`I never wanted to be a journalist’ is Jug Suraiya’s trademark tongue-in-the-cheek beginning to his book The Times of My Life: A Worm’seye View of Journalism.
Jug Suraiya narrates his journey from when he joined Junior Statesman in Calcutta as a writer right through relocation to Delhi. At the book launch event on November 24 at The Park Bangalore, the author read out some excerpts from the book. The lines he read were about his initial days as a journalist and painted a picture perfect imagery of Calcutta.
The journalist, better known for his popular humour column ‘Jugular Vein’, narrated his awesome stints as a spray painting machine operator and a wannabe tendu leaf tycoon. The real story starts when he gets to join the (now-defunct) Junior Statesman in Calcutta as a writer, and takes a curious turn when he relocates to Delhi to join another publication.
With his friend Subir Roy, an esteemed journalist, Jug Suraiya launched his book.
Suraiya began his writing career first with the iconic Junior Statesman.
His memories-both humorous and nostalgic-pepper the pages of this unforgettable book by a writer who has been described by Khushwant Singh as ‘India’s Art Buchwald’.
Present at the event was his writer wife Bunny Suraiya.
While in conversation on journalism with Subir Roy, Jug said “Newspapers tend to speak to you, they converse with you.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism is something that is grasped at once.”
About the book
Everything that impacted on the author’s life appeared on the pages of fi rst the youth magazine Junior Statesman, and later, the hoary Times of India. The chapters in this book are told in the same voice as his regular columns. The characters they describe-some well-known to us, some not-will remain immortal in our minds. Suraiya is the first Asian to have won the Grand Prize
for Travel Writing awarded by the Pacifi c Area Travel Association (PATA)