Sunday Snippets
By Venkatesh Raghavan
It was down memory lane for me as I happened to muse over the final day on which I quit the Free Press Journal way back in 2000. It was like bidding adieu to a host of memories I had with the organization in an almost decade-long space. My journalistic career had begun in the mid-eighties when I catered to feature stories for the Free Press Bulletin, an eveninger of the media house, in Bombay.
The first editor I met was Seema Patel. She asked me to get a well-informed piece on the quacks who operated in Mumbai. It was a lot of hard work as I had to patiently stand and watch as the vendors kept making their sales pitch to a mute audience. A week later, after painstaking inquiries, I arrived at Seema Patel’s table with my story. Those were not the days of computerized workspace. I used to deliver typed sheets to her table as per their requirement.
My second story came when Surekha Kadappa asked me to interview Ajit Wadekar, the former Indian Test captain who was working in the Nariman Point headquartered State Bank of India. Years later, I felt like laughing at the question that I posed to him. “Why can’t you become an umpire like England’s Jack Birkenshaw?” I had done it rather innocuously. Looking back I construed it could be regarded as a tongue-in-cheek question.
Ages later, when still with the Free Press Journal I had the opportunity to meet the Bombay Ranji trophy team’s ace spinner, Padmakar Shivalkar at a press conference held in the Garware club room adjoining Churchgate station. In his halcyon days, Shivalkar was known to have ripped apart the batting lineup of strong Ranji teams including Karnataka and Hyderabad. It was, however, unfortunate that he did not figure in the national Test team owing to the presence of an already strong spin quartet. Talking with Shivalkar whom I was in awe of made me feel happy as he turned out to be a down-to-earth person. He told me there was a lot of thinking and planning that should go into a spin bowler’s approach when on the field.
Another encounter I recall when still with the FPJ was a conference held at the Press Club that was presided over amidst others by former legendary Test opener Sunil Gavaskar and cricketing great Mohinder Amarnath. It was about how to combat the drug menace that had afflicted the city and what steps should be taken to curb it.
Those were the times when I used to be a great fan of the Caribbean cricket team. This time I was in the Asian Age and my resident editor Sujoy Gupta sent me to interview a band of Caribbean people of Indian origin who had come to Mumbai to trace their roots. However, the focus of my story as per editorial requirement was how successful they were in tracing their roots and not a word about Viv Richards or Clive Lloyd as I would have preferred it to be.
