It was 30 September 2001 after my wife, Renée and I, entered the Plaza cinema to watch the matinee show a new movie that had been released a few days earlier, when the phone rang at about 3.35 pm. It was my editor, Vir Sanghvi, and coming to the point he said that a plane carrying Madhavrao Scindia had made an emergency landing somewhere in Uttar Pradesh. He asked me to find out the details. I immediately called up Rajnish Sharma, my colleague in HT, who at that time was covering the Delhi Airport and told him what Vir had conveyed. There was a moment of silence and Rajnish said that even his sister, Anju was also on the flight with Madhavrao Scindia as several correspondents had accompanied him and he himself had dropped her at the Congress leader’s house that morning. I was speechless and Anju’s face flashed in my mind and I wished that the worse should not have happened. Rajnish rang back in five minutes and said that the plane had crash landed somewhere near Mainpuri. I knew at that moment that something horribly wrong had taken place. I told my wife to come out of the cinema and together we drove all the way to the Press Enclave where Anju and Rajnish lived with their mother.
I also called up some of my other colleagues and asked Amitabh Shukla to reach the Press Enclave immediately. By the time, we arrived at the Sharma household, it was known that all passengers and crew members of that ill-fated aircraft had died. It was big news since Scindia was considered the upcoming leader of the nation and he had passed away under tragic circumstances. A special relief aircraft of the Indian Air Force was leaving for the crash site and I asked Amitabh to get inside somehow as I dropped him off at the Technical area of the Delhi Airport. Anju’s memory was like a film going through my mind and I had found her as one of the most reliable reporters in the HT; she had received three promotions in three years. She had been very close to me and wanted to be the Chief Reporter after coming to know that I had requested the HT management to relieve me of my role as the City Editor since I wanted to be on the national scene once more. Vir had redesignated me as the Political Editor and I strongly recommended to him that Anju should be made the head of the reporting section. He said that it was going to be Shobhana’s (Mrs Bhartia) call since Anju was already a special correspondent. In less than a minute, he informed me that Mrs Bhartia wanted Anju to go to the News Bureau and Soni Sangwan would be heading the local unit. I conveyed this to Anju and she was heartbroken. She just could not reconcile that she could have been overlooked with me being there as her immediate boss. She stopped speaking to me for a few days and then this tragedy occurred.
Rajnish was a very enthusiastic young reporter when he approached me for a job in the Times of India where I was the Metropolitan Editor from 1992 to 1995. I liked his disposition and the energy he exuded and got him to join the Reporting team. He was a loyalist who would never let me down under any circumstances. In fact when my mother, suffered a heart attack in June, 1995, and I was about to leave the TOI on my way to HT, it was Rajnish and Sanjay Kaw, who drove me to the airport to catch the emergency flight to Los Angeles where my mother was with my sisters. Rajnish had started making his mark as a Crime Reporter but after I left for HT, he would daily call me to seek a job in the HT. It was difficult since his sister was already there but somehow, I was able to eventually get him to HT after a few years. He was shaping well but after Anju’s death, he was never the same again. His life had completely changed and he became a sort of recluse. Initially he would call me and talk about his cousins in Jallandhar, Amritsar and Chandigarh but stopped doing that after some time. He even stopped replying to my birthday greetings on 30 October; earlier he used to always make it a point to state that like me, he too was a Scorpio, referring to our zodiac sign. My last meeting with him was at the Saravana Bhavan on Janpath, where he was accompanied by some people, he was shy of introducing. His last message to me was when he joined The Mint and he requested that I should speak to the bosses there. However, he left the Mint to rejoin the Asian Age where some others, who had been our common colleagues such as Sanjay Kaw and Sridhar Kumaraswamy were working. I could not even in my wildest imagination believe that Rajnish would leave us so suddenly. When Sridhar called me up from Chennai on Wednesday to inform that he had passed away after a massive heart attack, I could not believe. The truth started sinking in and I thought about his mother, who must have been devastated at losing her second child after Anju’s untimely death. I pray to God that both Anju and Rajnish’s souls should rest in peace and that God should grant their mother, the strength to face this monumental tragedy.