Ghazala Ahmad | Clarion India
NEW DELHI – Senior journalist and Executive Editor of India’s investigative-narrative long-form magazine, The Caravan, Vinod K Jose resigned on Tuesday. “After nearly a decade and half of long-forming and muckraking, I am hanging up my Caravan boots today, ” Jose announced on his Facebook profile.
Jose expressed gratitude and called his stay at The Caravan “stellar”.Hartosh Singh Bal, Political Editor at the magazine, is set to replace him. “Hartosh, whom I brought in 2014 as the Political Editor, and was in thick and thin of the things since then, will replace me as the Executive Editor, ” Jose wrote.
Responding to Jose’s Facebook post, Hartosh warmly commented: “Many reasons for us to thank Vinod (some of the best journalism I’ve been part of has come about working with him). But above all, almost uniquely in Indian media, he’s shaped an organisation that is reliant not on personalities but on institutional strength”.
The Columbia University alum joined The Caravan team in 2009 when he was 29-years-old. During his tenure, the magazine broke several path-breaking stories including the death of Justice B. H. Loya who was hearing cases against Home Minister Amit Shah, the commonwealth Games scam, Adani’s Colgate scam, and the Hindutva terrorism.
In his post, recalling his early days at The Caravan, Jose wrote “Caravan was probably the smallest newsroom in Delhi, just enough people to fit into my small car when felt like going for dinner at Karims at Old Delhi. But now the team is ten times bigger.”
He also thanked the founder and editor of the publication, Anant Nath, for providing him with an opportunity to work for the magazine.
Jose also expressed his gratitude to Anant’s father Paresh Nath and sister Richa Shah for extending their support to him and standing by his side throughout his journey. He penned down the list of several reporters, journalists, and contributors in his post thanking them for making his stay at the publication warm and his journey stellar. A former scholar at Harvard who did his PhD in sociology called The Caravan’s newsroom one of the most diverse newsrooms in India.
“For me personally as a media scholar, whose PhD was in the sociology of newsrooms, my favorite aspect of Caravan was how we brought diversity into the newsroom. I think Caravan is among the most diverse newsrooms in India,” he wrote. As this one role ends for him, Jose is looking forward to completing the book that he has been contracted to write.
Reminiscing his role as an editor, he wrote, “I consider myself a reporter who was caged in a beautiful editor’s room, unable to report and write as much as would like to do”.
“It also weighs heavily on me that the time we live in demands serious thinking and interventions, even from outside the boundaries of a newsroom, who knows what that means, though. But first, I want to finish the book at hand.”
He took the opportunity to thank his family, who, he said, had “sacrificed the most for this run”. Concluding his post, he wrote, “I hope to give those near and dear some time. So, bye for now as an editor and hi as a reader and writer.”
