I would have gladly started as a janitor at Forbes. For me, the biggest thrill of being at Forbes was not the magazine so much as the chance of being in the aura of the legendary Jim Michaels. I think I’d heard of him from the moment I was born — and every Indian should have. Michaels was posted to India as a reporter with United Press in the 1940s, the years when a new nation was taking birth — and Jim recorded the pangs and the ecstasy. But he made history when his became the first account of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination that the world would read — a story that beat rival Associated Press by 15 minutes. Michaels saw a devastated country weeping over Gandhi’s body at Birla House; the world saw what Michaels saw. He said, later, that his time in India had changed his life and his view of the world. (How karmic, that Michaels should die on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.)

I had been at Forbes over a month before I actually met Jim Michaels. I’d heard so much about him, but never saw him. I began to think he didn’t exist. Forbes, I was convinced, was run by an invisible editor, a Wizard of Oz, who everyone knew about but who no one had seen. The only evidence of Jim’s existence was his searing comments on writers’ copy. A sampling: “What old fashioned service? There’s not a line here about what it is except some shit about watering a plant... story’s dead. Jim Michaels.” Or “I took out at least 50 lines without losing a single worthwhile fact. Jim Michaels.” And to a writer who he thought was too nice to a company, “Why not send them a nice, lacy Valentine?” Finally, to a fellow rookie reporter, “This piece is a jumble. They’re being taken over, yet margins are being squeezed but they are doing well abroad, but then the writer drags in mortgage payments. Is this supposed to be a parody? Journalism of the absurd. Jim.” So when I finally received a summons from Harriet Miller, Jim’s (also legendary) secretary, to meet the Great Man, I was terrified. Would I be sacked on the spot? Humiliated in front of everybody for not understanding the simple rules of fact-checking quickly enough? As I stood outside his office, waiting to be ushered in, I saw a framed front-page of the New York Times, datelined January 30, 1948: “Gandhi Assassinated.” The byline was James W. Michaels. My terror ebbed; I knew I had arrived at my destination. I peered into the room. There he was, the Wizard of Forbes, a neat little bespectacled man, perched on an impossibly high swivel chair, jabbing his fingers at a keyboard in front of him. He turned and peered down at me: “Come in. You’re the new reporter. From India? We don’t want an Indian mafia here.” And I was dismissed. Mafia? There were only three Indians at Forbes then, one of whom was senior editor Subrata Chakravarty, an elite Bengali from Yale and Harvard Business School who Jim Michaels had managed to bamboozle into writing for then little-known Forbes over making millions working for a mighty corporation.

... contd.