Forthrightness, thy name is Kamath

Bengaluru: One of India’s most celebrated journalists, known for his coverage of the famous Nathuram Godse trial (and for talking back to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto), Madhav Vittal Kamath remained honest and open until his dying day.

The prolific writer, who also wrote one of the earliest biographies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, died of a cardiac arrest in Manipal on Thursday. He was 93.

Constantly clacking away at the Olivetti typewriter he bought back in 1966 in London, Kamath never lost the often fleeting idealism of every cub reporter who sets out with dreams of changing the world.

Kamath began his journalism career as a  reporter with Free Press Journal in Mumbai under the tutelage of it founder-editor Swaminathan Sadanand and later went on to become its editor in the 1950s, making him the youngest editor of an English paper in the country.

Later, he went on to become the Washington correspondent for the Times of India and the editor of Illustrated Weekly of India.

To Kamath, however, journalism came to fruition only because he never did get around to obtaining a degree in medicine.

Shattered though he was by the fact that he would never be a ‘barefoot doctor’ working in rural India, Kamath had always dreamed of being a foreign correspondent for a newspaper. He covered the United Nations for 13 years, Europe for seven and finally, Washington for nine years.

He describes the midnight of August 15, 1947 as one of the greatest moments of his life, when he was a reporter with the Free Press Journal. In a freewheeling interview with Coastal Digest in 2011, he said, “We had two poles, one with the Union Jack flying and the other had our Tiranga Jhanda, which was hoisted a bit low as it could not be up before mid-night. O God! It was so thrilling! We were counting the seconds, our hearts thumping, five seconds before mid-night the Union jack was brought down, people were weeping with joy and there was a tremendous applause. The Tiranga Jhanda was hoisted, what a moment it was.”

An expert in International Relations and an avid newshound, M.V. Kamath always displayed a deeply philosophical side to himself. He believed in astrology and constantly pondered questioned life’s conundrums, much like the philosopher Descarte.

He wrote nearly 50 books on topics ranging from some of the earliest biographies on Narendra Modi to Mahatma Gandhi, the media, politics and philosophy. Throughout his long, illustrious life, he epitomised the true journalistic principles of honesty and integrity, qualities that have otherwise been set aside to die a natural death.

His forthrightness cost him a couple of jobs and earned him Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s dislike when he corrected him at a press conference.

Despite all this, no risk was great enough to hold him back from standing up for the ethics and principles that will, in the end, define him.