Every word he pronounced in his
clipped British accent, over the crackle of the radio, was accepted as the
absolute colour of truth. In those pretelevision days, millions of Indians hung
on his every word—as he engaged with wars and disasters, announcements and
deaths, upheavals and turmoils— yes, it was always the dependable voice of Mark
Tully.
Though he was born in Tollygunge, Kolkata and spent his
first ten years in India, his ardent love affair with the country began in 1965
when he joined the BBC in their administrative department in New Delhi. And in
his inimitable style, Mark Tully says, “I arrived with the Tashkent agreement.”
(We like this veteran broadcast journalist for his dramatic statements.)
Working out of the administrative department he first began to do pre-recorded
programmes and “it was infrequent.” He explains that in those days to do a live
programme was difficult. “The telephone connectivity was haphazard and it was
not easy.”
After covering much of eventful India through two decades he began his foray into the verbose world of books. He
laughs when he recounts, “I was used to doing small reports and at the end of
it I would sign off as Mark Tully, so when I started writing books, at the end
of every 250 words I would want to sign off. My first book with its cutoffs and
slashes was a total mess. Radio has always been my first love with its brevity,
clarity and simplicity whereas writing books terrified me.” However much he
says books terrified him, he has written over half a dozen books. And he
continues to do a regular Sunday morning programme on BBC UK called “Something
Understood” that deals with art, music, religion, literature and philosophy.
His reading takes him into philosophy, religion—his
major areas of interest and as for novels it is the ones from the Victorian
era—Dickens, Hardy, Kipling that still capture the attention of Mark Tully. “I
read them over and over again. I think in most of the modern novels the
narrative is weak. The emphasis is on the verbal pyrotechnics and it is too
adjectival. I like Graham Greene and R K Narayan too. They are spare and brilliant like the radio.” (We like that too —his undying
devotion and fidelity to radio.) Tully
who has witnessed the transition of India from a socialist state to the
liberalized state writes about those years in his book India’s Unending
Journey. “Consumer goods were in such short supply that foreign diplomats’ wives
preparing to leave the country found a ready market for their half-used lipsticks
and their underwear.” He says, “Before the liberalisation started much of
India’s entrepreneurial energy was bottled up. India lost at least ten years to
a country like China.”
Tully strongly stresses in his books how India has
changed him. “I used to look for absolute answers and it was in India that I
learnt the uncertainty of certainty. I also got a sense of balance.” Inspite of
all that he has imbibed from India, Tully still retains his Britishness after
four decades of living here. “I am British by blood, British by birth and I
believe in karma. I cannot throw away that part of me,” says Sir Mark Tully.
Memories Of Tamil Nadu
“Chennai, or Madras as it used to be known, has a sober south Indian culture which is less concerned with money making than with the old fashioned virtues of manufacturing.” Mark Tully has been coming to Chennai and the state to cover events, to do documentaries and to research for his books. He writes in India's Unending Journey “Chennai, or Madras as it used to be known, has a sober south Indian culture which is less concerned with money making than with the old fashioned virtues of manufacturing.”
He says that after the hectic pace of Delhi, he finds Chennai orderly and refreshing. It is the perfect place to unwind. He recalls how he loved the time he camped at the beautiful seaside Rameswaram. “Soon after the IPKF was sent to Sri Lanka, a politician threatened to swim across the sea to Sri Lanka in protest. So an entire troop of reporters camped there waiting for him to do that. And every morning we would watch him enact a drama but he never did it and we had to come away. Our editors were not too happy with us for going there.
P.S: Those of us who gathered
around the radio on that fateful day- October
31, 1984 -believed it was the voice of Tully that announced at around six in the evening: "India’s prime
minister Indira Gandhi is dead." Though she had been shot dead in the morning
the official Indian media was strangely silent so we had to wait all day for
BBC to pronounce it. I was in boarding school and a group of us had gathered
around the maid’s radio and we had listened in hushed silence. There were, perhaps, millions of Indians like me glued to the radio that day, BBC in particular. And I had always believed it was
Tully so I was sorely disappointed when he said, “No it was not me. I was away
on leave when she died.” He had spoiled the beginning of the piece I had
planned on him and I was none too happy. I stubbornly repeated the question hoping he
would give me the details of that day. He just as stubbornly shook his head. Interestingly,
the New Indian Express had thought like me and they had in their edit in January
2011 (I owe the month and year to google) said the same.
First published by The Times of
India in 2008, Chennai
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