M. C.: A TRIBUTE
C. L. R. SASTRI
“I strove with none, for none was worth my
strife,
Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm’d both hands
before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”
–W. S. Landor
“M. C.” (as the late
Mr. M. ChaLapathi Rau was popularly known) once wrote
a witty skit in Shankar’s Weekly of
I must take my hat off to him for this
invincible determination of his. For, unlike my other friends who also, in
their time, were equally determined to be bachelors “for ever and for ever”, but
were lured into matrimony by some designing Eves, he obstinately continued to
be one.
Should Journalists Marry?
It is possible that he loved his profession
so fervently that he had no wish to let anyone, or anything, come between it
and him. I occasionally wonder whether journalists should embrace the “holy
state”, as it is so quaintly called, and thus encumber themselves with
extra-journalistic responsibilities.
“Charity”, as Bacon says “will scarcely water
the ground if it must, first, fill a pool.” If a journalist has, first, to look
after his wife and children, what attention can he bestow on the composition of
his escoriating editorials on this wily politician or
on that? If you view journalism, not as a part-time but as a full-time job,
you cannot, it is obvious afford to
“Sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles
of Neaer’s hair.”
To my eternal sorrow I never met him in Vizag itself, our common home-town, as I had left that
delectable place decades and decades earlier. Where, eventually, we were
decreed to meet was in
I shall never forget that first meeting of
ours in the Odeon Hotel where he was then staying. We talked for hours and
hours on every conceivable subject under the sun: boxing the compass of events,
as it were. He was, I need hardly point out, a much more “knowledgeable” person
than myself: a scholar” to the manner born.” I came away from that interesting
and instructive interview with a proper appreciation of his
intellectual attainments: which, by any reckoning, were none too inconsiderable.
My other meetings with him were in his
spacious room in the Hindustan Times office where I used to take up
quite a lot of his valuable time. He was an Assistant Editor of the paper,
along with another distinguished Andhra, the late Mr. G. V. Krupanidhi.
“Shankar” and “M. C.”
He was with the Hindustan Times for
many years: and it was there that he contacted an intimate (and lasting)
friendship with the celebrated “Shankar” (Mr. K. Sankara Pillai), who was the
paper’s cartoonist and who, later, started his own Shankar’s
Weekly, which became a household word throughout the country.
They became bosom friends: the modern version
of “Castor and Pollux.” It was one of the most
remarkable friendships, that it has fallen to my lot
to witness: two kindred souls, each renowned in his own sphere of work, “M. C.”
was a taciturn man: but, evidently, not in “Shankar’s”
company. My opinion is that be had a considerable share in “Shankar’s”
cartoons. He would furnish the ideas, and “Shankar”
would, then, proceed to “build” on them.
It was an intellectual
“symbiosis” of an unique kind: the writer and the
cartoonist helping each other to their mutual advantage. While the hero of this adulatory piece had written several
coruscating articles in that excellent journal, Triveni, under a
congenial editorship, his main title to fame rests on his Hindustan Times magazine
section contributions under the nom de plume of “Magnus.”
Unfortunately, I have not had the privilege
of perusing any of them. In Bombay (my “home from home”) most of us do not get
the Hindustan Times: some of us have not even heard about it, being
wedded, so to speak, to the Times of India, the best-known of our
English dailies, But I had heard breathtaking accounts of his “Magnus”
dissertations, nevertheless.
He was well-versed both in English history
and in English literature. My knowledge of history, on the other hand, is
derisory: it can comfortably sit on a sixpence: so that, even if I had had
access to them, I might not have been able fully to appreciate them. His
“Magnus” articles (I repeat) were the basis of his prodigious reputation as a
journalist.
Then he shifted to Lucknow to join the
newly-started National Herald (courtesy, Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru), first as an Assistant Editor under the late Mr. K. Rama Rao
and, after the latter’s surprising resignation from that prestigious post, as
its Editor.
A viable “profile” of a distinguished
journalist like Chalapathi Rau must contain both
“light and shade,” both the “high spots” and the “low.” I do not, I protest,
lag behind anyone in my admiration of him as a writer who, in the poet’s
memorable words, “flamed in the forehead of the morning sky.” But I have no
wish to conclude this eulogy of him without expressing a profound
disappointment that, unlike the first Editor of the National Herald, K.
Rama Rao, he had no “fire in his belly.” I do not, as it happens, share the
political opinions of either. But, even a confirmed “loyalist” like “M. C.” an “Establishment journalist” if ever
there was one, should not spare his soi-disant when occasion arises.
Any number of occasions had so arisen, both
recently and in the years gone by. But he had not raised his voice, even
feebly, against the authors of the horrendous erosion of democracy in our
beloved Motherland. On the contrary, he supported that horrendous erosion with
a vim, a verve, a vigour, and a vehemence worthy,
surely, of a nobler cause. “If the salt hath lost it savour,
wherewith shall it be salted?”
I shall make my point clearer by quoting a
pregnant passage from Dr. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s
astute comment on the late Mr.
Kingsley Martin of the famous New Statesman of London in the columns of
that famous weekly itself. Dr.
O’Brien takes Mr. Martin to task for not toeing the radical line that was
expected of him as a “Socialist” politician. He writes:
“This, surely, is the real treason of the
clerks: that leaders of opinion, instead of showing to the very best of their
ability and knowledge how things actually are, should, in the interests of
something or other which usually looks pretty shabby in retrospect, present
them with a version which is thought to be better for them or more suited to
their limited capacity of understanding, their “wooden heads.” Plato’s Noble
Lie is really just another lie, the nobility being in the vocabulary of the
Liar.” (New Statesman: April 19, 1963.)
Politicians, as well as political
commentators, must read, mark, and inwardly digest this sapient observation of
Dr. O’Brien, one of the ablest writers of the West. This passage, as Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch says of Cardinal Newman’s The Idea
of a University,
“Deserves being bound by the young student of
literature for a frontlet on his brow and a talisman on his writing wrist.”
For “a young student of literature” may be
substituted “an Editor of an English daily.”