I first met KS Sachidananda Murthy, who passed away on 13 October at age 68, at my interview for a job with the Malayala Manorama media organisation, back in the summer of 1993. The interview was held at Manorama’s office in Kochi, Kerala. It was for the position of correspondent for The Week, the English language weekly newsmagazine, in Chennai (then called Madras), Tamil Nadu.
There were eight interviewers, all men. Sachi, as he was known, was one of them. The others included T.S. Gopalakrushnan, the then editor-in-charge of The Week; V.S. Jayaschandran, a senior editor; Thomas Abraham, associate editor of the Malayala Manorama, the top Malayalam language newspaper; and management executives of the company, including the HR head, Rajan Mathew. All the interviewers identified themselves.
I had little hope of getting the job, because just before my own interview, a senior political reporter from The Indian Express in Chennai had been interviewed. The interview ran for more than 30 minutes, after which I was asked to meet with Philip Mathew, one of the owners of the publishing company and editor of The Week.
Three weeks after the interview, I got a telegram (there was no email then, nor cell phones, and landline phones were hard to come by), which informed me that I had been hired as correspondent of The Week in Chennai, and that I should report to The Week’s principal offices in Kochi.
I first spoke to Sachi a few months after I joined The Week. He had called to say hello, and to offer any assistance to help me in my work. Without saying so in so many words, he let it be known that he had contacts in the two Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, apart from the corporate world in Chennai and Tamil Nadu.
He followed up his phone call by giving me the home phone numbers of Alladi Aruna, the official spokesperson of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party, the then opposition party in Tamil Nadu, and Prof K. Anbazhagan, a senior leader of the DMK. He was always available to discuss story ideas and how to package stories for the magazine.
I met Sachi in person again in the summer of 1994, when I went to attend the annual editorial meeting of The Week in Kochi. The meeting was addressed by the owners of the Manorama group – Mammen Mathew, Philip Mathew and Jacob Mathew – and Gopal and Sachi. There was a cocktail party that evening, at which Sachi took me aside for a word.
I asked him how I had landed the job, and he told me that the Indian Express reporter had been rejected because he was seen to have leftist leanings while he was in college, and the owners did not hire leftists. I asked him how the company had discovered the leftist leanings. Sachi told me that the company had done an intrusive due diligence on each candidate, including me.
“The company asked the Malayala Manorama’s news agent in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, to make inquiries about you from your neighbours, and the school and college you went to. It was only after the news agent’s report that the top editors and executives of The Week and Manorama decided to hire you for Chennai,” he said. My home town is Visakhapatnam.
I had been in touch with Sachi for several years after I left The Week, but I lost touch with him after that. But I will always remember Sachi’s assistance because as a reporter in Chennai, without any working knowledge of Tamil, barring a few swear words, initially I found it difficult to arrange and conduct interviews. He made it possible. RIP, Sachi.
(The author is a veteran journalist who has held senior positions at Deccan Chronicle and The Times of India, among other publications.)
