What made G Kasturi different from other editors

During his entire lifetime’s involvement with The Hindu, of which he was a key figure from 1965 to 1991, and for quite some time even after his sudden retirement in 1991, G Kasturi insisted on simple requirements: be in command, run a modern newspaper, and remain anonymous. To the staff, however, he was an everyday presence. A strict rule was that the newspaper was not to carry his photograph or write about him. There were exceptions: when he received the American Newspaper Publishers Association Award in 1968 in New York, and during the Centenary and 125th anniversary celebrations of The Hindu - by the last-mentioned occasion, he had retired. An editor is to be known by the content of the newspaper and his name in the imprint line.[caption id=“attachment_464695” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  G Kasturi. Image courtesy The Hindu[/caption] Bylines were not easy to get during his time as editor - in the 1980s, only GK Reddy mostly had the rare privilege. He explained why he was parsimonious with bylines: a byline makes a correspondent think he is larger than the masthead of the newspaper and become swollen-headed. The institution mattered. Others only had to contribute to it. Much as he did. He hired me, groomed me and even charted a career plan for me. It was mine as long as I stayed the course, remained loyal to the norms of decency, fairness, accuracy, and worked hard. “There is no substitute for hard work.” It pulled one out of even personal tragedies, he had said in his frequent and long fireside chats I was lucky to have had with him. Any journalist within the newspaper could reach him; if he was busy at home or office, a telephone call with a message meant he would return the call, in most cases within the next few hours. He reckoned that no one would call him for pleasantries or talk about the weather. It would have had a reason, often work-related. The conversation would be easy, nothing ever was brusque with him even if brief. This continuous contact, ensured by periodic phone calls from him or the news editor, K Narayanan (later The Hindu’s first readers’ Editor) who would then of course brief Kasturi, gave the journalists the feeling that they were working for their newspaper, not for him. For the centenary celebrations, he sent out personally signed letters to staff about our newspaper’s milestone. It was participatory, him of course being the empire. Though he retired in 1991 rather suddenly due to issues within the extended family over editorial control, Kasturi kept in touch with technology and with the staff. He visited the office and spent time with the staff. He guided them, just as he did in the past when he was the full-time editorship which he had seamlessly combined with management - he was also the managing director of the company that owned the newspaper. He revived the Sports & Pastime in the incarnation of Sportstar and started the Frontline with its emphasis on good text and excellent pictures. He had given me two auto-focus cameras, one to load with colour film and the other with black & white. It was a worthwhile experiment for a writer. It paid rich dividends; it showed how the same person could two things together. I too could strut around saying they were my pictures! The desk which subbed copy and produced the various group publications were carved into team but the same correspondent had to write for the other apart from filing for the mainline publication, The Hindu. It took some effort, for instance, to file daily on a developing story, and yet retain some new angle to be used for the fortnightly. Any rehash was not welcome and deadlines were sacrosanct. It was a task one had to do, and do it well. That it was a modern but genteel newspaper for the educated and sophisticated readers was driven home to me within the first year of employment. The vice chancellor of a newly-founded university had become incommunicado after handing over the campus to the district administration when the Leftist and the Right-wing students clashed. My copy which somehow passed muster with the desk, mentioned that “his whereabouts were not known” – even the Collector was searching for him. In those pre-STD days, I got a lightening trunk call. Such usage was not kosher, he pointed out. The readers were capable of understanding “that the blackguard had vanished, not being up to the task, but we should be careful with our language. ‘He was not reachable for comment’ would have been sufficient”. He asked me to engage better with nuances of good writing. How you say something was as important. In a communal riot, persons died; it was not important to identify the communities. Doing so could trigger a problem elsewhere. This perhaps kept the communal relations more congenial across the country than the brazen identification of Hindus, Muslims, Christians as victims or perpetrators of violence. That, of course, is pre-Ayodhya riots. But that was before journalism shifted to in-your-face reportage, and television gave rise to ephemeral headlines that did not last beyond the day’s sunset. That was before media’s news stories, as distinct from opinion pieces, pretended to be interpretative but voiced an opinion. Kasturi’s unrealisable gold standard was: if there were more than two angles, the interpretation had just started. Two conversations with him illustrate how deeply he was involved in the day-to-day working, unlike the corporate owners or the Sethias. As Ahmedabad correspondent in mid-1980s, I was filing regularly on the riots, part communal, part against reservations in Gujarat. One copy gave a break-up of casualties because of the riots, one being those hurt or dead in communal incidents, and another about the the anti-quota stir. Other papers did not do so, except for perhaps The Telegraph of Kolkata, and sure enough, Kasturi called me up. I had shifted residence, had no telephone, was using the Telegraph Office’s telex to file copies. He left a message with the telex operator, asking me to return the call. He wanted to know how I arrived at this disaggregation. When told that after the daily press conference by the chief secretary and the police chief, I lingered to have a conversation with them when they provided me the break-ups. Kasturi would of course want to know why it was not said at the press briefings. The government was keen to paint the quota stir as a communal stir but the well-meaning officials wanted to give the real picture to those who would ask. More questions followed. Were they reliable? Had they proven trustworthy in the past? If they were, I could continue to write the way I did. If any doubt surfaced I was to depend on only the official briefings but clearly say they were official versions. Others would have to be quoted for the other version. That was the lengths he wanted his reporters to go to remain credible. My despatches, thereafter, I suspect, received more respect. The desk gave them a better play. His dictum: spend on news gathering, but simply because something was spent, it was not incumbent to “file something”. Equally, simply because a story was hard to get, do not avoid spending. The accountants never got involved. He kept track of every correspondent and somehow was aware of their problems – even family related. His advice on how to mitigate the woes was “work. That alone would give some solace”. No wonder, despite his being retired, when he walked onto the stage for the 125th anniversary of the newspaper, which Atal Behari Vajpayee attended, he got the loudest and longest round or standing ovation. That showed his connect with the staff. That made for a great newspaper, the editor and the staff being in sync.