Chronicle of a life lived fully

Vir Sanghvi's memoir is like an extension of his commentaries; crisp and business-like, with enough gossip and wit to keep you turning the pages at speed.

An editor's memoirs spanning six of India's most eventful decades are bound to have something of interest to most people. When that editor is Vir Sanghvi, and the memories stretch from Morarji Desai to Narendra Modi (via other prime ministers, film and rock stars, smugglers and media moguls), chances are that many people will read A Rude Life as a sharp modern history told from a unique vantage point.

Sanghvi, as any one who has worked with him, or read his columns, or seen him on TV will tell you, is a journalist with the rare gift of cutting straight through layers of clutter and arriving at the heart of the matter. In an industry that has mirrored the country in its level of polarisation and noise, this is as useful an attribute as any.

A Sanghvi show on TV will give you an idea of the style you can expect in the book. If you want to save yourself the pain of listening to nine screaming heads being interrogated by an anchor keen to supply the Nation what it needs to know, switch on Sanghvi for a few minutes and you'll usually get a clear-headed opinion, even if you may disagree with it.

A memoir can often be self-serving, or self-indulgent at the least, and a healthy dose of self-deprecation is a useful antidote. It says much for Sanghvi's self-confidence (never in short supply) that he doesn't see the need for this: A Rude Life says it like it is. The book may lack the warmth and gentle amiability of another editor's memoir — Vinod Mehta's Lucknow Boy, published a decade earlier — but it is like an extension of Sanghvi's commentaries: Crisp and business-like, even if there is enough gossip, wit and 'inside' information to keep the reader turning the pages at speed.

Anecdotes and inside tales

The early part of the book traces a privileged childhood and youth — a large flat in south Mumbai, Mayo College, boarding school in England, followed by an Oxford education, the last of which he credits with the order it brought to his thinking. All this despite the shock and disruption caused by the early death of his middle class-communist-turned-international jetsetter father, who seems to have bequeathed Sanghvi his resourcefulness and fondness for the good things in life.

Sanghvi can be funny in a dry and understated way, and this keeps the narrative from running aground before it gets to what is, for most of us, the meat of the story: political India, and the newspaper wars.

The urine-quaffing Morarji Desai makes an early appearance, with a shocking revelation of how he leaked government papers he had taken from the PMO, and how a Foreign Hand might have been responsible for his exit; light is shed on an interesting side to Bal Thackeray (the ability to talk to people of all ages in the same way); the secret delight of Congressmen at the death of the unlovely Sanjay Gandhi; and the somewhat uncharitable dismissal of Narasimha Rao as a 'small-time manipulator'. There's also the inside story of the Rajiv Gandhi versus Zail Singh spat, and the tale of a sleepy and grumpy breakfast meeting with Deve Gowda.

But the most interesting insights involve V P Singh and Rajiv. Singh, because of the parallel Sanghvi draws of him with the current enigma, Arvind Kejriwal: some pros, but the cons include 'a man without any core beliefs, without any long-term loyalty...and without any transparency'. The Rajiv Gandhi bit is striking for its portrayal of how he spurns the chance for Hindu vote consolidation by his own lack of a Hindu identity, his missteps in Sri Lanka, on Shahbano and the Satanic Verses ban. "There was now a vacuum in that (Hindu vote bank) space. And somebody would fill it", as we now know only too well.

Some elegance, some sympathy

The portrayals of media tycoons are done elegantly and with some sympathy: ABP owner Aveek Sarkar's penchant to lecture experts on their area of expertise, evidenced at a meeting with Amartya Sen, but also his decency as an employer; the close relationship with the owners of the Hindustan Times, and how Sanghvi helped the paper take on the challenge from the interloping Times of India in Delhi. There's also a quaint passage where Sanghvi denies proprietorial interference at one of his papers; some colleagues from the same paper might feel that they inhabited a parallel universe.

Sanghvi's career took a brief but serious hit from the Niira Radia tapes, and he uses his memoirs to effectively clear his name. What emerges throughout the book — from his precocious editorship of the Bombay magazine to successful second and third careers in television and as a food and drink critic — is the ability to see opportunity and act on it, to not hold back, and to follow his instincts.

Some readers would find disappointing his silence on the current government, and its adversarial relationship with the media that it hasn't got in its pocket; this may just be Sanghvi's instincts for self-preservation kicking in.

That said, A Rude Life has been one lived fully, and the story of it is a riveting anecdote-a-page tale told with great economy and intelligence.