on his maidan outstation assignment to
cover the property auction of the erstwhile royalty of
Rajkot who was also a minister in the Madhavsinh Solanki- led Congress
government in Gujarat. As the Times of India’s Saurashtra-Kutch bureau
chief it would make us natural adversaries but as a visiting journalist who had
come calling, the ethos of the region called for being a gracious host. It marked
the beginning of a professional relationship that become personal and lasted
his life time.
Over the years one watched ND flower into a good
professional field journalist, his mind space fully occupied by ‘leads’ and
‘assimilations’ of news feeds 24x7. Haphazard and undisciplined in personal
life, he was meticulous in planning for a forthcoming event as he was in timing
newsbreaks. Having worked on the desk in a news agency ,it was the headline
which was always at the back of his mind
even in doing press conferences and routine stories.
A battery of journalists had descended on Porbandar,
Mahatma Gandhi’s fabled birthplace , to cover Murli Manohar Joshi’s ekta yatra ,both
of us included. ND was Gujarat correspondent for The Telegraph while I
was with The Pioneer. Reaching Porbandar after a nightlong road trip, it
was just a quick morning ritual and straight to the inaugural function- only,
that ND was nowhere to be seen !
He surfaced soon
after the yatra took off, toed along up to Junagadh where all of us broke free
to file our stories. Next day’s Telegraph had a banner story on how the
yatra flag-off function had characters
in prominent attendance whose criminal records still adorned the town’s police
station. Days ahead of the event ND had briefed the night-editor on the
implications of the story to follow, thus making sure that it got pride of
place. He made sure that even ‘ routine ‘ acquired a distinct flavour through
either planned treatment , unorthodox angle or sheer analytical acumen.
There were numerous ups and downs on this bumpy
journalistic journey together for while we shared the end goal vision, we
differed on the road taken to achieve it.
For ND,end justified the means in getting a ‘story’ and he employed
every trick of the trade to reach it.
His gifts came in handy. He was multi-lingual. He could write in English, Hindi
and Gujarati, speak the languages with distinctive local flavour thanks mainly
due to his schooling in Benaras and additional fluency in Bangla and Odia. He
could cut through the clutter of India’s regional identities to acquire the
shape and form that suited him for
access and affability to news sources. He could be a Gujarati, an Odia,
a Bengali, a Bihari, an Uttar Pradeshi and genuinely so due to his countrywide
forays and family spread. In the last few years, he had even picked up Malayalam.
His Gandhian legacy aided him in the pursuit of his
calling but its puritanism tended to become a drag in the bohemian style of a
media-man’s existence. His grandfather, venerable Mahadev Desai, was Mahatma
Gandhi’s personal secretary who died in
custody during the Quit India movement and his father Narayan Desai, a noted
Gandhian scholar who was chancellor of the Gujarat Vidyapith for over seven
years. His maternal grandfather
Nabakrushna Chaudhuri was the first chief minister of Orissa and maternal
grandmother Malati Devi Chaudhuri(nee Sen)among the 15 women in the 389 member
Constituent Assembly.
The heart has many halts before it finds its true
calling. Nachiketa too joined the Tarun Shanti Sena on a call by Jayaprakash
Narayan in 1973.Two years later when
Emergency followed, he became part of an
underground group that brought out a cyclostyled newsletter Ranbheri
during the days of press censorship. News and print both possess a peculiar drawing
power, and he soon began the arduous trek through its serpentine alleys from a
stringer in Benaras to Delhi and thereon to Ahmedabad as a staffer with the UNI
.
He subsequently moved
to the Indian Express and into a whirl of transfers and job changes that took him to Bhubaneswar,
Bhopal, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Indore, Delhi and past The Independent, The
Telegraph, Newstime, ETV Bharat, Dainik Bhaskar, Business India and The National Herald, to name some. Nevertheless he
remained a homing pigeon returning to Ahmedabad after every foray. For all his
newsy pursuits it was wife Ratna and his two children who picked up the tabs as most journalists’ families do for
absentee husbands and fathers.
For most of the time ND remained a man conflicted between his Gandhian legacy
and the passionate pursuit of his chosen
profession. As his father aged, there was this relentless pull of taking on the
mantle of restoring order to numerous rough drafts of precious history that lay
stored in the Vedchhi ashram home of father Narayan Desai. And yet he kept
putting it off unable to resist newsy urges until the body fabric began fraying at the edges.
It was only in the
last two years that he switched horses and his first book on his grandfather titled “Mahadev Desai: Mahatma Gandhi’s Frontline Reporter” was released at a
function at the Sabarmati Ashram on January 1 this year. Frail but happy and
buoyed, he soon plunged into the translation of another of his father’s works
“Jigar na chera” . He had plans but
destiny had other designs .
The frayed frame
gave way and Nachiketa joined a long
line of journos who had sought solace in
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s words “ Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to
do and die “.Sleep well my troubled soul.
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