'You are my worst nightmare come true'

By Sarita Tukaram (acj, 1999-2000)

I never thought I’d get admission into the prestigious Asian College of Journalism – not after I had blundered my way through the national entrance exam and the interview, where I was told by Dean Jyoti Sanyal, “Sarita, you don’t know English.” No one had ever told me that, and if it had been Math or Science I wouldn’t have cared. But English, my favorite subject and one I had always excelled in, was sacred cow. Here was this man, the dean of the college – standing knee-deep in his hideous brown gumboots and half-unbuttoned shirt - telling me I did not know English. I had no desire to sit at his feet to learn the alphabet, and was certain Sanyal did not want me as his student. What could be better? He rid of me and I spared of him. But it was not to be.

And so we started in the fall of 1999, a stubborn mentor and an unwilling student. The college was small – tucked into the second and third floors of the rickety Express Building at the corner of bustling Queens Road in Bangalore. It had a permanent teaching faculty of four, with Sanyal the only editor, and a class of 15 students. The elevator and computers took turns to break down and most often, both sprung back to life unassisted. The second floor had faculty cubicles, restrooms and a library. Classes were held on the third floor in the large room that doubled as a newsroom. Every morning at 9, Sanyal would walk into class triumphantly displaying a newspaper marked up with “gems” – poorly edited articles. Repeatedly putting on and taking off his glasses, he would squint his eyes as he concentrated on our critique of the “shit-rag”, thumping his hand on the table, every now and then, in agreement and pure joy. Each class would end with him goading us to join the war against wasted words. After class, the college functioned like a newspaper. Students took turns to report, edit, and design pages, and published a newspaper, The Word, once every week.

Sanyal’s comment on my English had dented my confidence so much that I dreaded the editing-rewriting process. I routinely exchanged my editing spots for reporting. Except for the mandatory classes with Sanyal, I did no other editing. This showed in my verbose articles and Sanyal was quick to point out that my writing “sagged like the bottoms of voluptuous Victorian women.” Couldn’t I be thriftier with my words? Why did I “maim” verbs by converting them into nouns? Every chance he got he picked on my editing. And every time he criticized my editing, I further shied away from it.

It got so bad that one day, after grading us on an editing test, he stormed into class with my paper in hand. “Sarita, you are my worst nightmare come true,” he spat, disgusted at my wordiness. “Don’t you realize, excess words are your enemy? Fight it.” For Sanyal, language was an obsession, wordiness a disease, and editing its only cure. Seeing him edit an article – pencil and eraser in hand striking out unwanted words with force – was like watching a soldier hack an enemy at war. Now he stood in front of the class, as if infected by my article. “We’ve got to do something about this,” he said, marching down the stairs. Friends told me not to take it to heart, “he’s just a crazy old man,” they said, but I had grudgingly come to accept he was right. My editing was awful.

That evening Sanyal called me to his cabin to discuss “a remedy” for my wordiness. Cigarette in hand, he was hunched over his cup of hot tea, sniffing it. “Sarita, do you smell something fishy in this?” he asked sliding the cup towards me. I didn’t. “Strange, it doesn’t seem right to me,” he said. A suspicious man, Sanyal’s days were spent killing excess words and saving his own life. He constantly believed his tea was poisoned, his computer hacked or his phone tapped. He often answered the phone with a curt “Who is it?” rarely a “Hello”. Students and colleagues alike were tickled by his idiosyncrasies but respected his work.

An acclaimed editor, Sanyal had spent nearly three decades with The Statesman, an English language daily in his hometown Calcutta. Before becoming dean at the Asian College of Journalism in 1997, he had authored The Statesman’s stylebook and overhauled its editing process. Sanyal firmly believed, “A good editor makes a better reporter” and often assigned readings from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and Amar Chitra Katha, a series of comic books with tales from Indian mythology. I got a generous dose of that, along with extra editing assignments. Three months after a strict editing-diet, I finally passed the Sanyal test. “Not bad, but it can be better,” said Sanyal, the first positive remark about my editing. I had become as obsessed as Sanyal, sometimes editing sentences as people spoke, changing passive voice to active. I won’t say I ever got good at it, I got a C on my transcript, but the drill helped me appreciate clarity in writing.

After graduating I went on to work as a reporter at the newspaper Sanyal loved to hate. “Send me their gems,” he wrote to me. We kept in touch for a couple of months and then the e-mails and phone calls petered out. It’s three years since I last spoke with him. In that time I quit my job, got married, and enrolled in a journalism master’s program at UC, Berkeley. Here too, I’ve shied away from editing. Now in my final semester, I’ve mustered the courage to take an editing class. As I start my first assignment, armed with a pencil and eraser, I remember Sanyal and strive to be the warrior he trained me to be.