M.C.: A Tribute

M. C.: A TRIBUTE

“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 New Delhi, captioned “My Mother-in-law.” It fairly hit me between wind and water. I rubbed my eyes in utter bewilderment. I happened to know him: did we not hail from the same place, Vizag? He had no mother-in-law then. Or, for that matter thereafter, either. Not because (horrid, thought!) she had departed prematurely from this wicked and inhospitable world: but simply, and solely, because he was a bachelor, and (would you believe it?) was determined so to remain” for ever and for ever.”

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 oron 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,
Orwith the tangles of Neaer’s hair.”

Our first meeting

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 New Delhi in 1945. A mutual friend had been good enough to introduce me to him. Of course, I had heard of him and of his fame even before: and, finding myself in the metropolis, resolved to see him, come hell or high water.

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 ofhis 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.

An Intellectual “Symbiosis”

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.

Editor of the “National Herald”

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?”

Dr. O’Brien’s Pregnant Observation

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.”