The Hindu Business Line : Memorable moments

It's a compilation of memorable experiences that most journalists would give their right arm for. Veteran journalist Hiro Shroff's collection of his columns — Down Memory Lane, Down the Ages, Yachting Notes, etc. — carried by various publications over half a century of his "wanderings, basically as a journalist", have now been published by Spenta Multimedia in the form of a book titled Down Memory Lane.

As the author explains in his note, and as any reporter knows only too well, "In the normal course, I was usually rushed; rushed to file stories and meet deadlines. But stored at the back of my mind there was always this mass of extra bits and pieces. In the evening of my life — I am now 80 — I felt I should share this anecdotal material with my readers."

The columns published in the 1980s have been selected for this venture, and what a rich source of information that material is, helping reconstruct bits of history from the perspective and firsthand knowledge of a man who was born in Karachi and hence was obviously chosen by the Press Trust of India to be its Pakistan correspondent for long years.

Whether it is M.A. Jinnah, Nehru, Chou en Lai, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai or J.R.D. Tata, Shroff gives us delightful anecdotes on their strengths and weaknesses, lighter and unusual moments revealed during their interaction with him or some of the people he has interviewed.

One of them is about the time when Mahatma Gandhi sent a note to Pothen Joseph who was editing in the early 1940s Jinnah's Dawn, the official English daily of the Muslim League then published from Delhi. Wrote Gandhiji, "Dear Pothen, I understand you have joined Jinnah's Dawn. Please send me a copy. You know I am a poor man."

As the Press officer to Pope Paul VI's visit to Bombay in 1964, Shroff had a ringside view of his activities and was amazed at the highly organised and efficient church machinery. The Bombay press also got the rare honour of the Pope holding a press conference, a rarity in those days.

In August 1983, the author met J.R.D Tata in his office for a briefing on civil aviation, and after the journalist had plugged in his tape recorder at the nearest power point, JRD asked him if he could also record the conversation and went almost on his knees to search for another socket, when his secretary walked in followed by the peon carrying the tea tray, and was clearly not amused to see the sight! Initially JRD's idea of starting an airline to carry Indian mail from Bombay and South India to Karachi "got a rather cool reception and he was told: `What airlines! It is a good way of losing money'.

But JRD told the correspondent that he took the help of one Mr Peterson who was his senior business colleague and "almost my guru in the early days. We converted, we convinced Sir Dorab Tata, who was the chairman of the Tatas then, that this was a risk we were taking and let the young man have some little fun in life. He agreed. The next thing, of course, was to get the Government of India to approve, because if we were to carry the mail, we were to be paid for it by them." Of course the government haggled but later the whole thing was sorted out.

In these days of Internet trading when prices change with the blink of the eye, an interesting anecdote from a column written in 1986 is on how a dishonest Reuters clerk from Goa tried to take advantage of his access to cotton prices, in an era of turbulent cotton markets. "Reuters supplied cotton quotations from Liverpool and had established the reputation for reliability and no Indian dealer would send a pound of cotton before he had seen Reuter's overnight quotations from Liverpool."

The first thing in the morning this clerk would go to the window and spit to the right if the prices had risen overnight and to the left if they had fallen. A fellow conspirator waiting below would rush to Cotton Green armed with this information!

Though each column has its own theme and place, strung together these pieces recreate for us valuable historic data. As Inder Malhotra points out in his Foreword, Shroff's offering is "a kaleidoscopic view of what India since independence has been all about." And quite a bit of his reportage reminds us that even "demi-gods can have feet of clay".

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