The Editor who stayed late but left too soon

Shailender S Dhawan 1960-2025

- V Sudarshan

Journalists are prepared for bad news round the clock. But not the kind I got today. Barely had I finished reading the papers in the morning I got a call saying Shailender S Dhawan, my predecessor who had held the post for almost continuously since July 31, 2008, was no more.

He had vacated his office only in April this year, barely six months ago. He died of congestive heart failure. To colleagues and friends who knew him well, this is code for broken heart disease. His heart broke because he could no longer do what he liked best: bring out another FPJ edition with hooks for headlines on the front page, the best page of the day.

Shailen obsessed about headlines, holding the page till he got the right one. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if he didn't get the right headline, but that was never.

I had known Shailen from the last century, the early nineties.

We had joined Vinod Mehta’s The Pioneer, the paper Rudyard Kipling had worked for, when Vinod launched it in Delhi, Shailen as Acting Chief Sub-editor and me as Senior Sub-editor in charge of the foreign features page.

Both had been what we call desk jockeys. Shailender arrived at the office in a peculiarly green colored Bajaj scooter, wearing a full shirt which he tucked in under his ample belly. Quite a lot of shouting usually emanated from the news desk, usually over headline accidents and choice of stories. It is par for the course. Shailen lost his cool when Sri Harsha identified BosniaHerzegovina as Serbia-Herzegovina in the headline of the lead story. But that was also par for the course, where tempers frayed in a newspaper that was trying to be different in vast ocean of newspaper sameness and where Vinod Mehta hurled the choicest of epithets whenever something went colourfully wrong in the headline. Those days Shailen lost his cool often.