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To know Vinod Dua was to love his way with words. The TV news pioneer talked to you, not at you

To appreciate Vinod Dua, who passed away Saturday, was to be a creature of the eighties and nineties, way before TV news became a soap opera post-2000.

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To know Vinod Dua, was to love his way with words. The way he delivered them, enunciated them, let them flow off his tongue, calm wave upon wave, in a conversation style that was accessible to everyone, that made each one of us feel a part of his world. 

To appreciate Vinod Dua, was to be a creature of the eighties and nineties, someone who watched Doordarshan and then NDTV, way before television news became a soap opera post-2000.

In those years, Doordarshan was the only TV channel available to a nation of viewers who were as new to television as were the pioneers of television and television news, like Vinod Dua or Dr Prannoy Roy.

But when you watched Dua host Janvaani on Doordarshan — a show where the public questioned Union ministers and other senior government officials — you had the privilege to watch someone who was a born broadcaster, who owned the TV studio like it was his drawing room. 

He loved the camera and the camera loved him back — he sat there, often hunched at the table, and talked to you, intimately, not at you, like news anchors do nowadays.


Also Read: ‘Every journalist entitled to protection’: SC quashes sedition case against Vinod Dua


Soft yet rapier-sharp questions

I watched and listened to Vinod Dua as a professional media critic whose acquaintance with Hindi was at best poor, those days. And yet, I had no problem understanding him or being captivated by his personality, his language skills, his soft yet rapier-sharp questions and comments or his sense of humour that always had a sting in the tail but was so gentle that his target often didn’t realise she or he was the butt of his joke.

As good as Dua was on Janvaani, it was his stints on the election specials aired on DD and later NDTV that were the most memorable. He would go on to present other news programmes on NDTV Khabardar India, Vinod Dua Live, and the utterly delicious Zaika India Ka that saw him literally eat his way through India — but it was Dua, seated calmly beside Prannoy Roy, flawlessly translating Roy’s elections analysis into simple Hindi, adding his own acute observations, that remain with us, even decades later.

If ever there was a jugalbandi on a news show, this was it. The two of them took their cue from one another, bounced ideas off each other, agreed, disagreed, agreed to disagree, in different languages, hour after hour, in a performance that was informative — and, dare I say, entertaining.

You watched, in admiration as Dua communicated complex ideas of psephology in simple, colloquial language any viewer could appreciate. His artistry was inimitable.

Fast forward to 2019: Before sitting down to write this, I watched a few episodes of his show Jan Gan Man ki Baat on The Wire. And I still experience the charm of him, that felicitous use of words that had become weapons in a witty, political satire. So good.

I knew Vinod Dua personally, but I think I knew him better on television where he always made it seem like he was addressing me, personally, whereas I was just one of millions, watching and listening to him.


Also Read: ‘It’s humanity’: BJP defends minister for helping Mallika Dua after Right-wing slams party


 

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