Vinod Mehta (left) and Rahul Bose at the Calcutta Literary Meet. (Anindya Shankar Ray)

Just as Oscar Wilde held up a mirror to Victorian London society and trivialised many of its institutions in his play The Importance of Being Earnest, Vinod Mehta, the guest at a Calcutta Literary Meet session titled The Importance of Being Honest, poked fun and ripped apart the political establishment and the fourth estate in India.

The afternoon session with Mehta and Rahul Bose on the penultimate day of the Lit Meet, in association with The Telegraph, had everything from wicked humour to scathing honesty to sober introspection.

Mehta started off by paying homage to the proprietor-editor relationship. “All seminal editors are backed by good proprietors just as Benjamin C Bradlee was by Katherine Graham.”

Speaking of his own journalistic career, he said: “During 1989-91, when I lost three jobs in quick succession (Indian Post, Independent and The Pioneer), I was unemployable. So, when I had this chance in 1995 to run Outlook, I thought it was divine intervention.”

Mehta believes it is a privilege to be an editor and would never quit it to venture into politics. “As an editor you just have to be answerable to one man, the proprietor, but as a politician you have to be a slave to hundreds of people. To appease the editor, I might have to print pictures of ikebana, if his wife is an ikebana fan. That kind of compromise in non-serious matters is okay. But not in the political context, I will not compromise there,” said the Outlook chief editor, who has since stepped down from the post.

The independent editor is an endangered species, Mehta lamented, and the corporate and the advertising sectors are the holy cows that the press doesn’t touch. “The great Indian free press goes after the politician day after day but not the corporate or the advertising guys,” he said. Asked whether a journalist could be unbiased, Mehta scoffed: “Journalists have opinions about the economy, the weather and dogs.”

Answering Bose’s question on whether the political establishment takes the media too seriously, Mehta said: “I have a dog and I call it Editor. And, like him, editors are disobedient, pompous and incorrigible.” He advocated that all editors post their source of wealth and income on the Internet just as Supreme Court judges do.

About the annual sex surveys published in his magazine, he said he allowed it since it brought in a lot of revenue. “The relationship between sex and our society is very hypocritical. Once Vajpayeeji (Atal Behari Vajpayee) told me ‘Your magazine (Debonair, of which Mehta was the editor) is very good but mujhko takiye ke niche rakhna padta hai (I have to hide it under the pillow)’,” he recounted. Anasuya Basu