“From the heights of the Himalayas Almost at heaven’s door
Comes the plaintive cry of the Yetti ‘Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore!’”
From A la Recherche du Calls Mating by Bachchoo

The closest thing in my memory to Britain’s now defunct News of the World was the weekly run by R.K. Karanjia called Blitz.

It was the closest thing we had to a sleaze-sheet and was printed proof that the aam janta of one country are not in any sense holier than the aam janta of another country. Indian curiosity, or at least that of western India where Blitz was published and popular, was replete each week with news of the screws (as News of the World, for its peddling of sex scandal, is popularly known). And when there were no screws to be had, with blatantly abusive, partisan politics.
All newspapers have their political biases. The Times, with all its show of balance, is by and large a Conservative paper. The Daily Telegraph is known as the Daily Torygraph and the Mirror and the Sun are tabloid adversaries supporting Labour and the Tories respectively.
The Independent, which boasts that it doesn’t support any one party, inevitably comes out in favour of the unofficial political-correctness party and has the most ludicrous columnists of the country’s fourth estate. One of them, Johann Hari, was recently caught publishing interviews which he had invented by cutting and pasting comments from the interviewee’s life, times, works and words. So, for instance, he could be “interviewing” Winston Churchill by making up the questions and transplanting the answers from the annals:
“Hari: Sir Winston, please tell us what you intend to do now?
Churchill: Well, my dear Johann, we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in the streets!
Hari: Golly!”
Having cast this first stone, I ought to confess that I am not without sin. I began in journalism, out of a desire to earn a few meagre rupees and to see my name in print, in the Poona Herald. It was a small newspaper owned by the distinguished family of a Pune (in the days when it was still called Poona) builder called Atur Sangtani. I was in college doing a science degree and became aware that the editor, one Able David, would accept reports and articles from the likes of myself and others as there was probably a shortage of fully professional English-speaking, hard-working journalists who would accept pocket-money wages in the town. He would test out this semi-professional cadre and then give us assignments — covering the meeting and resolutions of the local Rotary Club, or reporting on an accident at the Race Course.
Another of the semi-professional reporters was also a college student and friend who shall, for reasons that will become obvious, remain anonymous.
We would discuss the stories we were bringing to the paper and when, in 1963, the scandal known as the Profumo Affair broke in England, reported in all its sleazy splendour by News of the World, my friend and I decided to get a look-in and link the story in some way to Poona. The story was that John Profumo, a minister in the Tory government of the time, shared prostitutes and drugs with an attaché of the Soviet embassy. The agent and begetter of these liaisons was an osteopath called Stephen Ward. It was reported that Ward had in World War II been Captain Ward and could even have been posted in India.
My friend and I conjectured that it was further possible that a British soldier wounded in World War II on the Asian front — Burma, Singapore, Malaya or the Andamans — would end up in the large and prestigious Military Hospital in our Poona cantonment. There were, of course, no mobile phones to hack into and though landlines could be tapped with headphones and crocodile clips, there were no conversations which we could profitably intercept. It was a 20-year-old historical story.
But was there a story? By the time we’d finished our “investigations”, there was. There were musty old registers of patients in the Military Hospital and down these lists there were several, or at least three, people called Ward. There was even a Captain Ward, though his initial was not “S” but, if I remember right, “R.J.B.”. There were other “Wards” and they too had different ranks and initials but we reasoned that our Stephen may easily have gained promotion from an “other rank” to Captaincy for the valour that left him wounded.
The evidence, we concluded, was not strong enough to establish the link of the internationally notorious scandal to our little town. What would be convincing would be a first-hand account from an Anglo-Indian nurse who, these 20 or so years later, clearly remembered Captain Stephen Ward as one of the patients on her ward who had a particularly glad eye for the girls and particularly pinchey fingers. And lo and behold, such a nurse came into being.
I must immediately say that my friend, whom I refuse to name here, has gone on to become one of the most distinguished Indian journalists of his generation and was, of course, completely innocent of any invention or stretching of facts that the story which we jointly wrote contained.
Our editor was very enthusiastic and splashed the story without too much cross-questioning of the evidence. The next day five journalists from the national newspapers invaded the offices of the Poona Herald, wanting to buy the story and get any more facts, descriptions, clues and connections that its two writers may have had.
My friend and I opted for the highest bidder who happened to be one Captain Colabawalla from none other than Blitz. He had driven down especially from Mumbai.
Before we stated our price we demanded that he drive us in his maroon convertible Oldsmobile down Mahatma Gandhi Road where our friends and potential girlfriends could see us, as it were, riding high. Then we thought a Chinese dinner, an unattainable luxury for us at the time, would be an appropriate setting to discuss the transfer of copyright to the good Captain. Yes, of course, we had more facts and of course we had more stories — even one of a municipally paid-for school which was actually being run as a brothel.
(No phones or emails were hacked during the writing of this column.)