Saying goodbye to the century
By Manohar Malgonkar

I am breaking a rule. Hitherto I had been careful not to use my weekly column, "Time Off", for airing personal history. Well, this piece is all about Time Off itself, which makes it inevitable that I should also figure prominently in it.

I am armed with a valid excuse for this aberration, though. When I wrote to some of the editors of the papers which run Time Off that I was about to phase it off, one of them, Ravindra Kumar, the Managing Editor of The Statesman in Calcutta, wrote back to suggest that it would be more appropriate if I were to reveal my plans about Time Off through the column itself. So here goes:

Seventeen years ago, on a visit to Bombay, I was interviewed by Behram Contractor on behalf of a tabloid daily of which he was the Editor as well as the leading light. During our chat, Contractor may have dangled a bait before me that I should write a few pieces for his paper. But I had never written for newspapers before. I was a novelist and short-story writer. True, I had written history books too, but these were commissioned. Also I believed that, for a freelance, contributing articles to newspapers would not even bring laundry money. Anyhow, nothing came of Contractor’s suggestion.

At this time, I was busy writing a book on Goa for which Goa’s own, favourite-son artist, Mario Miranda, was doing the illustrations, and since Mario and Contractor have always been close friends, I and Contractor kept coming together and also became friends.

In September 1983, Sir Dinshaw Petit, third Baronet of his line, died in Bombay. ‘Faly’ Petit had been a lifelong friend of mine. He was an altogether exceptional man in that, possessed of immense wealth, he was also an intellectual, a voracious and eclectic reader. His residence in Bombay at the foot of Malabar Hill on the edge of the sea was a palace of Edwardian elegance, furnished with taste and he had country estates in Pune and Mahabaleshwar, a princely villa called Savaric on the riviera in France, between Nice and Monte Carlo, and a house in London’s Mayfair. Whenever I travelled to England or America, I invariably spent a week or two with him either in London or France.

The newspapers in Bombay had taken scant notice of Sir Dinshaw’s demise, so I took it upon myself to write a tribute to his memory, sketching out his own complex personality and how he had always contributed generously, but anonymously, to deserving causes in India and abroad. I sent this article to Behram Contractor and said in a note: "I should be grateful if you would publish this, but of course I don’t expect to be paid for this."

Behram — we were on first-name basis now — wired back: Publishing Stop will also pay.

Later that year Behram left the paper he had been working for and which he had reared through its fledgling years into a highly successful enterprise, to set up his own tabloid daily The Afternoon Despatch & Courier and right from its inception I began to contribute a weekly article to it.

I had named my column, in imitation of Allastair Cooke’s famed ‘Letter from America’, ‘Upcountry Letter’.

Initially my column used to be published on Tuesday, but after a year or two, Behram decided to shift it to his paper’s Sunday edition. By this time, too, I had changed the title of my column to Time Off. Behram also commissioned Mario Miranda to illustrate Time Off which I have always thought of as a special favour. I am happy to report that in spite of his ever-increasing workload, Mario still finds time to provide his bold, witty, urbanely perspicuous illustrations for The Afteroon’s Time Off column.

Almost right from its start, Time Off was accepted by two national dailies, Bangalore’s Deccan Herald, and Calcutta’s The Statesman and this actually meant that it was published in three major newspapers, because The Statesman began to publish it in its Delhi edition too.

Why did I call my column Time Off?

Because initially I had looked upon it as a sort of holiday occupation — time off from routine. I was a writer of books: fiction, biography, history, whatever. Not a journalist. Indeed in conformity with this concept, I stopped writing Time Off for a whole year while I worked on a novel.

I resumed it in 1990, and have not missed a single week since. True, now and then some paper which takes it has come out without it. But that has been due to postal strikes and similar causes. But whenever a paper missed its weekly Time Off, I got a small crop of letters from readers wanting to know what had gone wrong, which was rather flattering.

Over the years, four other national dailies took Time Off, so that it now appears in seven state capitals, and this, I think is a sensible pattern of distribution which makes sure that the circulation turfs of the papers that run it are kept compartmented.

It is my belief that these papers pay me their maximum rates, which doesn’t mean that these rates bear any relationship with the cost of living. A writer who has been in the business as long as I have does not have to go looking for work.

He can always make a fast buck spin-doctoring the life-stories of ex-maharajas sunk in tradition, self-admiring business tycoons or fat-cat politicians. Oh, easy!

Having said this, let me make it clear that the thought of money did not figure in shaping the decision to stop Time Off. As a matter of fact I don’t do so badly from it at all: seven papers paying for the same stuff adds up to a healthy total. No complaints.

My line of thinking was this: After all no newspaper column can just go on and on, but must stop some time. When?

Lacking signs from either editors or readers, I tried to think of some appropriate occasion on which to end it. Why not when Time Off was twelve years old. Entering its ‘teens. As good an occasion as any to sign off. That was it.

I slipped in this information in the text of a piece I wrote on Allastair Cooke, half thinking that it would pass unnoticed. It didn’t. In fact it brought me dozens of letters urging me not to stop. I have filed away these letters separately, to dip into, at times, as feel-good messages.

By that scenario, this piece I am writing should have been the final one. And I had indicated this to my editors a few weeks earlier suggesting that I would write a few fortnightly pieces and then stop. And it was in response to this letter that Ravindra Kumar suggested that I should make my decision known through the column itself.

Meanwhile, something had happened to give my plan an altogether new twist. R.K. Raju of Delhi, who is himself a veteran journalist and a critical but constant reader of Time Off, came out with a suggestion which was so dramatically neat as to make me reflect: But how stupid of me not to have thought of it myself!

Why not, Raju asked, go on for another year and stop with the end of the century and the millennium?

Sink quietly even as the fanfare begins, the drums bang, the fireworks go off and champagne flows.

But how perfect! Few things in life are given an opportunity for so theatrical an exit setting.

So that’s what I mean to do; carry on all through 1999 and then out.