One evening, not long ago, Sankarshan Thakur and his wife, Sona, were over for dinner at our home in Delhi. He was, as usual, wearing his trademark blazer-like jacket over his kurta. The coat, in linen or cotton in summer and woollen in winter, with his shirt collar rakishly upturned, was his sartorial signature. After dinner, I went to see them off to their car. On the way, I asked Sona — with a deadpan face — if Sankarshan and she had children. Surprised at my question since she knew I knew, she said, “Yes, two.” “Ah”, I said, “even so, have you ever seen him without his jacket?” For a moment, the juxtaposition of the two questions left her perplexed, and then all three of us burst out laughing. He, in particular, laughed the most, and recalling the incident, did so every time we met. That laughter — uninhibited, genuine, and fulsome — still rang in my ears as I stood at his cremation gazing at his still body.
Behind that laughter was a deeply reflective, introspective and razor-sharp mind. As a journalist, I think he had few peers. Nothing he wrote was even remotely pedantic or superficial. He believed in old-style journalism, where you had to stir out from behind your laptop and report from the ground. In addition, he wrote with an elegance and command over the English language that often made his prose read like poetry. Every time I called to congratulate him for a piece, his standard reply was: “Arre, aap bhi na. Aaj aap ko koi aur nahin mila!” (Oh, come on. Today you found no one else’s leg to pull!)
Information — carefully stored like some especially gifted beaver — and the cerebral power of analysis were his strengths. But the turn of phrase with which he would link fact to inference made him stand apart. A man of strong convictions about what is right and what is not, he was an unabashed liberal, always ready to be riled like any good Bihari at the hint of authoritarianism. Bihari by birth, Indian by citizenship, and global by outlook, he could effortlessly synthesise all three. But undoubtedly, his special love was Bihar. He spoke with transparent affection about his home town in Mithila, of its simplicity and authenticity, but also of its poverty and deprivation — hallmarks of Bihar as a whole. His masterful biographies of Lalu Yadav and of Nitish Kumar, and then his book, The Brothers Bihari, on both of them, are standard reference books, a must read for anyone interested in knowing the contemporary history of Bihar.
We spent many an evening together in Patna in the weeks leading up to the Bihar assembly elections in 2015. Sankarshan, meticulously striding across the state, had a ringside measure of things. My home in Patna was the adda where journalists and politicians, friends and analysts, would gather in the evenings. The discussions were passionate, often heated, and Sankarshan, pacing up and down the room, enveloped in cigarette smoke with a drink in his hand, was a scathingly well-informed participant. When his emotions got the better of him, he would stride onto the verandah to cool off. He wanted the coalition between Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav to win, but he was sometimes irrationally gripped by doubt, and a shadow of vulnerability would hover over his face.
Sankarshan was not a journalist of ifs and buts. He lived passionately and wrote with a courage of conviction that was rarely deflected. He loved an argument, but did not suffer fools gladly. He agreed to disagree, but if he thought your opinion was not worth this compromise, his ultimate weapon to end any acrimony was his disarming smile and ready laughter. The smile was partly an offer of truce, partly mocking, and partly transcendent, where suddenly he had gone beyond the discussion to somewhere else. In fact, such was his hyperactive mind that I would often think that his pauses of silence were because he was simultaneously thinking of some other issue which his powerful quill was itching to dissect.
The thing with Sankarshan was that his courage of conviction was married to an irrepressible nonchalance, reminding me of the couplet: ‘Qatl ki jab usne di dhamki mujhe, keh diya humne bhi dekha jayega’ (When he threatened me with murder, I said, we’ll see, so be it). That nonchalance was buttressed by a great sense of humour. Once, Nitish Kumar, after imposing the ban on liquor, said in a speech that if you shut the lights and sip on apple juice you will think you are drinking alcohol. Sankarshan, who was at my place along with Manoj Jha (from Lalu Yadav’s party and now a Rajya Sabha MP), said we should try Nitish’s prescription. Amidst much laughter, we concluded that the nuskha did not work!
In many ways, Sankarshan was a loner. Every year, he would disappear on a holiday to the UK. He had cousins there, but his real love was to wander alone in the English countryside, be by himself, away from the perennially distracting — and often meaningless — turbulence of routine. His weakness was that he did not sin in moderation. For decades, he smoked two packs, until in 2021, post-Covid, his lungs were impaired. We met several times after that, but he was always optimistic. Ultimately, lung cancer killed him. He was much too young to go, and there was so much more he could contribute. But he was very happy that he had become editor of The Telegraph, a paper that gave him the freedom to write fearlessly.
Cremations are about rituals and a crowd of people, no doubt sorrowful, but impatient to get on with their lives. In the midst of all this, Sankarshan lay serene, his innate ebullience now inert. But in my imagination, I saw his half-mocking smile, scoffing at the ephemeral lives we live and laughing at the chance to live it — like a blazing meteor — as fully as he could. Somewhere, the lines of Zauq came to my mind —
Duniya mein kis ka rah-e-fana ne diya hai saath
Tum bhi chali chalo yuhin jab tak chali chale
Who, after all, can avoid the inevitability of death
You too continue to live, but for a while at best
Pavan K. Varma is a politician, an author, and a former diplomat