By Nandagopal Menon (Nandu, acj, 98)
I remember my last encounter with Jyoti for all the wrong reasons. It was in late 2005 and he tried to recruit me for a rather unpleasant cause, to say the least. I almost signed up. But, fortunately, one of my colleagues (who also happened to work with Jyoti in The Statesman) saw through it and warned me. I don't want to go into the details of the episode. At least some of you ACJians, especially my classmates, know about it.
That said, I have to add that I have always respected Jyoti's brilliance and passionate commitment to his work. I believe that when alive, he did not receive the recognition he deserved. Part of that, of course, was because of his hot-headedness and unenviable skill to alienate people. Now that he is no more, hopefully people will judge his work and not the person. And, for sure, his work is near-flawless. Some are born posthumously. Perhaps Jyoti is one among them.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Still alive
By Priyadarshini Basu (acj, 98)
The only tribute I have silently been paying 'The Blighter', as some of us secretly referred to him, is by fighting to keep the intros within 20-25 words every crack of dawn. Can't tell you how much I thought of him the first day that I joined MiD DAY! The reporters' copies would have been a gold mine for Sanyal! He could've written a sequel to his book. But since that will not be, I can only pray his spirit continues to handhold and help me deliver the goods.
As you rightly said Ashish, we may have hated him, secretly admired his sheer editing genius, but we have never really been able to ignore him.
He lives on in our speech, in every written word and perhaps a tad grudgingly, has even managed a little nook in our hearts.
Long live Jyoti!
Priya
The only tribute I have silently been paying 'The Blighter', as some of us secretly referred to him, is by fighting to keep the intros within 20-25 words every crack of dawn. Can't tell you how much I thought of him the first day that I joined MiD DAY! The reporters' copies would have been a gold mine for Sanyal! He could've written a sequel to his book. But since that will not be, I can only pray his spirit continues to handhold and help me deliver the goods.
As you rightly said Ashish, we may have hated him, secretly admired his sheer editing genius, but we have never really been able to ignore him.
He lives on in our speech, in every written word and perhaps a tad grudgingly, has even managed a little nook in our hearts.
Long live Jyoti!
Priya
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Learning to teach
Sandhya Bhattacharya (acj, 98)
Thank you for letting me know about Mr Sanyal's death. Like Vijay, I must admit that being his student was nerve racking, to say the least. But I was shocked and saddened by this news.
Surprisingly, I've thought about Mr Sanyal many times in the last decade, (he would even rant in my dreams). As someone who is now herself a teacher I've spent a fair amount of time reflecting upon effective pedagogical strategies, and reviewed those of my mentors. I remember reluctantly coming to the conclusion that Mr Sanyal was (despite my deep seated resistance to him), among the finer teachers I've had. Like my peer in ACJ I still cringe when I see writing in passive voice -- and thanks to him, am conscious about adopting the apposite word in a given context.
As I try to teach my students to write efficiently and get frustrated when they can barely string two words together, I find myself actually sympathising with Mr Sanyal! I honestly never did think I would be tempted to lash out like he did, but have come close to doing so several occasions. But I always remember how his temper would affect students and have learned to keep mine in check.
So aside from learning how to write I suppose Mr Sanyal also inadvertently taught me how to teach. We never do think of telling people that we have learned something from them (and honestly, I don't know if I would have done so had he been alive). But I did want to share this with you, who have known him perhaps far better than I did.
Thank you for letting me know about Mr Sanyal's death. Like Vijay, I must admit that being his student was nerve racking, to say the least. But I was shocked and saddened by this news.
Surprisingly, I've thought about Mr Sanyal many times in the last decade, (he would even rant in my dreams). As someone who is now herself a teacher I've spent a fair amount of time reflecting upon effective pedagogical strategies, and reviewed those of my mentors. I remember reluctantly coming to the conclusion that Mr Sanyal was (despite my deep seated resistance to him), among the finer teachers I've had. Like my peer in ACJ I still cringe when I see writing in passive voice -- and thanks to him, am conscious about adopting the apposite word in a given context.
As I try to teach my students to write efficiently and get frustrated when they can barely string two words together, I find myself actually sympathising with Mr Sanyal! I honestly never did think I would be tempted to lash out like he did, but have come close to doing so several occasions. But I always remember how his temper would affect students and have learned to keep mine in check.
So aside from learning how to write I suppose Mr Sanyal also inadvertently taught me how to teach. We never do think of telling people that we have learned something from them (and honestly, I don't know if I would have done so had he been alive). But I did want to share this with you, who have known him perhaps far better than I did.
More doffs of the hat
Two tributes in newspapers. Ravinder Kumar of The Stateman wrote this obit:
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.arcview.php?clid=2&id=226119&usrsess=1
while Ram has written this moving piece in Mid-Day:
An angry man called Jyoti
Obits are being written all over India for Jyoti Sanyal, the journalism guru who died in Kolkata last week. I had seen him every day for three years when he was in Bangalore, and for someone in his fifties, he looked young and fit. When I heard the news of his passing, I wondered how someone like him could have had a stroke. “It was his temper,” said C K Meena, who knew him closely as a colleague at Asian College of Journalism.
Meena (now a columnist for The Hindu), Vishweshwar Bhat (editor, Vijaya Karnataka) and I taught at ACJ when Jyoti was dean (1997-2000), and we often watched him rage against the ugly style that rules our English language newspapers. He certainly was an angry man, but the anger was more ideological than personal. He shouted at students who turned in clumsy copy, and flung insults that left them reeling. But a trainee just had to write one nicely worded story for him to fall in love with her (He mentored the boys with equal concern).
Jyoti blamed the bad English of the Indian newspapers on two influences. Indians, he believed, thought in their own tongues, and then translated their thoughts into English, which is why they don’t find expressions such as “I am having two brothers” wrong. Second, he was convinced the merchant language of the East India Company had overwhelmed Indians and left them incapable of clarity of thought and expression. Jyoti called it “baboo English” because it used “scraps of commercialese such as same/the same; the said letter; aforesaid letter; duly noted, and Kindly instead of please, and so on.”
When I first heard about Jyoti’s insistence on English that sounded like English and not like an Indian language, I thought he was one of those literal school-teacher types, obsessed with textbook correctness. I had discovered the psychedelic beauty of Salman Rushdie’s prose, and had earlier enjoyed the bold Kannada-coloured English of Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura. I had arrived at the position that Indians writing in English ought not to feel apologetic about bringing in their own cadences and idioms into English. But I soon realised Jyoti was bristling against something else altogether, and at one point he acknowledged my argument that English would be enriched, and not impoverished, if we applied our native imagination to it.
Looking back, Jyoti looks like a Naxal of the newspaper world, incensed not so much by personal injury as by the absence of a just system. And he carried himself around like an ideologue with his own idea of fashion, wearing oversized goggles, puffing away on a Wills Filter, and outfitted in jeans and cowboy-style zip-up boots.
When we published an obit for Jyoti in MiD DAY yesterday, we headlined it ‘Enemy of the cliché’. Ashish Mukherjee, the author, had almost ruined his chance of getting an ACJ seat when he said he wanted to become a journalist and fight for some great cause. Jyoti believed Ashish had “airy fairy” ideas about journalism, and decided to turn him away, but changed his mind at the last minute. Ashish came down from Delhi and and turned into one of Jyoti’s fervent disciples. He went back to work for Indian Express and CNN-IBN in that city.
Jyoti’s students now populate newspapers and TV channels across India, and are conscious they have the responsibility of carrying forward his crusade against shoddy writing. On their blog (http://acjbillboard.blogspot.com), they have been sharing stories about Jyoti. Elsewhere, Ravinder Kumar, editor of The Statesman when Jyoti wrote its style book, describes him as a man of style and great substance.
Here in MiD DAY, we bought copies of his book Indlish for all our journalists as soon as it hit the stands a year ago. We didn’t know it then, but our preference for it over The Economist Style Book had pleased Jyoti, and he had felt vindicated that a newspaper was trying to put his ideas into practice.
Jyoti didn’t teach me anything overtly, perhaps because he felt it would be indecorous to instruct a colleague, but I watched him at work, and picked up Ekalavya-like! writing and editing techniques that have proved invaluable in my journalistic career. I know this is belated, but thanks, Jyoti!
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.arcview.php?clid=2&id=226119&usrsess=1
while Ram has written this moving piece in Mid-Day:
An angry man called Jyoti
Obits are being written all over India for Jyoti Sanyal, the journalism guru who died in Kolkata last week. I had seen him every day for three years when he was in Bangalore, and for someone in his fifties, he looked young and fit. When I heard the news of his passing, I wondered how someone like him could have had a stroke. “It was his temper,” said C K Meena, who knew him closely as a colleague at Asian College of Journalism.
Meena (now a columnist for The Hindu), Vishweshwar Bhat (editor, Vijaya Karnataka) and I taught at ACJ when Jyoti was dean (1997-2000), and we often watched him rage against the ugly style that rules our English language newspapers. He certainly was an angry man, but the anger was more ideological than personal. He shouted at students who turned in clumsy copy, and flung insults that left them reeling. But a trainee just had to write one nicely worded story for him to fall in love with her (He mentored the boys with equal concern).
Jyoti blamed the bad English of the Indian newspapers on two influences. Indians, he believed, thought in their own tongues, and then translated their thoughts into English, which is why they don’t find expressions such as “I am having two brothers” wrong. Second, he was convinced the merchant language of the East India Company had overwhelmed Indians and left them incapable of clarity of thought and expression. Jyoti called it “baboo English” because it used “scraps of commercialese such as same/the same; the said letter; aforesaid letter; duly noted, and Kindly instead of please, and so on.”
When I first heard about Jyoti’s insistence on English that sounded like English and not like an Indian language, I thought he was one of those literal school-teacher types, obsessed with textbook correctness. I had discovered the psychedelic beauty of Salman Rushdie’s prose, and had earlier enjoyed the bold Kannada-coloured English of Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura. I had arrived at the position that Indians writing in English ought not to feel apologetic about bringing in their own cadences and idioms into English. But I soon realised Jyoti was bristling against something else altogether, and at one point he acknowledged my argument that English would be enriched, and not impoverished, if we applied our native imagination to it.
Looking back, Jyoti looks like a Naxal of the newspaper world, incensed not so much by personal injury as by the absence of a just system. And he carried himself around like an ideologue with his own idea of fashion, wearing oversized goggles, puffing away on a Wills Filter, and outfitted in jeans and cowboy-style zip-up boots.
When we published an obit for Jyoti in MiD DAY yesterday, we headlined it ‘Enemy of the cliché’. Ashish Mukherjee, the author, had almost ruined his chance of getting an ACJ seat when he said he wanted to become a journalist and fight for some great cause. Jyoti believed Ashish had “airy fairy” ideas about journalism, and decided to turn him away, but changed his mind at the last minute. Ashish came down from Delhi and and turned into one of Jyoti’s fervent disciples. He went back to work for Indian Express and CNN-IBN in that city.
Jyoti’s students now populate newspapers and TV channels across India, and are conscious they have the responsibility of carrying forward his crusade against shoddy writing. On their blog (http://acjbillboard.blogspot.com), they have been sharing stories about Jyoti. Elsewhere, Ravinder Kumar, editor of The Statesman when Jyoti wrote its style book, describes him as a man of style and great substance.
Here in MiD DAY, we bought copies of his book Indlish for all our journalists as soon as it hit the stands a year ago. We didn’t know it then, but our preference for it over The Economist Style Book had pleased Jyoti, and he had felt vindicated that a newspaper was trying to put his ideas into practice.
Jyoti didn’t teach me anything overtly, perhaps because he felt it would be indecorous to instruct a colleague, but I watched him at work, and picked up Ekalavya-like! writing and editing techniques that have proved invaluable in my journalistic career. I know this is belated, but thanks, Jyoti!
Monday, April 14, 2008
Fire and Ice
By KC Vijaya Kumar (batch 1997-98)
Let me be honest upfront. I never had a great equation with Mr Sanyal. We were the first batch to learn from him at ACJ and understandably there were misgivings. He was a man who spoke his mind, never held his punches back and it did not help that his irritation over the use of wrong English got aggravated on reading the dailies and obviously his mood in the mornings could be quite taxing.
But there was no faulting his commitment to helping us improve our writing as well as editing skills. If many of us in that batch manage that odd tightly-written copy, it is thanks to him. But while studying under him, he was the feisty `old-man' with strong biases and prejudices when compared to the serene Mr Ramakrishna and the ever-smiling CK Meena. It didn't help that he was perhaps teaching for the first time and we were a bunch of strong-willed individuals. It was a strange equation - we loved his linguistic repertoire, his skill to enhance the readability of our copies but at the same time our personal equations with him sucked. But credit to him, we could walk into his cabin anytime and say what we didn't like about his approach and he would listen, argue and then give up with a resigned air. And while he would improve our way with words, he did lacerate a few with his acid-tongue. But he never held any grudges. I do fondly recall him mentioning my interest in sports journalism to a visiting faculty! He was never politically correct and in this age of too much sugar, he was indeed a relief though I guess we all realised it a bit late. Sir, thanks for the memories. Never got a chance to tell you earlier, we have had our fights with you but we always respected you. You were one of the finest teachers I have had in my life. Wish I told you that earlier.
Let me be honest upfront. I never had a great equation with Mr Sanyal. We were the first batch to learn from him at ACJ and understandably there were misgivings. He was a man who spoke his mind, never held his punches back and it did not help that his irritation over the use of wrong English got aggravated on reading the dailies and obviously his mood in the mornings could be quite taxing.
But there was no faulting his commitment to helping us improve our writing as well as editing skills. If many of us in that batch manage that odd tightly-written copy, it is thanks to him. But while studying under him, he was the feisty `old-man' with strong biases and prejudices when compared to the serene Mr Ramakrishna and the ever-smiling CK Meena. It didn't help that he was perhaps teaching for the first time and we were a bunch of strong-willed individuals. It was a strange equation - we loved his linguistic repertoire, his skill to enhance the readability of our copies but at the same time our personal equations with him sucked. But credit to him, we could walk into his cabin anytime and say what we didn't like about his approach and he would listen, argue and then give up with a resigned air. And while he would improve our way with words, he did lacerate a few with his acid-tongue. But he never held any grudges. I do fondly recall him mentioning my interest in sports journalism to a visiting faculty! He was never politically correct and in this age of too much sugar, he was indeed a relief though I guess we all realised it a bit late. Sir, thanks for the memories. Never got a chance to tell you earlier, we have had our fights with you but we always respected you. You were one of the finest teachers I have had in my life. Wish I told you that earlier.
P(l)ainly Speaking
I have known about Mr Sanyal but never met him - a great writer with simplicity of expression par excellence. My condolence to his family.
- Radhika Rani (acj, 96)
My interaction with Mr Sanyal was restricted to the telephone when I was working for Deccan Chronicle and he was writing a column for students on the correct usage of English language. I was awed at his meticulousness. He would call the day before to update me on the status of his column, call back to inform he had faxed it and then call back again to find out if all was well. Sad that the Guru of English Usage is no more.
- Manju Latha Kalanidhi (acj, 96)
- Radhika Rani (acj, 96)
My interaction with Mr Sanyal was restricted to the telephone when I was working for Deccan Chronicle and he was writing a column for students on the correct usage of English language. I was awed at his meticulousness. He would call the day before to update me on the status of his column, call back to inform he had faxed it and then call back again to find out if all was well. Sad that the Guru of English Usage is no more.
- Manju Latha Kalanidhi (acj, 96)
Sunday, April 13, 2008
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.
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.
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