My first flippant thought on reading that T.J.S. George had departed this world was ‘No more avocados!’ The sense of real loss came flooding immediately afterwards as I remembered that the avocados had ceased in any case when the Georges moved to a smaller house with a more manageable garden. But the rich, creamy flesh of their avocados was unforgettable though Thayil Jacob Sony George’s real distinction was as the only Indian journalist with a deservedly international reputation.
Ann Morrison was the editor by the time George’s Asiaweek invited me to contribute a regular column. I jumped at the opportunity for I was already writing for Ann’s husband, Don, who edited the Hong Kong edition of Time magazine. Steering a course through these troubled waters, George could claim the probably unique distinction of giving birth to a magazine that eventually obliged its far richer and more powerful global partner/competitor, Time magazine, to buy it up to shut it down. I liked the sentimental touch of the vacant desk they kept for him in his old office.
Perhaps the sands were already running out. In full command of his faculties till he died at 97, George gave a vital jerk to the ancient argument over whether or not East and West are identifiably separate entities. Today’s tumultuous West Asia highlights the confusion. Adopting the Anglosphere’s values, one thinks of Jews as Western, Arabs (or Palestinians) as Eastern. But although Turkey now advertises itself as ‘Eastern Mediterranean’ that does not prevent those two words from warning NATO and the European Union of the challenge that lurks forever in the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Some Europeans would say this is where refugees begin so that dead babies, probably killed while trying to escape to a better life, are washed up on unknown beaches in Greece. That definition lies like a naked sword between East and West.
George must be credited with another achievement. Recalling the fuss in 1993 when my wife, son and I went to live in Singapore, I am sure the emotional obstacles were far greater when he left India in the 1970s. India wasn’t Asia in those isolated years; if anything, Asia was seen as an inconsequential piece of India. Taking the opposite view, my last newspaper, The Straits Times, wouldn’t even publish Indian news on its Asia pages. They were “world news”. True, a certain imperial linkage was discernible before and during the Second World War and modest arrangements existed to share scraps of news. But even if individuals shared some ties, institutions did not. It was in defiance of this fragmentation that George and Michael O’Neill, his former colleague from the Far Eastern Economic Review — another casualty of globalisation — launched Asiaweek in Hong Kong in 1975.
Their lively news magazine’s mission statement promised a new world. It was “To report accurately and fairly the affairs of Asia in all spheres of human activity, to see the world from an Asian perspective, to be Asia’s voice in the world.” The important point that the editors stressed was “Asia through Asian eyes”, a concept that sounded like an intellectual commitment to a more just society than decades of stultifying colonialism had left behind.
It was an age of tentative trial marriages among the media. The New Zealand-born O’Neill was a founding editor-in-chief of Yazhou Zhoukan, which Asiaweek launched in 1987, with the distinguished Buddhist translator, Thomas Hon Wing Polin, as founding managing editor. Malaysian championship of ‘Asian values’ provided additional binding cement by the time Singapore’s The Business Times and The Straits Times ran a scattering of studios and subbing stations throughout Southeast Asia and talked of a possible economics paper in New Delhi. One of George’s own columns appearing in 2009 under the heading “Hail the all-American world!”, suggested some doubts about globalisation. Was the hidden hand only America’s? The British distiller, The Macallan, the French logistics firm, Geodis, and the Singapore-based loyalty platform, Eber, were only three of the 322 companies that either set up or expanded their businesses in Hong Kong in the first half of 2024, bringing in investment worth US$4.9 billion.
Where uninformed Indian media owners resisted reform, fearing it was a Western stratagem to rob them of their papers, a progressive leader like P.V. Narasimha Rao assured the so-called ‘Bombay Club’ that more investors would mean a bigger pie and consequently larger slices for each participant. The Club’s 13-point charter really sought a return to the protectionism of the Nehru-Gandhi years. But, as Narasimha Rao told me on my next visit from Singapore, “There will be blood on the streets if we wait for the ripple effect of foreign investment to solve the problem of poverty.”
There was a hilarious occasion when one of the most vocal champions of press freedom tried to turn the ‘foreign hand’ theory on its head at a Delhi working lunch: seating himself next to Arun Jaitley in the chair designated for someone else, he regaled the chief guest with tales of dark conspiracies to destroy the financial viability of Indian newspapers so that proprietors were forced to sell cheap to foreigners who were already making lists of desirable acquisitions. No doubt he trotted out this hackneyed ultra patriotic line to curry favour, not realising the extent to which the political wind had changed.
I had lost touch with George after his stint with the International Press Institute (The Free Press Journal and The Searchlight came earlier) until he surfaced as editorial advisor of The New Indian Express. Manoj Kumar Sonthalia was interested in Tamil Murasu, a modest, 89-year-old Tamil daily that belonged to the group I worked for in Singapore. George said he was only doing a friend a favour as he flitted in and asked for help with introductions. I suspect that the dream of an Asian-owned, pan-Asia voice in the media had not faded altogether. I never knew if the negotiations led
anywhere but nothing came of George’s fear of a hostile reaction to his book, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, published way back in 1973. There was a copy in my office library and it was heavily annotated with pencilled comments covering every page from top to bottom. I don’t know who it belonged to but the reader must have been an assiduous Singaporean.
George told me he never mentioned the biography which was based entirely on secondary sources to Lee. If so, it was an incisive, if somewhat unkind, portraiture. Having said that, I must admit that his fears did not do justice to Singapore’s pride in what it had achieved. Harsh criticism might not be forgotten or forgiven but the Republic would consider it demeaning to pursue a personal vendetta. George’s Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore is more justifiably critical in describing the city’s decline from a pensioner’s haven to a hub for entrepreneurs and home to a software revolution, all the while remaining in the grip of crime and liquor.
Chronicler and historian though he also was, George’s first loyalty remained to the media. He knew that press freedom was under threat the world over. He suspected that many high-powered committees were packed with operators who made a career of exploiting a fashionable cause. It was also said that with Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian journalists at the rate they were doing in Gaza, and refusing to allow anyone else to report from there, there would soon be no one left to keep the world informed. George had downsized by then. His new garden in Bangalore didn’t boast an avocado tree whose luscious fruits I could take back to Calcutta.