 Welcome to this lovely Saturday evening and today we have with us a very special guest, someone who actually does not need any introduction at all. And someone who can wear many hats with equal ease, the editor columnist TV host and food critic Mr. Wee Sanwee. Thank you Mr. Sanwee for joining us today. When we're talking about Mr. Sanwee's latest book, Rude Life, in which he turns his dispassionate observers gaze on himself. And he'll be talking with Dr. Anurag Bhattra, chairman and editor-in-chief BW Business World and Exchange for Media Group. Towards the end of this discussion, we'll have two eminent people asking not so easy questions. So before I hand it over to Dr. Bhattra, I want to request Mr. Sanwee and Dr. Bhattra to show us the book which is the version of a group picture online if we can have it in front of the camera so we can take a screenshot. Thank you so much and over to you gentlemen. Thank you so much Rohan for the quick introduction and getting this interaction where we've started. You know, we doesn't really need an introduction but a lot of people have over the last three and a half decades look forward to his writing, look forward to his critiques, look forward to his shows and look forward to his sharp point of view on many issues starting from politics to food. I just want to start by asking, we will come to the book. How have been the last 18 months for you both personally and professionally? Hi Anurag, thank you for inviting me. Delighted to do this. I don't know if people watching this know this but Anurag and I have known each other for what, 15 years through various ups and downs in our lives. And I think for most of us the last year or so would count as a down, apart from the frustration of being locked up at home, not being able to go out, not being able to do other things. There was also at least in our case, I'm sure in everybody's case, an element of tragedy. All of us lost friends, we lost relatives, we knew people who were hit by COVID. So it's been in many ways a really, really traumatic time for us. It's been a mixed back while it's given us time for reflection and being with family and being at home which manifests in better health, but at the same time it has meant a loss of lives and livelihood. And that has been very discomforting. Now let me also ask you what has changed in the last 18 months, which is for good and what has changed which is for bad. Of course we work from home, we travel as we eat more home food, which is not good for restaurant, though people are ordering at home and that experience is being created at home but it's not the same. But what are the things that have changed permanently in the last 18 months and are likely to become a part of how we organize ourselves, how we work, and what are the things that have changed temporarily. When we have a choice, we'll come back to the pre-COVID normal. Well this Arang, what you and I are doing is possibly the biggest change during the last 18 months and one that will probably last in some form or the other for the rest of our lives. When I have done events for Exchange for Media before, I have hosted conversations for Exchange for Media in front of live audiences and presumably if things had been better we'd have done this face to face in front of a live audience. But the fact that we can do this now, you're sitting at home, I'm sitting at home, the other people who are joining us are not even in the same city. What COVID has done is not just taught us to work from home, but taught us to work in a way that makes geography almost irrelevant. I've done Zoom, I've done conversations with people, one person is in New York, one person is in Singapore, one person is next door to me in Defense Colony, and somehow when you see them on the screen, it doesn't seem to make a difference. So the good side of COVID is that we've had all kinds of geographical boundaries in our minds and those boundaries have now disappeared. We've learned how to communicate with people across geographies. We've taught ourselves how to work with people, how to negotiate, how to do things over a Zoom or something like that. I mean, that's the good side. The bad side is that all of this contact is essentially bogus. It's essentially honey, it's caught in a sort of bubble. For instance, if you and I were doing this the live session, I would have arrived at the hotel where we were doing this 15, 20 minutes before. We'd have gossiped, we'd have gone to a corner, we'd have chatted, we'd have had the energy of the live audience. If we would have finished, then we'd have considered going for dinner. Now, none of that is going to happen now. We're going to do the best conversation we can, but it's going to be just the conversation, just to meet with no fat. And I kind of miss the fat. I kind of miss the warmth of human contact. And if you work in an office and you work with a team of people, there is according to me at least, no substitute for working together. But not just from the point of getting things done, maybe you can get them done over the internet, but in terms of motivating people, understanding them, understanding their problems, understanding what's lacking with people I work with, I see them on Zoom all the time. But if I was to see them in real life, I would know this guy is not telling me this, he's upset about this, he's worried about this, maybe I need to push him harder on this. So Zoom is probably a good medium for meetings and stuff like that, but it's not a good medium for managing. And I think in terms of work, that is our greatest loss. Thank you so much. The loss of human touch, the experience of having a face-to-face conversation. Now, today we've met because you've written a new book. It is a memoir. It's called The Root Life. Now, first of all, why a book now? Why this book and why this title? I hope you're not retiring. People write honest books when they want, we're retiring. So give us a sense of what's happening. You're never quite through or rid of me. But honestly, why I did this book relates to our last question. I was stuck at home. I was incredibly frustrated because, yes, I said we could do these Zooms. And at the beginning of the first lockdown, Zoom wasn't such a big deal anyway. So none of us was doing that many Zooms. And I felt that I should use this stuff. I shouldn't waste it. I should do something. So writing was the obvious thing to do. But what do you write about when you're stuck at home? You can't go out, meet people. You can't do stories. So the subject suggested itself, which was why don't I write about myself because it's easy enough to do. Now, I've always said I won't write a memoir because I am not as a person. You know this because you know me for a long time. The kind of person who looks back, who dwells on the past, etc. So I wondered how it would go. So I sat down and it's written chronologically. And I wrote the first chapter based on what my mother had told me about how she met my father and on my early life. And I was very surprised that I put myself into a zone where it all sort of came flooding back. And then I said, look, maybe this will work. So I will write it. And I sort of set myself a couple of rules. Rule number one was make the chapter short, make the sentence the short, make the paragraph short. Don't make it a long and ponderous book. You may have to do more chapters than you would have thought. For instance, I thought it would be about 40 chapters. It ended up being 60. But they're like 2000 word chapters. They're short snappy chapters. That was rule number one rule number two was remember me writing a memoir ultimately is an act of extreme arrogance and vanity. You imagine that your life is so interesting that people want to read about you and my life is not interesting. Nobody really wants to read about me. So remember that what makes you interesting in to the limited extent that you can write a memoir is the people you've met the experiences you had. So much of this book is about what I have seen, rather than about me. I mean there's been a criticism about this, the fact that there's not enough personal stuff. But I was very clear that it was going to be a book about my career and what I had seen in the world. Does it end when there's two things to happen? I should hope so. I hope this is not the end. I hope I'm not really retiring, but it happened because of the lockdown. If there had been no lockdown, there would have been no book. Why is it called a rude life? I think Penguin came up with the title. There's that connection with root travel, rude food. The suggestion was that the book was irreverent in tone. So rude fitted in. The word rude is frequently associated with me. So it was a marketing decision. Absolutely. It was something that would get somebody curious why it's called the rude life. Let's look it up, at least look at it. Now, you also talked about the chapter, the content in the book, which is about your early life and your mother telling you to dedicate the book to your parents, Vimu Sanghvi and Mr. Vameesh Sanghvi. Now, tell me, every child who grows up to be somebody, of course has the values, has the imprint of his or her early childhood. Give us a snippets of what's in this book about your early childhood. As people will find out when they read it, some of it is about my background, how my parents met, how they got married, where I was born, how I was born. But a lot of it is about, and that you sort of come full circle in the last chapter, is about how my childhood influenced me as a person. I lost my father when I was 15. I was an only child. My mother did not have the, I think the ability or the way with all to cope with the world as it was. So I ended up doing things pretty much on my own. I went to England. I found a school. I called the principal. I went for an interview. I wrote a check for my school fees. I got to Oxford pretty much on my own. When I got to Oxford, I found out a way to pay for my education by getting a grant from a British local council. And yet my interest, the fact that I'm so interested in writing, I think comes from my father, who though he was a barrister also used to write. The elements of that, but essentially the sense that because I lost my father early, I was an only child. I knew I was on my own and I think that's probably shaped my personality more than anything else. That's why I'm still essentially a loner. I am an introvert, and I do things myself. Absolutely. But you know you did very well. You, as everyone knows that you became a leader at a very young age of 22, but I want to focus on the chapters. You talk about short snappy chapters. What got my attention about the book was the title of the chapters. And it's so inviting if I may use the word. You want to dive in and want to know. So let me start by asking you about this chapter called, Who the Queen Go To? Give us a glimpse to our readers and viewers. What's in this chapter? Because the beauty about these titles is, unlike most other books, the titles are very plain, they're very boring, and they're very, very obvious. In your case, the title doesn't give away things, and you want to kind of get into the, in fact, when I was reading the book, I was going from one chapter to another chapter without following the sequence. Because whatever got my attention first, that's the chapter I wanted to read. So give us a sense of how did you come up with these names? And then we'll talk about who does the Queen go to. Okay, the chapter names I can take no credit for. One of the advantages of being maritouan editor and my wife Seema, edited graffiti very successfully in Calcutta for a long time, and is now a columnist. Is that you can just give the book to an editor, in this case my wife, the editor who stays at home with you, and she can look at it and she read it, she edited it, she put it together. She looked at the manuscript and Penguin sent me these titles, the editor at Penguin, who I'm sure very well meaning, which was, as you described, really boring. And Seema looked at them and said, this is rubbish, you can't go with this. So I sort of slamily hoping that she would do the titles in the chapter heading says yeah, I says very bad, but what do we do so she then said what I hope she'd say which is I'm going to do them myself. So because she understands headlining, she knows how to peak your curiosity without giving too much away. She did the chapter headings and I have to say, I'm a little ashamed of this. People seem to like the chapter headings more than they've liked the chapters, because it's the one thing everybody comments on. Of course, as you rightly said, the beauty of the chapters is in the curiosity that it generates because the title doesn't give away somebody who doesn't know you, doesn't know your life, or knows even a bit of it. It still doesn't give away what's in the chapter, only when you start reading you get a sense of it. So let me, as I said, let me now get into the first chapter, which is who does the queen go to, give us a sense of what's in this chapter. I'll tell you about it, it's about my parents really because my father came from a lower middle class family in Rajkot. He was a communist, he was one of 14 children. And his background was such that he never had much money, but he came to Amzabad, where my mother was, my mother's family was, and my mother fell in love with him. And my grandfather, who was a big mill owner at the time, a typical sort of Gujarati shade with a dhoti and that Gujarati topi would go to the mill every day, was appalled by the idea that she wanted to marry a this poor boy from nowhere. In those days they regarded low mid-classes per and somebody who was a communist and wanted to take away all their money. So they eloped, they got married. And then finally the old boy faced with the set the company decided that he would accept the marriage, but said give me a grandson. My mother had two miscarriages, and she was by this stage getting on and those days you expected women to have their children by the time they were 22 or 23. And my grandfather got increasingly desperate. And he said, I have all this money, why can't I get you a good doctor. My mother said, look, we're going to the best doctors in India, I can't do much more. So he said, why India? Why not abroad? I think Prince Charles had just been born at that stage. He said, who does the queen go to? My parents said, we haven't a clue. I mean, who knows who the queen goes to. And he said, no, find out. So they looked through clippings and they found out that it was a guy. And he said, go to him and gave them money. They went to London. They discovered who this guy was. They found his telephone number they found his address. They asked him for an appointment. And I don't know what he made of this strange couple from India that had walked in this pregnant lady and this guy who would obviously no respect for royalty anyway. And he said, okay, I'll do it. And so my parents stayed on in England for the duration of my mother's pregnancy. This doctor, Sir William, delivered me and which is how by a happy accident, I came to be born in London or I came to be born at all. Now, you know, in the chapter, your link with the future, you start by saying that the happiest years of your childhood were between 1967 to 70. Right? That's what you say at the start of the chapter. And during the chapter, talk about how your father started to get more wealthy and prosperous. Give us a sense of what's in this chapter and what are you trying to say in this? See, as I said, my father never had much money. After they got married, my mother went to London. My mother was rich, well educated. She had been to an American university, which was very unusual for girls in the 1940s. She had no difficulty getting a job in London. And with the money she earned from her job, she put my father through the, what's it called, inner temple, and he became a barrister at the inner temple. He did the law largely on the basis of her hard work. They came back to India and he started doing law and he would write a column for Blitz, which was a big publication at the time. And from all accounts, I'm too young to remember it, while he did have his big successes in. There wasn't the kind of money there is now in law because there was no corporate law or anything. And he just got fed up of going to courts and arguing cases. So he really had no enthusiasm for it. He then got dragged by people because I suppose the beginning of what we would now call corporate law into advising people who were doing international deals. One such deal was between a bunch of Americans and the Iranian government and he went off to Tehran. And he made friends with the Shah of Iran, who was then a young up and coming monarch who then gave him various contracts to do things for the Iranian government. Armed with that he went to London. He bought over a public relations company and started a company doing public relations in London. Many other clients became very successful, made a lot of money. So I was now 67 you will remember for those of you with long memories was the year of psychedelia and swinging London and all of that. I was 11 years old so I was a bit young to be smoking weed or understanding psychedelia, let alone dropping acid. But because we had a house in London, I went there every year for my summer holidays from boarding school. I really got into going to Carnaby Street going to the King's Road, looking at the London scene. My father was rich. He had a lot of time for me. I spent a lot of time with him. And you didn't, I think in retrospect while I enjoyed it so much. I only realized how precious that time was because in 71 when I was 15 he died. So those three or four years, which were years of prosperity of glamour of being at the center of the world, which is what swinging London was then. And being with my father, when I look back at the happiest in my life. Absolutely. Now, right off from you talk about the fact how you got admission in the school and then later on in the university. You have a chapter called You Can, made on Mondays and Fridays and talk about how, you know, your uncle, talk about your uncle, you talk about Michael, the principal of the school and the experiences. Why don't you take our readers through that? Okay, I mean it's not very exciting story but I'll tell it to you anyway. Because it talks about see the point in that chapter when I read it, and you write a friend said that in some way you had to do a lot in your early age and in a sense kind of you were on your own. This chapter, once you read it, it comes through very clearly that that's how it was. Okay, I'll tell you story. I finished it, I took ISC in December 1972. And in those days you then went directly to college after ISC so most of my friends, all of my friends went to college in India. But in England you couldn't go to college. You had to do two more years of something called A levels at school. I hadn't realized this when I worked out I had to do this. I went to school. I went to England. I stayed with some relatives who had no more flu than I did. And I tried to find a school for myself. I found something called the public schools handbook. I chose a couple of schools. Many of the better ones said look, you're calling us in May, June, the term begins in September, people register for these schools years and years in advance. There is no way we can accommodate you. And the school I was quite keen on called Mill Hill, and the school was in London and I liked it because it was on the tube, 20 minutes from the center of London so I had enough of being in school and boarding school in India. And I thought this would be a nice mix between London and boarding school. So when they said no, there's no way you can get in because you haven't been registered long enough. I said what do I have to lose. So I asked the switchboard I said will you put me through the headmaster. And they did a very nice man called Michael Hart, I think it was intrigued that a boy wanted to speak to him himself. And he said all right come and see me so I went and saw him and I said I want the place. And he said, Why, why are you doing this why hasn't anybody else registered you so I explained my circumstances. And I said there really is nobody else is me. But I think I have enough money to pay your fees. So he had me interviewed by two heads of department who presumably thought I was okay, but I came back in and he said I can find one room in a house called I can accommodate you. Will you take it so I said yeah he said who will pay your fees so I said I will. So I pulled out a checkbook and I wrote him a check for the first terms fees. This was I was what 16 at the time. And in those days, people thought a 16 year olds being children, and he was incredibly impressed and he said please join. And I often think back that only in England was I lucky to find a man who would do this for me in India said gone to mail or I'd gone to doom, they would I would never have got to meet the headmaster, let alone talk my way into school. So in a way there's a lot for us to learn from the West, and I was very very fortunate to meet a man who helped me he had nothing to gain himself. He was just a decent person. And we when I was reading at the end of the chapter, you talk about that you learned a very important lesson in life, which was to help other people, knowing well that may not be able to help you in the future. And you talk about that because of these kind of people, you are where you are. And in my 17 and a half years of interaction with you I've seen I've called you in the early days of exchange media for help for your presence at events, or your view. And you always been kind enough, and give me in those years exchange for media was just a young startup 17, 18 years back. So when I read this chapter I said, what we're saying at the end of the chapter, he pretty much, you know, lives by it so you know, and that's what comes across. And you said at the end that this kindness from people you didn't even know, really help you sail through that difficult period of your life in the sense that your father had gone away. Now, in the chapter five, which is called isn't there anything British about you. It's a, you know, by the way, I enjoyed this chapter a lot. And give us a sense of what's in this chapter. Well, you know, as I explained, because of my grandfather as well, I was fortunate enough to be born in London. My parents came back I was entitled to British passport, and I consistently refused to take it. I didn't write to the residents in the UK, but I'm very clear about where I want to live and what my nationality is. So there was no question of taking a British passport. I always thought of myself as being India. When I went to Oxford, I was reconciled to paying what was then called the overseas fee, which was a lot more than the fee paid by British students. And again this business about kindness of strangers, a tutor at my college said to me no we don't want you to pay the overseas fee. I said look I'm an Indian I have to pay the overseas fee. And he said isn't there anything British about you. So I said well I was born in London so he said okay, that's enough for me, and he had put me down as British fee. And then he said why don't you take a get a grant. Now in those days it sounds incredible in retrospect, the British government would make university completely free for everybody, you didn't have to pay any fees at all. The argument was this created a truly competitive society. If you went say to Harvard you'd have to take a loan, maybe help your parents who reach to pay those very high fees. In England, it didn't matter. So the admission into Oxford was not determined by how much money you had everybody could get in. So this guy said to me said there must be a local council that you can apply to and ask them to pay your fees. And I said not really I live in Bombay. And he said no don't you have any relatives when I have an aunt in the UK. So how long has she been here about two decades. He said has she taken grants for her children so I said no, she doesn't have any children. So he said okay, she's paid enough tax time for her to get something back. So call her local council so I called her local council. And I said this is my situation I'm here my aunt is looking after me as you know having it up slightly. And they said no problem. They agreed immediately to pay my fees. And not only would they pay my fees. They gave me a maintenance grant, which was money to actually live and pay for my hostel and pay for my meals. It was really long live the welfare state, but it happened purely because this tutor said to me, do this, do that and push me he again he had nothing to gain. It was the kindness of strangers. Absolutely. And you talk about your friendship. You talk about how India today was started in those years started in 1975. You also talk about your friend Mr bullet. Yeah, make a bullet chandarude Singh. And you talk about the fact that everyone in those times wanted to write a live like one thing. Yeah, you talk about the fact that, you know, you made up the name you call him Sanjay and I don't know the random. I don't know if you're old enough but people of that generation. I think now forget how much Kushwan Singh was idolized and revered in the days of the Illustrated Weekly. He was the most famous journalist in India. And he used to write articles always in the first person and always with no real sense of shame. I went to certain such place. I called the ambassador. I said send me three bottles of whiskey. Somebody came over he would write about women in a what I think he imagined with a slightly naughty way. He would call somebody a Buxom lass, somebody else a winch. I mean in retrospect all of it sounds quite appalling and none of his articles have aged well, but at that time he was like this huge cult. And every young journalist tried to write like Kushwan Singh. Now you could do it if you were Kushwan Singh, but if you were not Kushwan Singh you couldn't do it, which is why I think Indian journalism and that period was in quite a bad phase. And you said you relied on a tiny core team. You know you're a core team and you talk about Mr. Dilip Bob who's also on the webinar today. He's also part of the event. He was one of the few people who logged in. You talk about Sunil Sethi, Shirley Jokhwa, Dilip Bob and Mandirapuri. And you say that you didn't have that core team in Mumbai. And you know you were asked to write for India today and you would get 150 rupees for an article you wrote and you also started writing a small item on the people page which would get you less than 50 bucks between 25 and 50 bucks. So give us a sense of those times in terms of what kind of journey is working, what kind of stories were being created and how would you prepare for them. Why do you have to remember that India today when it started out was extremely unusual because the world was dominated by the Hindustan Times, the Times of India. The biggie the biggie newspapers illustrated weekly where Kushwan Singh was the editor was the Times of India publication. Something else was essentially small time. When Arun Puri who was not a journalist, who was owner of Thompson Press became editor through circumstances of India today. He depended on a team of people who are what, around 25 or less. Dilip I think was the first employee of the publication. Neel Sethi was a star because he worked with JS and had done various other things Mandir Shri was Arun's sister, and surely it was really the Shri Joshua was the backbone of the organization. And the four of them sitting in this little office and gone out place, working with virtually no resources with Arun learning on the job created this magazine that went on to become the best magazine in India, which even in its early days was head and shoulders above everything else. So for me, I learned a lot in those days though there's not much money, admittedly, because I think I learned a lot from Arun because Arun had this accountant mentality we used to tease him, which is that if you were going to say something is big, don't say big say eight feet, say whatever. So we learned how to be precise, we learned not to use vague adjectives. We learned that Krishwan Singh was not necessarily the end all of all journalism that if we were going to look as a magazine for a format, time in Newsweek was a better thing for us to copy. So we learned to write in that style, and it imposed a certain discipline on all of us. And as young people it gave us a chance to go out to meet people we would never have had the opportunity to meet to go and see the world. So while the money was crap, it was still a huge learning experience, educational and lots of fun as well. We in a 45-50 minute conversation, I can't possibly take you through the 60 chapters. So I have chosen mine. But before I come to them, I would like to ask you which are your favorite chapters? Are there any favorite chapters or a favorite chapter or which are the ones you enjoyed writing and reading again once you wrote them? I'm sure there are some. Honestly, it all sort of merges into one in my mind. I don't tell the chapters apart because yeah, it's true the book is chapters with very clever headlines and it seems like that. But for me, it's my life. It just sort of poured out of me and I wrote it. So I don't know if there's anything that's particularly a favorite. In fact, when people show me bits of the book, I really remember the events but I don't remember having written it because that's how that book was written in something of a blur. Thank you. Now, let me share with our viewers and readers that, you know, we also go into the slow life in Calcutta and uses expressions like single file movement for the public protests of 1980. He also draws a parallel to the present pandemic saying that social distancing reminds him of public protests in Calcutta at that time. But I want to get into, because, you know, their exchange for media and so much of a media pitch impact. I want to focus on these mentions in his accounts of his journey in Indian journalism. And he is very honest, authentic and he leaves no one out and he's talked about his experiences right from Anand Bazar Patrika to New Zex to Hindustan Times. So first of all, let me ask you, why don't you talk about what you've written in the book about Anand Bazar Patrika? Well, I accepted the job, as I explained there, turning down an extremely good job from the times when they're from Sameer Jain, who was my friend, and who I knew would turn the times around and turned into a powerhouse. I accepted, I turned that job down, I went off to Calcutta, I cold called Avik Sarkar, he was good enough to offer me a job, I went to Calcutta City, I'd never been to a Calcutta has changed a lot. In those days, it was very different, it was, even if you'd come from Bombay, which is a real city city, but let alone if you'd come from a small town or from Delhi, it was full of people, full of noise, full of smells, full of sounds. It was really a city that lived in Technicolor, and people kept telling you that Calcutta is the cultural center of India, etc. And this was true, what they didn't tell you was that all this culture was in Bengali. So if you didn't speak Bengali and speak a word, you were completely out of things. At Anand Bazar where I work, everybody spoke to everybody else in Bengali, even non Bengalis learned Bengali and spoke to everybody in Bengali. So for the first couple of years, I felt like a complete outsider, because I had no sense what people were saying to me, and it's changed now but Calcutta in those days was a very negative city. It was a city which was lazy, it was slow. People were always protesting. Every time you went out on the street, your car would be stopped because a demonstration would happen. And when we think of demonstrations now, we think of hundreds of people marching, but Calcutta, 25 people could stop traffic for one hour, as I've said, because the Bengalis invented social distancing. There would be a single file crowd, a single file line of guys, one guy would walk eight feet behind him with the other guy, would be the other guy, eight feet behind him would be the third guy. And that way they could make such a long snake for want of a better term, stop traffic, the cops were on their side. So all of us had to sit and wait while the snake slowly made its way across the streets. In addition to that, there was also an APP, it was no exception, the curious air of negativity. If you said I want to do this, it seems slightly unusual or whatever, they would say no, it can't be done. So you really had to fight, and you had to struggle to get anything done. I think one reason why Calcutta has changed now is they've got over that and my theory and I'm probably politically incorrect in saying this, is that this sense of getting finally fed up and saying we should do something with our state, with our city is what led to the collapse of the CPM, which had by then driven out all of it, all the industry. We had the worst infrastructure of any major city, and they were quite content doing it because they said they were intellectuals. I wanted to talk about how you set up New Zex, what happened to New Zex, I'll come to your Sunday days in Hindustan time. And I was thinking when I first came across the book, when you started your TV show on CNN IBM, you called it Velocity, I mean I love the name. So clearly you, being an editor, have an eye for what will get readers, the viewers' attention. But I want to focus on your television journey a bit, how you set up a new channel, what happened to it, give us a sense to our viewers, what they're likely to do. New Zex story, it's in the book and actually that's when we first met, I'm trying to think when it was New Zex, I used to do a show for Star TV, I did many shows for Star TV. Star TV was headed originally by a man called Ratikal Basu, who set it up. Ratikal Basu was then overthrown after coup and Peter Mukherjee was installed as the boss. Peter Mukherjee then ran Star TV, ran it successfully because it had many, many successful shows. Peter Mukherjee was then overthrown by a man called Sameer Nair who became the new boss and Peter hung around with no real responsibility. It being made clear to everybody that he was yesterday's man. And during this time, he approached me and he said he'd spoken to Uday Kotak and various people in the investment community and they wanted to finance a new network and wanted him to head it. And he thought there was room for more general entertainment channels. He was not alone in this because this is a period during which Raghav Bail started colors, NDTV started Imagine, so there was this whole rush to start new Star Plus type channels. But Peter was slightly different from the others and that he wanted on the side to start a news channel which would be not a profit sector or anything, but it would be the calling card for the channel. And it would be upmarket, we weren't going to be interested in TRPs, we're going to spend money on it, it was going to look great. So he then offered me more money than I had ever been offered before or since then as salary and bonus. So I'd already been editor of the HD I was now editorial director, and there was not that much more for me to do in print. So I said let me this is the one thing I haven't done right on a channel. So let's try it. So I did it. And we had very very good people. We hired among other people Nick Pollard would just left Sky News in the UK. And Nick who understood the mechanics of television was setting up the channel for us. When disaster struck Peter had started this so called Star Plus type channel called Nine X which as you will remember was a disaster. It never got the ratings it was supposed to. It was doing worse and worse and as the tension over the failure of Nine X grew. He was more and more impatient with news X. Finally, I think at the last stage he said it's going to be an upmarket channel why do you need any cable distribution, just put it on Tata sky, which wasn't what the original deal was relations between us I think, got very bad. And eventually, Peter and his wife in the running leaked to various trade publications that had been sacked, which was news to me because I was still sitting in the office news to the team and news I think the investors will put all this money into the channel. But it was clear we couldn't work together so I spoke to Peter, and they gave me a very very generous package and I left, but I say in the book that I often think that it may never have worked because my vision of that channel was something that was like 70 mm that had the best reporting, the studios were large, it looked wonderful. There was all kinds of in depth analysis, if you really wanted to know what was happening, you came to us. But I mean, is that what television developed into television now, does anybody even know what the studio looks like it's like 45612 postage stamp type things people shouting things at each other. Nobody cares about footage. Nobody cares about programming. It's all people just fighting with each other, which I could never have done so even imagine we pulled it off in use X had been that kind of channel, we might have lost anyway. You know, Sunday again a very big high point in your life, your career. And, you know, I had the good. I read it every show Sunday when I was young. I did read the illustrative because my parents would get it at home. So I started reading it when I was eight years old or seven and a half years old. It was a big, again, a big success. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist today. But it came from the very strong editorial legacy. Give us a sense of what you say about Sunday. And again, this chapter on, you know, what happened to, you know, Rajiv Gandhi and you know, when he died and you, you were at the Sunday that right. You were at the Sunday then, and how you got to know and then you covered that of course you were very unhappy about it and it took many days to figure out it was LTTE who had done this. But I also want to talk to you about your days at Hindustan time because that's where you became the editorial director, your imprint on the newspaper and how it covered what it covered your food columns. All that came together at Hindustan time. If you had to sum up your, and you do talk about it in quite a detail, but if you have to sum up your tenure at the Hindustan time, how would you kind of share it with you? Again, I was very fortunate to be at the Hindustan times in what was the pivotal moment in that paper's history. The Hindustan times was started by a group of Sadagis. They then ran into trouble, Gandhi got involved, whereas other people came in with financing, ultimately it ended up with the bidlars. And it ended up finally with KK Birla, who was the most public spirited and most public minded of his generation of bidlars. And it was the leading newspaper in Delhi, and it did very, very well. It made a certain amount of money. But there was a problem in that India changed in 1991, post liberalization, people stopped seeing themselves just as readers, they saw themselves as consumers. And I think someone like Sameer, who's Sameer Jen, who's a great marketing person has had brain, saw that shift and turned the times of India into much more of a market friendly publication. He also turned into professionally run publication. The Hindustan times remained a bureaucracy, not a bureaucracy of the Punjab government as much as the Pepsi government, even before that. And the whole focus continued in this bureaucratic focus on doing things the old way. There was another change. People said always somewhat unkindly that the Hindustan time was the only English language newspaper in the whole world to be written entirely in Punjabi and certainly it was written very, very badly. Nobody cared about the quality of the writing, but Delhi was changing that Punjabi middle class which had always subscribed to the Hindustan times was either dying out and their children were not wanting to read the sometimes. They were much happier with the times of India, or new people were coming in were not Punjabis from that same kind of background, who are much more cosmopolitan. So the HD kept losing ground to the times, which of course did all kinds of reduction in prices and interesting marketing schemes, which left the HD is then management is completely bureaucratic, confounded and at a loss at what to do so can you give it a set to me, because even now what it was going to be taken over taken by the times of India, would I like to tell him what was wrong with it so I did. And, but then by again stroke of luck, the editor of the Hindustan times plagiarized an article from the London Sunday Times and used it as his column, he was found out of course he had to go, and there was a gap there was a vacancy at the top. I knew KK and I knew Shubna Bhatia his daughter would be trying very hard to persuade him to change the management to change the style of the paper, and I spoke to them they were very kind. They said they would make me editor. And so Shubna and I looked at the paper and we decided we had to reoriented completely. It had to be smart. It had to appeal to the kind of person who read the Times of India. It had to be written in better English. It had to expand its coverage from just the old bureaucratic government kind of stuff that it did earlier. And because I had the full backing of the bill as KK Babu and Shubna Bhatia who was as keen as I was, and would finally been given a free and to install her own management team. I was at a pivotal moment of the Hindustan Times history there as editor, and we were able I mean thank God to turn it around. It was written off the HD being written off it was supposed to be like a telegraph statesman situation in Calcutta, where it was only a matter of time before the HD fell by the wayside and the Times of India ran everything. But we managed to turn the paper around. And now, when you tell people that the HD was regarded as this down market West Delhi Punjabi paper, and the times regarded as the upmarket South Delhi paper. It doesn't make any sense that you may like the HD you may like the times, but the papers are on par. And I think we achieved that during my tenure. Thank you read my last question before I bring in some questions from the audience, I can go on as I had 60 chapters cannot be covered in less than three four hours, but the book also gives an insight into the political and personal lives of a few former five ministers of India, like Mr. Devagora, like Mr. watch pay. It also talks about the awkwardness of few prime ministers like Mr. PV Narsimh around the grace of it. It also talks about that and then make limited. But one of the chapters that my thought my attention was your interactions with artillery watch, right, the then Prime Minister, and how you were invited to his home during Diwali and you became in some way, very close to him. And you know, you also clarified many myths and doubts about the then Prime Minister Mr. watch page public persona and you talk about the fact that Mr. batch by beyond the point was a family man. Yeah, right. And so give us a sense of some of the bits about the Prime Minister that you talk about. So that, let's talk about Mr. watch by since you started on that one, but I didn't know Mr. watch by initially, I was a friend of his foster daughter and her husband, and their daughter so I was a friend of the families, I was invited for Diwali as a friend of the family not as a journalist or somebody. But if you hang around somebody's house long enough, and you're reasonably well known as a journalist, and the head of the household is a politician, you're bound to get to know each other and to talk politics. And Mr. watch by was aware that I was not by nature, a BJP sympathizer, and he would joke about it and he would say things like up key Sonya G etc. He was always making fun of me for being what he called a Congress supporter, and not a Congress BJP sympathizer. But here's the thing in those days, it didn't matter. He never held it against me. The fact that you had a country ideological point of view that I would go back and write editorials and articles that were against him against the BJP that never seemed to matter to me may disagree with what I had said, but he never denied me the right to say it, and he never allowed it to interfere with any kind of personal relationship I had with him. I always regard that as one of his most remarkable qualities, because it's very rare, particularly today when everything is so polarized to find politicians who respect you for what you believe in, and give you the right to say what you want to. Now I say about Mr. watch by and his house as you mentioned, is that if you go to most politicians houses that political households, the conversation the table is all about politics who's defecting who's doing this. There are always hangers on secretaries favor seekers outside. There's no sense in which it's a normal household. The watch by household is very unusual in that number three race course road where they lived number seven was the office at number three, there were no hangers on. There was no politics discussed. They were like any other family, all of them loved and respected Mr. watch by, but he was like any elderly person if on the dining table, he wanted to eat an extra kachori, they would take the plate away and not let him take it. They treated him with affection and with respect, but not with the kind of exaggerated difference we now see to political leaders, and he was happy about it he would come back in the evenings, he would change into a lungi, he would sit in his favorite chair, he would give him a bowl cup of soup, he would sit and eat it he used to do it on the Harika, his foster granddaughter, and she would run in and dance around kiss him on the head run out. And to him, I think he got a matter much more. He got more joy out of those interactions than he ever did from the glory. That's very very unusual for a prime minister. Thank you, and that's why I recommend this book. I want to ask my last question before I bring in real to take over again, and I bring in two special guests, one of my friends, who bought the book and gifting 1020 copies to various people who have written a review on his own, and he really enjoyed reading the book and introduced me to the book. He's the one who introduced me to the book. And so I'll bring him and I'll also bring my senior editorial career, Ms. Nazia Rahman Albi, who is the editor of exchange for media.com. And she started her career as a trainee in India, when we were the editor, and she is especially read the book, and we'll ask you a question. My last question to you. We, you got so much respect, affection, you've seen the pinnacle of the editorial ladder, you set up new things, you've done food shows, you've done, you know, chat shows around personalities, you've done shows around journalism. I mean, your show was a bit, possibly, we never had a conversation, like Farid Zakaria's GPS. That's how I always saw it. And I never miss a single version of GPS. You've done it all, you met primeness, there's important people, you have your own cult following, I know it. Because I have some friends, I know what I'm saying. And is there a bucket list that Veer has now that still needs to be kind of fulfilled? What for Veer now? I know you continue to write, you have a point of view, but what are your plans over the next three, five years? I don't have a grand plan, I never have, as the book indicates things have always happened to me. I'm really involved in the project just now, it's called culinary culture. It's an attempt to give some shape to the culinary scene in India, to give awards to chefs, to some missionary guide style, rating of Indian restaurants that's reliable, and not advertising dependent. I want to bring the best chefs to India to come and cook for us. I want to take Indian chefs abroad, and give them a chance to be shown up for the geniuses, the real As you can imagine, it's all been put a bit back by the pandemic and the lockdown. Hopefully that will end and that will continue. I do want to do it because I believe that Indian food has never really caught the respect it deserves that we are still people want to go and eat Punjabi Chinese They appreciate the genius of Indian cuisine and the chefs who make it. So that is one project that occupies a lot of my attention and a lot of my time. It's pretty much a full time thing for me. As for the rest, no, I don't have any kind of bucket list, something will come along and do something. I'm a little bored of television at the moment, which I think if you're watching news channels, you will know that it's getting more and more difficult to have a sensible conversation on television. So unless I could do my own thing on television, unaffected by what the rest of the channel is doing, and unaffected by government interference, I don't really see any point doing it. So something will turn up. I'm 65. I hope I have at least 10 more years to go. Let's see. All the best week. And I remember our conversation 11 years back, you took me to the Italian at the, at the Imperial we met. You told me about Dutch asparagus, you know how the Dutch asparagus is the, in that season the best asparagus and you know, so I learned something new. At this point I want to bring in Mr. Sudhir Mishra, who's a leading environmental activist. He runs a large law firm, does a lot of work in media healthcare technology, and has read your book, has written a review of the book, has gifted your book. And as I said, there are a lot of people who follow you. He's definitely somebody I know who does. So Sudhir, you and me, you may want to ask a question. Can I just say something for Sudhir. Thank you so much for the review. A lot of people, a lot of them professional journalists, people who know the background have done reviews of the book, but none has been I think as perceptive and as thoughtful as yours. So thank you so much. It's a big compliment because I'm coming from a place called Sivan. I have a very rural background and I've been reading Sunday because my father insisted when I was in my class, it's in mind. And much of my impression about food is because of you. And all my family knows that I'm reading something new on a Sunday and I'm trying to implement it. But more than that, it was a very honest book and I have been giving it to many people who are your admirers. And thanks to Mithilesh, we have many signed copy to give it to people who really understand why what you stand for. One question which I have become my family's vegetarian and I'm essentially a non vegetarian and I keep on reading any new thing, whether you talk about prawn toast of prey or anything. And I try to impress upon others that what I have learned very recently. There is a talk that you have fewer columns on veg food or veg restaurants and their reviews. So are you thinking we're to do some justice to the veg food. Yeah, you know, I have this problem at home that my wife was a vegetarian till she was 25. And then she met me and then I corrupted her. I don't know how she eats everything, but I think she's basically a vegetarian at heart. So most of the time at home we're vegetarian. My favorite kind of food is street food and chart, which is vegetarian. And yes, I think there is a danger that we focus too much on non vegetarian food. Like many other people in the world, I'm focusing not just on vegetarian, but on vegan options. My friend Daniel home, who's a well known chef in America, had a three mission star restaurant. He's turned it totally vegan. He's given up on meat. So there is that tendency around the world, and it would be foolish for me to ignore it. So expect more vegetarian columns of the future. Wonderful. That's wonderful. All yours. I want to come in here and Nazia, my senior colleague Nazia, your question please. I just while you were talking, I remembered one small incident, you know, when I was a crime journalist, I was just two or three years into my career. I was doing the story against an effluent family of Han market and I remember that lady calling me and telling me that you can't do the story against me because I'm a very close friend of Mr Sangvi. And you don't, you have no idea, you know, we have our dinner together, we have our lunches together, we are very close. So I did not know what to reply, I told her if you're that close, you should talk to him, you should not talk to me. So, 10 minutes later you called me, and you told me that next time somebody calls you like that, just tell them that only person who can stop a story is Mr KK Birler because he owns the company. And we're just like me as an employee there. You know, it was so encouraging for me as a journalist at that point of time. This is how I started my career. And now, you know, we all know what kind of times are we living in. So my question to you is that, you know, you almost have like four decades, almost four decades of journalism career, right? Which era would you consider as golden period for journalists in India? You know, when, when the journalists had maximum freedom in the sense that you really didn't have to think what you're writing. If you're sure of your facts, you know that the story is correct, you can just go ahead and write. I think the 90s and the 2000 to 2010 period a little bit after that, I think those were really in many ways the golden age because journalism was growing, not just in print, also in television. People were doing different stories. There were areas that had never been done before. For instance, Cargill was the first televised war. There was a new generation of journalists that came up. And everybody could do pretty much what they wanted. I give the example, Mr Vajpayee just now, and Sonia Gandhi was the same. Prime Ministers respected you regardless of what you wrote. I think that was pretty much the golden age of journalism. It helped, of course, that there was less internet and digital media and newspapers had much more money. And therefore we had the luxury. I remember when we were in the sometimes you and I both, the number of times the ad department walk into Arun Roy Choudhury who was a resident editor, with some idiotic ad, which was we were do some zigzag mountain on the front page and I don't throw the ad manager out and say I'm sorry my front page is sacrosanct. I mean, you can't do that any longer because you need the revenue because papers aren't quite a bad way. But for us, I don't think we realize how lucky we were then, like you mentioned Mr Billah, he never once called me, never once stopped a story. We ran whatever stories we liked. We told the ad department to get lost. We told people who call up and say that I am connected to so and so to get lost. Those days unfortunately are gone forever. That lady next day called me and apologized. Oh really, that's good. And we carried the story. And the story was carried. So, you know, I also, because you've seen this much closer than me. When and how did it start going wrong? I mean, when did this deterioration start? Okay, part of it I think is political. I think when this regime came to office, they were much less critical, much less tolerant for criticism. They had a very different attitude towards criticism. It's not unprecedented. Indira Gandhi during the emergency had a similar attitude. So it's not a BJP Congress and both have done it in their own way. But they were much more effective in getting the point of view across to the end that some television channels and some newspapers just buckled under. Many individual journalists decided that there was no point fighting an unstoppable force and went over to the other side and see the journalist and became cheerleaders for the regime. This went along with a diversion of advertising traditional media to new media. So it became very difficult for television channels and for newspapers to make the kind of profits they had in their head. So that combination of political pressure, economic pressure is what's compelling the media. You are optimistic. You still have hope. Well, it's part of my job description to have hope. I always have hope, but I cannot tell you why I have hope. It's just a gut feeling. If I can just, because I'm reading a book, so this is, I will not quote the people, but when I was in India sometimes at the age of 21, 22, just as a reporter and we learned that you were an editor at 22 or 23. So I learned it from the book that how you begin to get it. But then the popular thing was that your father opened your publication because you came from a very different family. From beyond the grave. Yeah, your father. So everyone would say, oh, his father had opened him a paper and that is how he became the editor. You should have written this book much before. Well, you can't stop people from imagining things. And thank you so much for this book and I'm completely, I'm not completed it yet. I was confused. I don't know why I thought the session was next Saturday and I just ordered it yesterday and between yesterday and today I've completed the 50% of it. You know, I've completely ignored my children. I've ignored everything. I'm glued to it. Well, thank you, thank you for buying the book. Thank you for reading it. I am enjoying every bit of it. Just out of college, right? When you joined the HT when you were just out of college and look at your mother of two children. Yes, I'm old now. I'm quite old. Wonderful to do you. So see you doing so well. Thank you so much. I in fact, I can never write review of your book because I'll be very biased. I'm too big a fan. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. And just a 30 second, I mean short question to you. Lifestyle journalism. Has it come off age in India? I mean, now that I mean, lifestyle journalism does not exist in a vacuum till 1991. We lived in a siege economy. If you want to get a pair of jeans or a pair of Levi's later on designer jeans, they were hard to get records were released in India, six months after they were released abroad. Movies were released seven months before they were like two hotels in every town. There was no restaurant boom. The siege economy opened up once prosperity increase rates of growth increase the middle class expanded. There were things to write about. And once it is possible to have something of a lifestyle. The journalism always follows all research will tell you that whenever an economy gets more prosperous, whenever a middle class has more money, it starts spending it on food on restaurants on travel, and then on fashion on purchases like that. Those patterns are not determined by journalism. They're determined by the laws of economics. The journalism follows that. Great. And thank you so much for taking out time and talking to us and what a lovely conversation. Thanks once once again, and hope to see you soon in person at a live event. I hope so too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So thank you everyone for organizing this. It's been a real honor and a real pleasure. Thank you.