Bittersweet memories

Rina Datta, (acj 1999-2000)

I heard of Jyoti Sanyal back in Kolkata 1997, much before I heard of ACJ. His daughter Reshma was my classmate in Jadavpur University, Dept. of English Literature. I was proud of my writing skills then. At ACJ, Sanyal wiped it out on day one.

All I knew about him was that he ran some journalism course in Bangalore. I read his columns but not often while I immersed myself in exactly the kind of English he later taught me to despise. At our introductory lecture, he told us we were lousy. We didn't believe it then, but today, I think we all agree he made us better.

It was never an easy relationship with Mr Sanyal. We were a little taken aback by his love for the four-letter word on day one. He continued to shock us by shouting and swearing his way through session after session. Frankly, he enjoyed the effect he had on us! Many of us couldn't stand his straight talk and temper, but Mr Sanyal grew on us. His lifelong passion for diction was addictive. We could not deter him from getting a little bit of himself into each one of us. I thought him invincible, until last week.

But beyond all that he was a father at heart. He took care of us girls, especially those of us staying at the hostel. I remember once the bathroom drain was clogged and Sir came home after the day’s work. He put his hand down the drain and took out all the hair and the dirt and the grime with his bare hands. We girls stood shocked and shamed that we put him through that much trouble. Shamed that we couldn't get ourselves to do it.

I had a terrible sinus infection once. Every day, as soon as I reached ACJ, Sir would call me in. He marched me to the rest room with a cup of hot salt water in his hand and made me draw it up my nose... and oh! though I still can't forget the pain, it was something that even my father failed to get me to do.

We heard many stories about him, that once he thought students had poisoned his coffee and once they’d locked him up in the bathroom. Or that someone let a monkey inside his office! I have no idea if any are true but he gave us many a good laugh. Once Mr. Sanyal, Meena, Ram and others took some people out for dinner. Next day we heard that he had thrown a fit over no bamboo shoots in his bamboo shoot soup and garam masala in Chinese food.

Sanyal Sir is a part of such bittersweet memories, I wonder what I could pick out about him that could sum him up. No way! What and who he really was inside is a riddle. His daughter Reshma said to me on his death: I know a part of him lives in me, but then a part of him has died too. That echoes with us, his students.

Good bye Sir, and though he would have greatly scorned at it, God Bless!!

Another tragedy in the family

Rajesh Kumar Nair's (acj, 98) father passed away a few days ago. He'd been ill for a while, but the end was sudden.
Rajesh is with Sify.com and based in Chennai.
He can be contacted at 09443389024 or acjrajesh@gmail.com.

When I put the arse before the face...

By Shaila Preeti Mathew (acj 1998-99)

*When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I put the arse before the face. The tragedy of Jyoti Sanyal is not the man he was and not his untimely death, but that we, especially his students, waited until now to recognise his better side.

Sir, as I called him, rubbed people the wrong way. He was abrasive, prone to rage, and tore our pretty little egos to pieces. I remember my last meeting with him. I had stopped by to show off my wedding pictures. He looked at them, shocked at what he saw, and said, "Preeti, is that really you? You actually look so pretty!"

I honestly don't know (to this day) if that was a jibe or a compliment. I managed a weak smile and left, bruised.

That was his style. He showed no desire to be ornate, stating facts as they were… Pure, simple and brutal. He chose his words well and worked them effortlessly, slicing you when you least expected. He had his task set before him to weed us of wordiness. It worked.

Week after week, as we trudged uphill, we did get better and even understood what he was trying to tell us.

He could talk about anything. From the patterns on a Hyderabadi sari to authentic Chinese food to the crocodiles in the Nile. My only regret is that I never stopped to tell him, however grudgingly it might have been, the impact he had on me.

There is no stupid sentimentality in telling people how much you appreciate them while they are alive, only good old common sense. After life, dead people don't read tributes written to them.

Thank you, Sir.

*I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

(*When I am Dead, My Dearest by Christina Georgina Rossetti)

Different strokes

Rahul Saigal (acj, 98)

Some holidays change the course of our lives forever. Of course, we do not know this beforehand.

When I traveled from Bombay to Bangalore with my entire wardrobe packed in two suitcases, I hadn't a clue if I'd be back home in a couple of days, or nine months later with a diploma in print journalism from the Asian College of Journalism. Rather absurd, that twice as many students, who would finally be admitted, should be asked to attend an interview on the pre-condition that selected candidates would start school immediately.

At 20, we ask fewer questions of situations we do not understand. Or even of instances that threaten to change the trajectory of our lives. It is only obvious then that every person who constitutes a space in this time of our lives will live with us forever. Even Peter, the accountant, who'd almost convinced me to pursue a career in whores racing so that I could tip him off beforehand on the best whores. Only a couple of days earlier, Sanyal had asked me to work on a series of investigative stories on a politician-in-power's many relationships with promiscuous women.

I didn't take up Peter's advice after I figured he was talking about horses. Sanyal, I still suspect, was only thinking of innovative ways of having me bumped off.

One of the very few things that Shinibali* and I had in common, then, was that we could never have been among Sanyal's favourite students. It's funny how one man's dogged obsession to gun for you can change your life forever. Most admit to have become "new and improved" writers and editors. Shinibali and I got married. I sometimes wonder if we hooked up initially only in spite of Sanyal.

I did not pursue writing or journalism as a career.

My days at ACJ hold some of my fondest memories. All made up of Kerala parathas, lousy movies, Shinibali's cool chauffeured bike, great friends, the girls' hostel, Meena, Ramki, Clara and Peter. And punctuated by one remarkable man. Remarkable – someone you cannot help but make a remark about.

Ten years ago, we were all perhaps the most integral part of each other's lives. Let's meet again. This time, for a shorter holiday. August in Bangalore?

(* Shinibali, or Saki as we used to call her, was Rahul's classmate at acj. They married soon after the course.)

Some memories...

Dev SS (acj, 98)

A couple of incidents came to mind. We were at Honnemaradu (a green paradise amidst the backwaters of the Sharavati river in Shimoga) on our first field trip. We were to camp on an island the first day. As it got dark, the organisers realised we had forgotten the food… so Sanyal and I volunteered to help Chakra (Sudarshan – one of the organisers) get back to the mainland by coracle and fetch rice, vegetables and utensils from the kitchen.

Since we were camping atop the hill on the island, it took a while to clamber down. Along the way, Sanyal narrated a reporting assignment he’d taken up during the war (for the liberation of Bangladesh). He was stringing for AFP or AP. He'd disguised himself as a Bangladeshi villager and was accompanied by a boy-guide.

However, in one village, somebody suspected him and started following the two. In Sanyal’s words… “He kept shadowing us. I was a bit nervous. The boy told me we should make a run for it… then the villager came up to us and started asking questions. I think he suspected my accent, he knew I wasn’t from those parts.

"We were away from the village and approaching a thicket. I sized him up, wondering if I could strangle him and throw the body in the thicket. But the village was not far away and they would have heard if he shouted.
Suddenly, clouds gathered overhead and it started to pour. The villager ran back to his friends, while my guide shouted at me to get away as quickly as possible!”

All of this was said in a grave voice. The image of Sanyal sizing up his unwelcome companion and thinking of strangling him is somehow… hilarious.

**

I wasn’t one of those who was intimidated by his searing tongue. Somehow, I guessed it was all a performance… his anger sometimes seemed too disproportionate to the 'crime'.

I asked him about it at the final convocation. I asked him if his anger at students wasn’t a put-on… and he admitted it was. “You see, I had never worked as a teacher before I arrived in Bangalore, so I wasn’t sure how to approach it,” he said. “I thought I had to present this image of being a hard task-master. That’s why I was so strict with the first batch (1997-98). Gradually, I realised there was no point in intimidating them as much, and I softened.”

That was true. He was much harder on us than with the last batch. And from what I’ve heard, he was really tough on his first batch (fourth batch of acj).

I don’t know how many of us judged him by his image rather than his true self.

'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.

Look who is talking…

(By Ashish Mukherjee)

To say that Jyoti Sanyal knew the English language inside out would be an understatement. Or to snatch an idea from his Statesman Stylebook, it would be "stating the obvious".

In my nine months at ACJ, and afterwards, I never found Sanyal stuck for want of the right word – written or spoken. I used to be as much kicked about his razor-sharp intros (scribbled in red ballpoint ink on my newswriting exercises) as his manner of speaking.

During the daily swipes that he took at English language newspapers, Sanyal never wasted time or vocabulary on unnecessary civilities. Blunt was his way. He would call a spade a spade, and often a bit more! No wonder that quite a few of my batchmates would routinely get pissed off.

Here's a rewind to the ACJ classroom of 1998, to the “vocabulary” of Jyoti Sanyal.

Shitrag – First day, first salvo against substandard journalism. This was Sanyal's common noun for English language newspapers. Not one paper escaped the tag.

Who wrote this piece of shit? – A question Sanyal would regularly throw at us, especially during critiques of the ACJ lab journal. Unable to explain the use of that unnecessary adjective or wrong phrase, the culprit could do little but fumble.

Face first, arse later – This had nothing to do with the human anatomy. Sanyal was merely telling us how to put names and designations in copies – always, the name first and designation later. "S M Krishna, former chief minister of Karnataka", he would say…

This is Baboo English! – Thank you Ram for reminding me of this in your MiD DAY column!
“Baboo English” was Sanyal’s dig at 21st century Indian English written with a 19th century colonial hangover. The commonest example he would give was the practice of putting a "subject" in official letters.
My admission application to ACJ had run with the subject "Request for ACJ admission form". The teacher in Sanyal lost no time in correcting me, even though I was months away from my ACJ studentship.

Handout journalists – A reference to reporters who churned out reader-unfriendly stories from government and police handouts, ignorantly picking up and adopting hackneyed expressions and clumsy sentences along the way.

25 – The maximum number of words the intro of a copy could have. A Lakshman Rekha that we dare not cross! I started my ACJ stint with 40-word intros and steadily improved…
Towards the end of the course, when I sometimes managed to say it all in about 20 words, Sanyal would don his editing hat, carefully strike off a few words and say, "It's 15 words now. What do you think? Can we tighten it further?”...

Don't put the cart before the horse – News first always was Sanyal’s mantra. Especially in legal copies where reporters have the habit of prefacing important judgements with the name of the judge.

Never point out, it's bad manners – While quoting in copies, Sanyal wondered why journalists would unnecessarily make officials and ministers "point out", "mention", “stress”, “add” or "opine" when one could simply "say" things. His take was when reporters write "so and so pointed out", they actually mean "so and so said"…

"In any case, never point out,” Sanyal would say, his index finger pointing very much at you. “It's bad manners!"

-Ashish