Everything ends too soon

Though often haunted by the spectre of death which his profession compelled him to observe from close quarters — the attack on WTC had him glued him to the TV set for most of the night — it also taught him to put a premium on small, easily forgotten items of daily life. Every little expenditure, brief encounters with strangers and colleagues in office, a word of praise from the bureau chief for a story well done, a chance encounter with chief editor Shekhar Gupta on the staircase of Qutub Office — nothing would be allowed to be forgotten. All of these, and the other humdrum events in his life, he would enter meticulously in his diary every night. Without fail.

A shattered marriage briefly played havoc with Sansi’s life, but he was quick to put it behind him with his trademark grin. That’s when he started coining his own acronyms for ‘humanity at large’; initially something of a private fetish, they soon engulfed everything and everyone. ‘‘You know, most of us pass through our lives like a JAFO,’’ he announced loudly in the office one afternoon. That, for him, stood for Just Another F*****g Observer.

So the important thing for him, he often asserted, was not to act like a JAFO but to Be Somebody and live with gumption. This, till his dying day, was to be his guiding principle. The child-hero of The Catcher in the Rye often caught Sansi’s fancy, but that was a mood he said he had learnt to outgrow following his encounters with the ‘‘jerks’’ of the world. ‘‘It’s important to be seen as a tough person,’’ he often commented. Not at all surprising for somebody who also fancied himself as the blind Al Pachino in The Scent of a Women, the film he claimed to have seen over 20 times for its ‘‘inspirational value’’.

A robust conversationalist, words rarely failed Sansi. In the end, they also did him in. Chasing Scindia all the way to his last flight for a 500-word copy was, for him at least, an important step towards Being Somebody.