Meet Amol, UK’s first non-white editor

[1]

London: Britain’s first non-white editor of a national newspaper Amol Rajan drea­med of cricketing glory and not bylines as he grew up in London.
The 29-year-old, who will formally take over as the editor of the Independent newspaper on Monday — just days short of his 30th birthday — reveals his first love was cricket.
He wanted to be a spin bowler in the England team. He is just about three years older than the newspaper. “So really journalism was an admission of failure,” he laughs.
Indian-born Rajan grew up in Tooting in south London after moving to the UK with his parents as a three year old.
Getting injured at 17 put an end to his dream of cricketing glory, recalls Rajan as he sits in the building shared by the Independent and its sister publications with the Daily Mail and other Associated Newspapers titles in Kensington.
His cricketing romance continued with his book, Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket's Greatest Spin Bowlers, which he wrote in 2011.  
He edited the student magazine Varsity as he studied English literature at Cambridge University and then started to work as a journalist.
“I have a very romantic attachment to the idea of a newspaper,” says Rajan, who has a very ambitious blueprint on how he wants to steer the newspaper under his stewardship.
Rajan, an adviser to Independent owner Evge­ny Lebedev, admits “I don’t think I would have been made the editor of other dailies like the Time, Guardian or Telegraph this soon.”