Who publishes JJ news?

After the ceremony of conferring Denovo status on JJ, it was thought that JJ’s problems were solved. But that was our misunderstanding because during that program, a conspiracy was being hatched in the Directorate of Art and the Department of Higher and Technical Education to remove Dr Santosh Kshirsagar from the post of the in-charge Dean of J J Institute of Applied Art. A special article that unravels the conspiracy.

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The answer to this question is – It’s me, Satish Kashinath Naik, I am the one who publishes that news. I have been doing so right from the eighties. It has been almost forty years now, that is, I have been doing this for almost four decades. I was working in the mainstream journalism in the eighties and the nineties. Naturally, it became easier for me to publish that news. Of course, the initial news was published by my journalist friends, acquaintances or colleagues in the Loksatta Daily. Encouraged by the likes of Ajit Gogate (whose book on the experiences in the court was talk of the town recently), Dhananjay Karnik, Vinayak Parab, Datta Panchwagh, Vijayakumar Kale, late journalist friend Hemant Kulkarni and most importantly our Editor Madhav Gadkari, I started reporting on JJ and the Art Directorate. That news was well received in the art field at that time. In fact, I was working in a weekly, but since Loksatta’s office was next door to ours (actually we had a small office with just four or five chairs and tables in the spacious office of Loksatta.) I gradually started dabbling in the field of news reporting as well.

The impact of such news in the art sector or at the government level, and the changes that were taking place, were very significant and therefore gratifying. So I started giving news continuously as if I was a ‘beat’. In fact, I was not getting any income from it. I was reporting that news only and only because of my love for JJ and the JJ campus. In the 90s itself, an imprudent editor published an outright fake news and in protest of that, I stopped providing the art related news to them, and from then onwards the downfall of JJ began. That fake news was given directly in favour of a corrupt official and because of that single news that officer in Directorate of Art was saved from getting arrested. Later during his remaining tenure, he produced about two hundred unaided Art Colleges in every corner of Maharashtra and after completely ruining the Directorate of Art, that officer left for his hometown Pune. From then on the glorious tradition of art education in Maharashtra started to diminish. Such is the history of the present state of complete demise that the art sector has attained today.

After 2000, even after I had left full-time journalism, I started getting news, but I couldn’t do much than to pass it on to my friends from newspapers or to familiar journalists. Because then I had no medium in my hand. It was entirely up to those persons (whom I used to send news) or the newspaper they worked for, to decide whether to publish or not to publish the news which I sent. As a result, there was a complete chaos in JJ. Terrible things started happening one after another. Bribe of One lakh rupees was demanded from the students while taking admission, which was unheard of in the history of JJ. Corruption became JJ’s perennial identity. It was also widely criticized in the society. And at the same time a very unexpected event happened. One day suddenly I got a call from senior journalist Kumar Ketkar. He was the then editor of Loksatta Daily. He requested me to write an article about JJ’s status of the day, which I straight away declined. I also told him that all this happened because of a fake news in the newspaper of which you are the editor. But he did not stop urging me. In the end he won.

My very first news ‘In Mumbai University a student who did not appear for the exam got the first rank in MFA’ created waves. It literally defamed JJ, Directorate of Art and University of Mumbai. Ketkar later said, ‘I have never received so many calls for any other news in my journalistic career’. The news became so popular. And after that my articles started getting published in Sunday special edition of Loksatta. Thereafter my daily column got published for a whole week on the occasion of JJ’s 150^th anniversary, which was so explosive that it reached almost every reader of Loksatta. Some readers who have read it, meet me even today. Not mentioning this as a self-proclamation, but I have never taken any remuneration for all these articles or for writing about JJ for many newspapers. I didn’t think it was right to take it. I have also returned many such cheques that I received. I am mentioning this only to show how deeply sincere my feelings or loyalties have been towards JJ and JJ campus.

There is a so called reason for the action taken against Dr Santosh Kshirsagar which is getting disseminated in the art education sector in the form of a rumour. That is, “Dr Santosh Kshirsagar, in-charge Dean of JJ Institute of Applied Art feeds news to Satish Naik, and that brings discredit to the government. And this was the reason for taking action against him.” Therefore, I feel compelled to clarify how hollow and baseless the rumour is. I have only taken this opportunity to give a befitting reply to those, whose ‘shops’ have closed down or are on the verge of closing due to my hard-hitting writing in the past twenty-twenty-five years. This article explains why I write. Now read in the next article, How do I get these news? Who provides them to me? And so on and so forth.

Satish Naik

Editor, Chinha Art News