NEW DELHI: As tributes poured in from admiring journalists and professional rivals on Monday, Vinod Mehta, who died on Sunday from an old heart ailment, was quietly and unassumingly emerging as possibly the last of India’s great editors. He was 73.

Unlike some of his contemporary media heads, Mehta nurtured a mellow aloofness from politicians. When his rivals hankered after a Rajya Sabha seat from this or that party, he would be slouching pen in hand over a “bloody good story”.

“No wonder, then, that for every proprietor who dispensed with Mehta’s independent-minded editorship, after finding it politically expensive, there was always a new one coming along, sooner or later, asking him to launch or resuscitate something,” wrote Anjali Puri in the Business Standard.

These firings and hirings, which Mehta came to wear as badges of honour in his later years, when the tumult became a distant memory, are narrated with relish in the two books that contain his memoirs, Lucknow Boy and Editor Unplugged.

“Frank & direct in his opinions, Vinod Mehta will be remembered as a fine journalist & writer,” tweeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the man who could hardly be described as his sympathiser.

“I am a Congress stooge, on Sonia Gandhi’s payroll,” Mehta would unfailingly taunt his more gross critics while pouring vitriol at the Congress party’s lacklustre tenure.

Mehta had successfully launched Sunday Observer, Independent and Pioneer, apart from authoring the biographies of actress Meena Kumari and politician Sanjay Gandhi. But his most enduring memory will be that of 17 years he spent as editor of Outlook, a magazine he created after his own image as the last word on journalistic integrity.

Born in pre-partition Rawalpindi, Vinod Mehta grew up in Lucknow, straddling two diverse cultures and blending them in a fine persona he will be remembered for.

Published in Dawn March 10th , 2015

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