Thank You

R.I.P, Mr Jyoti Sanyal (Dean, Asian College of Journalism 1997-2000)



Stupid locals in these sleepy villages. Can't we have some better facilities here also?

A tribute by Ashish Mukherjee (acj bangalore, 98)

Why must all villages be sleepy ones? Because Kipling once described them that way? Indian villages are no longer sleepy, reporter. It's you who needs to wake up and resolve never again to use this tattered expression.

local residents
Residents generally are local. People live in an area / a neighbourhood / a vicinity. Stop using local residents and use the appropriate term. And never use locals, which is a hangover of the colonial days.

actively consider
As opposed to passively consider? What does that piece of officialese mean?

- From Write it Right, The Statesman Stylebook (By Jyoti Sanyal)

Jyoti Sanyal, the man who passionately and relentlessly tried to introduce good writing into our journalistic consciousness, died of a heart attack on April 12.

Sanyal, as my batchmates and I used to call him after we passed out of Asian College of Journalism, was far ahead of his times. The clear and pointed newswriting that he wanted ACJians to practise has yet to gain ground in the industry.


Around the country, journalists are more than happy prefacing a report with "in a significant development..." Or calling everything from a theft to a murder to an assassination an "incident".

"Write what you mean, and mean what you say," Sanyal would roar during the critiques sessions of ACJ lab journal The Word. Those who took him seriously found out along their careers how difficult this was. And probably, that's where my respect for the man comes from. For Sanyal showed us - copy after copy, day after day, month after month - that it was possible to write that way…

There was hardly anything about Sanyal's persona that one could ignore. Some of us noticed his "piercing eyes", some commented on his "fancy boots". Quite a few hated the sarcasm and bite in his official notes on the ACJ softboard (they were always marked From the Dean), while the more inquisitive among us wondered why he drank only black coffee.

Everyone had, and still has, an opinion on Sanyal. In my first week at ACJ, I had sneaked out of Bangalore to attend an interview for a film production course at Delhi's Jamia Millia University. I remember fibbing to Sanyal that I was going to Mysore, and I can't forget the look he gave me. As if he had seen through my lie…

From that moment on, his eyes were kind of set on me, for good reasons though. I almost became obsessed with the Sanyal-kind of newswriting, and he told me I was doing a "good job" at subbing. That "good job" is perhaps the only reason I can today manage a job on any newsdesk.

***

Thank you, Mr S

A tribute by Dev S Sukumar (acj bangalore, 98)

I suppose we've yet to come to terms with the loss. I used to send him my writing from time to time and seek his comments. A 'good' from him was cherished for long, because it meant it was good, while a few yellow patches (he used to colour questionable sentence construction with yellow on MS Word) would mean I had to get back to the basics, as it were.

I just realised I couldn't mail him my stories any more.

I remember two phases he went through. After ACJ, when the IIJNM thing didn't work out, he was freelance consultant for technical writers. He was low, mentally, because I suppose it wasn't half as challenging as a journalism job. Soon after, he left for Calcutta. When I mailed him a story, he replied saying he didn't think he was fit enough to edit it! That, from a man who went about editing with the single-mindedness of a surgeon at an operation theatre.

I happened to visit him in December 2004. He was a changed man – I think he was about to set up Clear English India and was looking charged up as before. His mind was sharp once again and we had a pretty long conversation. Among other things, we talked about God.

I asked him what he thought of God, and the answer was typically Sanyal – "People believe in God because… you see, if I get hit by somebody, and I cannot hit back, I'd like to think there is somebody to punish him."

"There might or might not be a God," he continued. "But why do I need a priest to act as a middleman?" I cracked up, because I remembered his hatred for obscure mantras and their practitioners. Sanyal was always for the clear and simple.

His skill of editing reflected this philosophy. There was nothing 'arty' about editing – it was to make language simple, precise and to the point. No mantras, no language gymnastics. His was a scientific mind in a literary project – always searching for the word that was in excess, for the phrase that had no place – and cutting his way through the underbrush of our linguistic and cultural peculiarities. As Indians, he would always tell us, we had a tougher battle at hand, because our culture had predisposed us to use English in a way that should not be used. I don't know if anyone has dived so deep into the use of English language among Indians. In the years since I left ACJ, I haven't come across anyone who treated English usage with the kind of rigour that he did.

For Sanyal, language did not mean just smart ways of expression, it meant making life simpler. Consider, for instance, the incomprehensible legal documents against which countless Indians dash their heads. If he had his way, all legal documents would be far simpler and easy to understand, and there would be lesser opportunity for middlemen to control our lives.

I think he was quite disappointed that none of us at ACJ went through his notes with the seriousness with which we were expected to. Speaking for myself, the collection of notes he handed us has been top of The List of Things to Do ever since I left ACJ. You know what happens to these lists.

Still, whenever a certain word or phrase comes up, Ping! an antenna picks it: Also; Facilities; Local Residents; Sleepy Village… It hits. That's because he tore into us with such abandon that we still fear using those phrases… He gave us the skills we'd need on the job, and he made us feel we were fighting for a cause, the cause of purer English. Few of us still have that missionary zeal, but we are thankful to have worked with someone who showed us that such zeal was not misplaced.

Apart from what he bequeathed us, I'm thankful for two things – that he died quickly and painlessly, and that his book (a bestseller) will continue to wage the war against bad language on his behalf.