The Newsroom Mafia                                                

 By Oswald Pereira 

Chapter 1

The front page

Most of Bombay had gone to bed. Among those who were still awake were workers on the third shift; streetwalkers looking for a late, drunken customer and various newspaper offices in the city, churning out the daily morning editions. Sreedhar Shastri, editor-in-chief of The Newsroom, was busy putting to bed India’s most respected and largest English language newspaper. It was rare that the editor-in-chief himself was present to close the edition.

But on a black, rainy morning, at 1.15 a.m. on July 10, 1986, Sreedhar took the responsibility of tucking the edition into bed. That was because the 150-year-old pro-establishment newspaper, The Newsroom, dubbed the Grand Old Dame of journalism by its rivals, was breaking new ground. For the first time in the history of the newspaper industry the world over, The Newsroom was publishing a news story written even before the event had occurred. In the newspaper world, only obituaries of famous people are written in advance. These are kept at hand just in case a luminary passes away inconveniently when it’s deadline time.But the story for which my editor-in-chief was up in the early hours of the morning was a breaking news story written in advance by me.

The story was to be rolled out at 12.30 a.m. after the event was confirmed. The content, wording and the slot for the story had been planned and fixed earlier in the day. In a way, the story was like an obituary: it was meant to signify the end of Bombay’s most notorious Don. That indeed was the impact that supercop Donald Fernandez and I had expected from his most heroic deed till date and the best news scoop of my life.The closely guarded pact between Donald and me, supported by my indulgent editor-in-chief, seemed to have worked beautifully.

The late city and metro editions of The Newsroom carried a front-page, lead story — Underworld don Narayan Swamy arrested from home in predawn swoop. Bombay’s Police Commissioner Donald Fernandez had struck a deal with Sreedhar and me that I was to have an ‘advance’ exclusive on the Don’s arrest if my editor-in-chief agreed to carry it on the front page. The beneficiaries of the deal were the police commissioner, The Newsroom and me, the newspaper’s crime reporter. Front-page coverage in India’s largest English newspaper would give a boost to the image of the Police Commissioner, already labelled ‘supercop’ by his admirers.

By establishing an international record of printing red-hot, early morning news, barely a few hours after its occurrence, The Newsroom would silence its critics and turn around its conservative image of being the Grand Old Dame. The Newsroom would score over its rivals and I would be crowned with journalistic glory for the scoop on the arrest of the Don.