The best years of my professional life in the world of words were spent in newspaper journalism. I was fortunate to be hired by the New York Times while I was still at college in the United States. That was nearly five decades ago: the fact that I began my journalistic career sweeping floors and fetching coffee and snacks for irritable editors late at night did not bother me a bit. I was, after all, working for the world's greatest newspaper.
I never got over the thrill of being a "copyboy," which was the term for those of us who performed menial work. In those days, that's how young men (and some women) started out at the Times. Occasionally, some reporter on deadline would snap his fingers and, between deep puffs of his cigarette or a swig from his whiskey flask, ask me to get a factoid for his story.
That didn't officially confer on me the coveted title of "reporter," of course, but it made an 18-year-old feel very good indeed. It made me totally determined to devote my life to newspapering. I yearned to see my own byline in the paper some day, which happened in due course.
The Times and its senior editors - particularly the executive editor A. M. Rosenthal - nurtured me; they gave me opportunities to chase ambulances - newspaper code for covering breaking news - and then the paper made me a foreign correspondent, a dream assignment for a young man who felt empowered to cover the world for Americans.
That assignment offered extraordinary experiences: I trekked through the jungles and deserts of sub Saharan Africa; I dodged bullets and bombs in the Middle East; I followed the taking of American hostages by student acolytes of Ayatollah Khomeini, who had returned home to Iran from a long exile in France and elsewhere, ensuring an end to the corrupt rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979; I surreptitiously entered Afghanistan after the Soviets had swallowed it, filing stories about everyday life, always wondering when I would be caught.
And I happened to be in New Delhi in the terrible aftermath of the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in October 1984, when thousands of Sikhs were butchered for no reason other than the fact that Mrs. Gandhi's killers, her personal bodyguards, were Sikhs who responded to the call of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a radical who wanted Punjab state - home to a large cohort of traditionally martial Sikhs - to become independent of India and form a new country named Khalistan. It was a hopeless cause, but the charismatic Bhindranwale roped in thousands of fellow Sikhs through his thundering rhetoric.
I foolishly left the Times in 1985, the year after Mrs. Gandhi's murder, yielding to the temptation of a regular column in what was then known as Newsweek International. Life hasn't been as exciting for me since my departure from daily journalism. Indeed, the arrival of digital technology has transformed the very nature of journalism: these days, young men and men need only a smart phone to write and file stories for websites that are hungry for stories every minute of every hour.
This has become an age of instant stories and instant bylines and instant stars. There's no waiting for the next day's paper to ascertain if one's dispatch has made it to the august pages - and particularly the front page - of the Times. Indeed, the Times itself is deepening its digital avatar by the day. One day in the not too distant future, there may not be a print edition at all. I will mourn that inevitable day, if I'm still around to witness it.
Nowadays I write books, mostly biographies, histories, and ghosted autobiographies of famous people. Unlike most newspaper articles, books cannot be produced overnight; depending on the complexities and character of the subject, they can take many years to research and write before publishers can ship consignments to bookstores. My most recent biography, that of Dr. Prathap Chandra Reddy - founder and chairman of Apollo Hospitals in India - took three years from start to finish. A biography of the late Capt. C. P. Krishnan Nair, the intrepid founder of The Leela Group of luxury hotels, has taken me nearly five years.
They have been long and lonely years. They have been years without the benefit of having experienced mentors. They have been years when I find myself dealing with whip-smart publishers half my age. And while I grow older, those publishers seem to get younger.
I sometimes extract tidbits of stories from my days as a young foreign correspondent, if only to entertain the publishers. Their eyes glass over; my world, my time in the sun, was very different from today's times. I never imagined that one day someone in the word business would call me an "old man." But I'm increasingly hearing that term, not always employed benignly.
I'm learning to come to terms with that term. I don't feel old; my physicians say that I look much younger than my age, which is their way of subtly advising me to look after my health. I like to think that I still have the energy to report and write, even if it's just books now.
But in my reckoning, writing books can never replace the delight of daily journalism of those long-ago years at the New York Times.
I should never have abandoned that genre of journalism of those years. I often relive specific adventures, and misadventures, and I think of the interesting characters I'd encountered - if only to savor what a wonderful life I've had, and to remind myself that it all really happened.
That life is now part of history - my personal history; that life has been consigned to the dustbin of time. That life isn't a part of today's journalism, not even to commemorate that once there were people like myself who roamed the world searching for stories that would universally appeal to readers.
The late novelist and playwright Irwin Shaw once referred to himself as a "story teller in the bazaar." He conjured up the sight of a man sitting cross-legged in a village, enthralling his audiences with tales of far away and long ago.
This is what Shaw said, and this is what still resonates in me decades after I first read his words in an introduction to a collection of his celebrated short stories:
"There is the reward of the storyteller, sitting cross-legged in the bazaar, filling the need of humanity in the humdrum course of the ordinary day for magic and distant wonders, for disguised moralizing that will set everyday transactions into larger perspectives, for the compression of great matters into digestible portions, for the shaping of mysteries into sharply edged and comprehensible symbols."
Today's storytellers aim for different rewards - more money, more fame, more glory - and they don't need to cajole audiences to listen to them. Stories are getting shorter - Twitter can accommodate only 142 words at a time - and shorter still is the attention span of audiences most everywhere. The story no longer lies in its telling but its length.
The global bazaar is both shrinking and expanding - which is to say that the storyteller today can mostly dispense with context and perspective. Speed is of the essence in transmitting the news - speed and the ability to navigate the technicalities of a smart phone.
But enough said, enough lamented. I recognize that my time has been gone a long time and that, other than in my memories and historical imagination, what I once did and the places and people I once visited are of little interest to my contemporary journalistic brethren.
I still care about those long-ago years. Not too many others do. I understand the journalistic physics of today, but that doesn't stop me from mourning, nor from yearning, for those days of chasing ambulances.