Nikhilda, my Dopplegänger

Nikhilda observed, watched, recognised, listened to what surrounded him and was, at the same time, a part of his own life, and then wrote. In his journalistic writing he constantly arranged what he had perceived, trying to find a sense in the historic events he witnessed in his own country and the rest of the world. His presence for us, who followed his generation of journalists, referred to nothing else except what an intelligent and sensitive mind had felt, seen and reported without caring for the protection of an authority or its wrath. His writings even today refract that peculiar wisdom we call ‘life experience’ because they portray life as a road we journalists travel and travel again with the past curling up behind us and becoming a part of our permanent baggage.

For me Nikhilda’s journalistic eminence has little to do with mastery or heroism, but a lot to do with ingenuity, a certain native cunning, a deep respect for atavistic human values of freedom and secularism and a refusal to compromise. Other female journalists, who met him and befriended him, would testify that this man had no male vanity, and in the stories he told us, he was never the hero but a witness-turned-historian. Very little escaped him and yet he looked at the world with a wry detachment as something that is inherently fallible and must be reminded of it without a mincing of words.

“A question is very often heard nowadays in the Capital,” he wrote with rare candor during the Nehruvian years, when the air was redolent with hero worship for India’s charismatic leader, “does the Prime Minister know what is going on?” He opposed the imposition of the Emergency later under another equally charismatic Prime Minister and welcomed the new political front that replaced a Congress stigmatised with despotism and anti-democratic suppression of the media. But he did not spare the Janata Party when it began its downhill slide. In 1978 he realised and wrote that the new experiment had turned into ‘a ramshackle outfit’ full of ”plethora of platitudes ranging from barefoot doctors, small scale industry and prohibition”.

Meeting and being counted among his friends was a privilege for me. Looking at him, listening to his riveting tales about the changes he had lived through, the powerful men and women he had observed with his sharp mind, one was reminded that our generation is not the only one to pose unanswerable questions to itself. Within weeks of our meeting way back in the eighties, he was not a stranger. I could talk to him of my innermost thoughts, share my misgivings about people, about language, about journalism in Indian languages. Soon, immodestly I began identifying with him. This dopplegänger act suddenly gives me an insight. Today I am the age he must have been when I first got to know him and I share something of his composure that exists with hurt, with pain and with compassion. The last an essential for story-telling.

The author, a senior journalist who was the editor of the Hindi daily Hindustan, is currently the Chairperson of the Prasar Bharati Board.