The Craft Of Deepayan Chatterjee

The following is the second part of a tribute to Deepayan Chatterjee, who transformed The Telegraph in the late 1990s and produced some of the most breathtaking news pages in India from 1997 to 2006 as the Deputy Editor in charge of news and played a key advisory role until 2016 when he retired. Chatterjee passed on March 3, 2025. This part covers layout, headlines and a wrong call.

Layout

Rajagopal: Deepayan had an abiding interest in sports – all forms of sports, not just cricket, and all forms of sports journalism. The deep interest was a double-edged sword: high-octane events tugging at the fan’s heart and the journalist’s head. Deepayan would pretend to be poker-faced during the matches India played but he could not hide his joy if India won and his rage if India lost.

Some of the finest pages he conceived and produced related to sports. An unforgettable one was when Anil Kumble cast a devastating spell on the opposition. It was all over TV. Every newspaper would splash Kumble’s picture on Page 1. What else could The Telegraph do?

Deepayan used to spend a long time before the picture feeds every evening (personally scanning hundreds of pictures during the peak hour is not a joke, blink and you can miss what could have been a timeless picture). Deepayan then spotted a picture of Kumble about to send the ball drilling towards the batsman. The cherry had not left his hand, rather it was like an arrow placed on the taut but jackknifed bowstring and about to be fired.

Deepayan blew up that picture (foreign agency pictures had the resolution to afford this) to such an extent that it filled the page from top to bottom. An outsized catapult, with the ball loaded and locked. The still picture had the menace of a coiled viper, seconds before the deadly strike.

When the picture fell into place on the page, I gasped! Deepayan knew he had a winner. I will cherish the memory of that crop. Few editors would have had the nerve then to cut out Kumble’s face and the rest of the body and retain only his forearm with the ball. This was long before sports pages started using or misusing cutouts that jut into the copy so much so that the design device has lost its edge now. Editing by all the operators concerned is at the core of all forms of journalism — reporting, subbing, cropping, captioning, laying out and headlining.

At a time when sports journalism had descended into jingoism and the blind worship of superstars, Deepayan did not hesitate to be an iconoclast. When Sourav Ganguly was dropped, it coincided with the immersion of idols after Durga Puja. The Telegraph front page carried a striking visual that featured Sourav and the familiar immersion backdrop and asked: Idol will be back but what about icon?

In a way, the journalism I pursued later had its roots in what Deepayan did although he did not editorialise it as much as I did, and when he did, he could pull it off with far more grace and elegance than I could manage. Had social media been as active then as it is now, Deepayan’s pages would have created waves across the country. Do remember that these pages were published two decades ago.

Harshita: When Deepayan showed us a draft of the Sourav Ganguly page, I wondered if people might get offended that we were comparing Durga to Sourav. The goddess, after all, is at the core of Bengali life. I am delighted to report I was wrong. The next day in office, I took scores of calls from very angry readers, but these were Sourav supporters who were outraged that we had suggested he was being immersed.

When he was planning a page, Deepayan would not care about what the response would be or what other newspapers would do. He went by his own judgment and Raja’s. Sometimes, there would be protests at the office gate. At other times, a politician would complain. But none of this ever mattered. Under Deepayan, The Telegraph became a leader with a voice far bigger than the newspaper’s size.

He taught us to swim against the tide and to say what no one else was saying. Raja’s front pages were in that sense a continuation. They were of course far more editorialized and in-your-face than Deepayan would have been comfortable with, but they were also the product of a different time in our country. Deepayan taught us that journalism was not about trying to create an impression or networking, it was about telling the story that needed to be told and telling it in the best way possible.

Yes, The Telegraph was a paper that had stood out from the start. I grew up reading the paper and loved it. But I have no doubt that it is Deepayan who gave it character and lifted its quality, making it a newspaper to be proud of.

Headlines

Rajagopal: Most Indian newspapers were – and some still are – very good with headlines. Especially The Times of India, The Indian Express and a host of Indian language newspapers, including Malayalam newspapers, and the India Today magazine when it was a fortnightly. I continue to marvel at the headlines that I could not think up but someone else could – which makes my inactive life more tolerable. I picked up the habit while seeing Deepayan in action, so to speak, right from the days in Business Standard where I was a rookie when he was the joint news editor and later news editor. I will save my personal stories for another time.

Influenced by Delhi papers, many sub-editors in the 1990s were bent on copying the first line of the report and making it fit somehow in the headline – a practice that made headlines sleep-inducing. This, in spite of the rich tradition of headline-writing in the 1970s and 1980s that focused on the kernel and lampooned the high and the mighty. That craft was lost in the 1990s. Encouraged by CP Kuruvilla and Aveek Sarkar, the dream team of Business Standard retrieved that lost craft. The Telegraph edited by Akbar, Shekhar Bhatia and Sumir Lal was also known for its headlines — “Indira assassinated, nation wounded” is one such timeless headline.

The key difference was that Deepayan did it almost every day. I think here he was following TN Ninan’s motto: every page should have at least one gem (a standout element) every day. A readily noticeable option was the headline. Every day, Deepayan would come up with some headline that took our breath away – sometimes literally.

Deepayan’s way with words and my reckless adventurism made a lethal combination: I would egg him on when he hesitated or his good taste made him think twice. Sometimes, we went overboard, largely because of my child-like enthusiasm at seeing a headline that smashed the straitjacket. Once Deepayan used “silver-lining” as a verb – something like “Atal silver-lines nuclear cloud”, I think, to mark a report on a constructive comment by the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee weeks after Pokhran II. Few readers and even fewer journalists understood what the headline meant. But I was on cloud nine, so to speak.

The pace at which Deepayan came up with headlines was astounding. Once he realized that we were struggling with a headline and the deadline was close, he would walk across and stand behind the page handler. Behind his calm, his mind would be racing, and headlines would pop up. This ulcer-generating skill was on display especially during sporting events, especially football World Cups, that end late at night when the press is straining at the leash to roll.

“Ronaldo’s Redemption” when Brazil won the World Cup after the great player had slipped up four years earlier and “Dhonit!” when Dhoni and the team won the World Cup were headlines that he pulled out of his hat in a matter of seconds after the games were over.

But the character of a headline writer is really tested when adverse news drives down the mood in the newsroom. When the Indian cricket team lost against Australia in the final of the World Cup in South Africa after a dream run, few in the newsroom were interested in the front page any more.

Then Deepayan stepped in and worked his magic. “THANK YOU, BOYS, FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT,” The Telegraph shouted its heart out the next day in an all-cap, double-deck, eight-column headline, below which was a big picture of what had then come to be known as the “huddle” by the Indian cricket team and a sub-heading that said: “Never mind the loss, this is how we would like to remember you from this World Cup.”

The idea behind the headline has been repeated by many newspapers when the home team stumbles, but it was a bold statement then – and a reminder that we must stand with our boys in sorrow as well as joy.

Now, I quote from a note I wrote for my friends after the 2024 general election results were announced: “I sometimes wonder which was the toughest election I had been associated with in terms of newspapering. I think Harshita will choose the 2004 election. My choice will be the Bengal Assembly election of 2001. Both pages had a common link: the genius of Deepayan. What new headline can you give when the Left Front keeps winning election after election? When I was at my wits’ end, I used to literally ‘look up’ to the six-plus-foot Deepayan. He was almost always kind but when his brain was whirring and you intruded with your rabbit-caught-in-the-headlight-look, he would glare. Then, always, always, without fail, he would lean forward, take a headline sheet, scrawl something carelessly as if it is the grocery list and pass it on to me.

“In 2001, I was speechless, as I often was when Deepayan’s creative gears started shifting. I was speechless because leaping at me from the headline sheet was what I consider the best election headline I had seen in my career. The headline: 1977, 1982, 1987, 1991, 1996, 2001…

“The ellipsis was the coup de grace. A hint that the chain will continue, which was not very difficult to predict and the Left won one more Assembly election. Little did we know then that within a decade the Red Fort will crumble.”

Harshita: The front page after the 2004 general election result was announced is my favourite. Who would have thought that Sonia Gandhi, who had been called a foreigner and so vilified, would be able to defeat Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the India Shining campaign? When we reached office that afternoon, we were still in a state of wonder at what the Indian voter had pulled off. Deepayan captured the moment. He got a photographer to take a close-up shot of our colleague Nupur Roy’s inked finger and made that the main visual. Above it, the headline said: “Amazing! Power of the Finger.”

Another outstanding edition was the full page with Sonia Gandhi’s picture standing in front of Mahatma Gandhi’s portrait the day she announced that she would not become Prime Minister. Then there was the May 22, 2004 edition. It had a photograph of Sonia at Rajiv Gandhi’s memorial, discreetly wiping a tear. The headline for the picture said: “A pain power can’t remove.” Deepayan was a communist, he had always been opposed to the Congress, but who would know that looking at these pages? The May 22 page reflected how sensitive a human being he was, just as the “Thank You, Boys” page mirrored the way he treated his colleagues.

Yet another standout headline was after the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. Printed across eight columns was just one word: FEAR. Below it was the cropped photograph of the terror-struck eyes of an onlooker. What made this page special was not just that it captured the mood but also its refusal to fall into the trap of the jingoism fuelled by 24/7 television, which was already beginning to show the makings of the monster it would become.

A Wrong Call

Rajagopal: Deepayan loved producing budget editions. The budget was a strange animal in many general newsrooms then. I have seen budget copies beginning with these immortal lines: “Union finance minister P. Chidambaram presented the Union budget today.”

Aveek Sarkar played a key role in making budget coverage a celebration and a spectacle – and the budget was given an eyeball-grabbing platform when TN Ninan reinvented business journalism in India. The tradition continued in The Economic Times and The Times of India when Jaideep Bose, who led the business coverage in The Telegraph, joined the Bennett Coleman publications.

One fallout of the preoccupation with the budget was a blot. I was a willing partner that facilitated the unforgivable error of judgement. In 2002, when the Union budget was being presented, the massacres had begun in Gujarat. But The Telegraph that night led with the budget. Busy tracking the budget, I had assumed erroneously that the killings were being contained. Deepayan and I were also jittery about going big on the communal killings until all the information was verified because of the sensitive nature of Bengal that is a border state and we did not want to fan the flames.

Not that the riot coverage was relegated. The budget had introduced a surcharge to fund national security. The page featured the two stories – the security tax and the massacres – side by side to highlight the irony of the government taxing citizens to fund security on the very same day citizens were being picked out and killed. But the decision to give more prominence to the budget was an error of judgement. The massacres should have been the lead – no question about that.

The next day, Deepayan made amends. Many newspapers published the picture of a cowering Qutbuddin Ansari, who came to be known as the face of Gujarat’s trauma, but the maximum play for the photograph taken by Arko Dutta for Reuters was initially given by The Telegraph. Ansari later told the BBC that he was upset with the unwanted identity that cost him his job. But after he met Datta 10 years later, Ansari said he realized that the defining picture, published worldwide, had helped convince the world about the horrors of 2002.

Harshita: It is mistakes like these that remind us that everyone in the newsroom has the responsibility to point out something they think is wrong. In the budget rush, Deepayan and Raja failed to see the magnitude of the Gujarat violence. But I wonder what the rest of us were doing. Why did no one else protest? Why were we not thinking? That edition was our collective failure.

The upcoming third part of the series covers apology, our home, the review and rut of history.

To read blogposts from this tribute, click here.