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ARRIVED IN LIFE: Advani at the Bhatnagar
wedding
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Satish Kumar
remembers his daughter as being a "very bright student". His
voice trembles as he tells you, "Shivani was a voracious reader and
English was her favourite subject in school." A former Steel Authority
of India employee and longtime RSS sympathiser-it explains why L.K. Advani
attended his daughter's wedding on July 18, 1996-Kumar must have been
proud when he read the news reports Shivani wrote in her career at The
Asian Age and The Indian Express.
Yet, if yesterday the media meant pride by association, today it has
become a hate figure. Bristles Sevanti, Shivani's younger sister: "So
many things written about her personality are news to us ... How do people
know so much?" Barely 25 km from the power city of Lutyens' Delhi,
in a middle-class Ghaziabad home, the Kumars mourn their daughter, the
"simple" girl who "loved kadhi-chawal". This somehow
glosses over the attitudinal distance their daughter travelled in her
32 years.
Steel executive Krishan Chand, Shivani's classmate from nursery to Class
XII at Bokaro's St Xavier's School, recalls her as thin, ordinarily dressed
and nondescript. "She wouldn't stand out in any crowd," he says.
The introverted nature began to unravel at Delhi's Daulat Ram College
and, later, Jawaharlal Nehru University. By the time she joined The Asian
Age, she was, in the words of a colleague, "loud, abusive in her
choice of words and sometimes crude". At JNU she had a steady boyfriend,
but working life brought a string of liaisons she openly boasted about.
A friend sees it differently. While acknowledging "her writing
could have done with a lot of improvement", there is admiration that
she "knew how to work hard". As even her family observes, Shivani
was obsessive about her work. she would do anything for that one piece
of information, that juicy quote. While covering the BJP, she would walk
to the party office on Ashoka Road past 10 p.m. if she didn't get an auto-rickshaw
if the editor wanted some "extra stuff".
Shivani wanted to get ahead, and fast. She wasn't in journalism, friends
say, to make friends but as much to make a mark. This edgy, restless bundle
of nervous energy "wanted to be successful instantly and contacts
with powerful people went to her head quickly". Perhaps they cost
her her life too.
-Shefalee Vasudev
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CURRENT
ISSUE SEPTEMBER 2, 2002
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