By Dr Olav Albuquerque
drolav...@gmail.com
Norbert Rego, who passed away on Monday, November 13, 2023,
at the age of 70 years, was my colleague and friend for
several decades in The Times of India (ToI) at Mumbai. He
spent over 40 years in the ToI and adeptly brought out the
Sunday Review much before some staffers were removed and it
was shut down. He knew exactly what to say and how to say
it. And what is more -- how to display it using banner
headlines which adroitly fit into the space which kept
changing with the changing advertisement position.
Norbert was ailing for two days before he died of a heart
attack on the afternoon of November 13. He was admitted to
hospital and discharged. After he returned home, he was
feeling uneasy until the end came on Monday afternoon.
I knew him as a warm, friendly, courteous and
diligent human being. More than that, he was a
competent professional, bringing out the Sunday
Review with feisty headlines, witty acronyms and
uplifting visuals to inject dull and prosaic copy
with vivacity, sparkle and life.
When I first knew him, he was working under Fatma Zakaria,
the mother of the now US-based noted journalist Fareed
Zakaria. She later joined The Daily, a tabloid launched by
Russy Karanjia, a colourful and irreverent tabloid, which
however folded up like its sister-publication the Blitz.
Norbert would frequently chat with me in the fourth floor
canteen of The Times of India building at Fort, opposite what
is now known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. And sometimes,
another journo, the Goan-origin Ivan Fera, from the
Illustrated Weekly of India, would join us in the canteen for
a cup of tea or snacks which were heavily subsidized and cost
one rupee or more -- something unbelievable today.
Ivan Fera later died of cancer, at the age of 36. He never
told a soul he was suffering from this killer illness.
Our discussions would cover politics, law, science
and technology. Norbert was an aficionado, who
knew something of everything and everything about
page-making and page-design. Apart from writing
crisp copy.
After we spoke, Norbert would rush off to meet his deadline
which crept up every week. Before that, he would phone
contributors to coax them to meet their deadlines. And when
they did, with shoddy copy, he would phone them again with a
diplomatic touch asking to clarify a badly-written phrase
here-or-there.
Norbert was the President of The Catholic Staff Association
of The Times of India and managed this Association very well
with the Secretary of the Association, Sylvester Lobo, who
was a chief sub-editor in Science Today, before it closed
down. Sylvester Lobo and this writer worked under the then
feisty and outspoken Publishing-Director, Pritish Nandy, the
anti-thesis of Girilal Jain, who was dour, kept to himself,
and nearly always wore a suit-and-tie to office.
As a journalist, Norbert Rego was in a class by himself.
Though a deskman, he wrote articles and news items which were
carried in the newspaper. His book reviews were pithy,
succinct and encapsulated the essence of the book in as few
words as possible.
In fact, he was neither taciturn nor loquacious. He spoke
when he had to. But the titbits he revealed about other
senior journos like Walston Rego and his brother R.H.S.
Rego, were interesting. As were his titbits about his boss
and the then Editor of the Sunday Review, Fatma Zakaria.
These were a triumvirate of Regos -- Rainier
Hercules Socrates Rego (or RHS for short), Walston
Rego, and well, my friend, Norbert Rego, the
quietest and the most sober of all the three Regos.
And all the three Regos were in different
departments of Bennett Coleman & Co. RHS Rego
headed the News Bureau, Walston was a Chief
Sub-Editor in the Economic Times while Norbert was
in the Sunday Review section.
2
Norbert Rego was a first-hand witness of the turbulent 1990s
in Bennett Coleman & Co. Journalists who were members of the
then vibrant Bombay Union of Journalists (BUJ) went on a
strike because The Independent (a new newspaper from the ToI
stable) had just been started to wean away journalists from
The Indian Post, another paper then doing well, with
attractive salaries. And well, hasten the shutting down of
The Indian Post.
All the BUJ members were afraid these journalists from The
Independent, located on the fifth floor would be brought down
to the ToI on the third floor and placed above us with fat
salaries and fancy designations. This is exactly what took
place.
Norbert Rego carried on unperturbed because he was practical,
analytical, and level-headed. He refused
promotions-on-contract linked to a questionable
evaluation-criterion with the result that he lost his
seniority to juniors who were not as competent as he was.
Had he to accept these
