News
Iqbal Athas defined a new era in journalism
View(s):The time was some forty years ago, the place the sprawling ‘News Room’ of Independent Newspapers Limited in Hulftsdorp, the media factory that produced the SUN, Dawasa and Dinapathi. On most weekday mornings around 10 am, a tall, well-built, moustachioed gentleman in his trademark safari suit, briefcase in hand, would saunter in, usually with an inscrutable smile and with his sunglasses still on. The pace of the room would quicken ever so slightly as dozens of news reporters went about their work, as if acknowledging the arrival of their boss.
That would possibly be how Iqbal Athas would have set the scene if he was writing one of his trademark introductions to any of the many newspaper columns he wrote. Iqbal passed away this week, aged 81, signalling the departure of yet another colossus of a different era of journalism in this country.
It was a different time, different for many reasons. Media was restricted largely to two state television stations and a few newspapers. There was no other ‘electronic’ or ‘social’ media where everyone was a journalist. Even among the newspapers, The Island had only just begun publishing, so the state-run Lake House newspapers and Independent newspapers were the two established giants in the field.
The print media had enormous clout then. What they said mattered. Newspapers were produced by reporters taking notes by hand and then clattering away their ‘copy’ on typewriters. If they wanted to research a subject, they visited the library; there was no Google; the internet was yet to be born. Most newspapers were painstakingly typeset, letter for letter, word for word, by hand.
In such a world, Iqbal thrived. As News Editor of the SUN, which I had joined soon after leaving school, he was my first ‘boss’. It never felt that way. In the best traditions of the newspaper world, at least at Independent Newspapers, he was always simply ‘Iqbal’, not Mr Athas, and never ‘Sir’. Seated behind a large desk in that newsroom, Iqbal was the master of all he surveyed.
Quite rightly so, too. Whenever a major story broke—and there was a bomb exploding almost every other week those days, at the height of the Tamil Tiger insurgency—Iqbal took it upon himself to do the honours. He would gather his papers, turn his chair to his left, where his typewriter was, pause to reflect for a short while and then bang away at the typewriter, producing a lead story in next to no time that would make the next day’s headlines. When he was in this frame of mind, we knew better than to disturb him.
Even back then, before he would rise to greater heights, Iqbal had a reputation for having a nose for news and an uncanny knack for putting across a news story in a very readable manner that made you feel you yourself were watching the story unfold. Often, the secret was in the little details—of exact times, the colour of dresses people wore, and what was on the menu—that he wove into the story. It was not just that, though: if that was the icing on the cake, the cake itself was hard facts that turned heads, raised eyebrows and triggered investigations.
As Independent Newspapers—then regarded as the ‘school of journalism’ because it had produced so many journalists who would go on to have stellar careers in other media institutions—shut down, most of Iqbal’s colleagues moved to other newspapers. Iqbal did so too, but mostly as a columnist.
Iqbal’s work as a defence columnist at a time when a separatist war raged was pioneering and is arguably unmatched even today. The threats—and awards—Iqbal received are testimony to this and are too numerous to mention here. There were times when Iqbal had to maintain a low profile so he could live to fight another day. It suffices to say that Iqbal remains one of a handful of Sri Lankan journalists to have won international recognition for his work in relation to exposing corruption and upholding press freedom.
As a boss, Iqbal was always approachable and available for advice, but he also gave you a free hand. He would give you an idea for a story and let you do the rest, ‘polishing’ it if necessary before it went to print. For someone in his job, he was uncharacteristically soft-spoken and always sported a smile, so it was difficult to say whether he approved of your work or not!
Iqbal continued writing for as long as he could. For several decades, his regular column in the Sunday Times was by far the most popular in the newspaper. Readers looked forward to it to find out what was going on in the corridors of power and in the armed forces. Politicians, on the other hand, looked at it with trepidation to see whether their ‘deals’ had been exposed.
It is a pity Iqbal didn’t have the time to write his memoirs. If he did, it would prove that the pen is indeed mightier than not only the sword but also the threats, lawsuits and other tactics of intimidation that were thrown in his way.
Iqbal’s passing is a tremendous loss, but Sri Lankan journalists will be forever grateful to him for the path that he pioneered in reporting on defence matters fearlessly, defining a different age of journalism in this country, a path that others are now travelling more comfortably.
- Rajiv Weerasundera
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