Anil Dharker (1946-2021): ‘Anil was a five-star editor’

Anil Dharker joined mid-day as editor in 1988. File pic

Anil Dharker joined mid-day as editor in 1988. I was a rookie copy editor at mid-day, then being churned out of a condemned, leaky tin shed in Tardeo, when we heard the announcement. Anil was a star. A familiar face on Mumbai Doordarshan. He would generally interview exotic filmmakers who made boring art films, and sometimes he would interview film stars like Shashi Kapoor. He was a well-known columnist - his television reviews in The Sunday Observer were legendary.

‘New team did things differently'

Anil came to mid-day from (titter, titter) Debonair with an entourage that included the then-unknown Meenakshi Shedde, Jeet Thayil, Hutokshi Doctor, Amy Fernandes and C P Surendran. In 1988 mid-day was still a young newspaper but the newsroom was still rather stodgy and old-school, especially, the desk. Anil and his team changed all that. The new team did things differently.

Soon after he took over, Anil started a new daily column called ‘Yesterday's TV'. He had once, in the Sunday Observer, simply repeated the words ‘Rajiv Gandhi' 300 times as a comment on the overexposure of the then prime minister on Doordarshan.

‘You do it'

The reviews on Yesterday's TV were shared between his new team. But as it was a daily column, they soon got tired of it, so Anil asked his friend B P Singhal (later Censor Board chief and brother of VHP head Ashok Singhal), to write it. One day, just after I had put the morning edition to bed (I was by then the chief sub), Anil announced that Singhal was going to be away for a couple of weeks and he wanted someone to stand in. He asked Shedde and some others who all begged off. He turned to me and said, "You do it."

That's how I became a columnist. After my very first column, he sent me a note (no email in those days) saying that he wanted me to write the column permanently and that he'd thank B P Singhal. He later gave me a weekly column in Sunday mid-day. That's how much he believed in people.

He often took us to the Trattoria at The Oberoi, the Willingdon Sports Club, or the Bombay Gymkhana for meetings. He was a five-star editor. Eventually his refined and upmarket editorial approach was a bit too much for the working class reader and he faced resistance from the old-school journos within the newsroom. He offered me a job when he left to start The Independent. Thirty years later I still regret not taking it up.

I never once called him Anil. Rest in Peace, Mr Dharker.

Roy Subir Kaunds is a New Zealand-based TV and radio journalist, and Editorial Director of the Apna Network, New Zealand's largest ethnic media entity. He worked at mid-day from 1987 to 2000.