From Terence Netto
The death of K Sugumaran, 78, on Aug 3 after a brief bout of illness, was lamented in social media chat groups plied by retired journalists in a perfunctory manner.
He deserved better because he was an editor of panache and a columnist of wit and charm.
Popularly referred to as “Sugu”, he was the first news editor of The Star, whose emergence as an English language newspaper that overtook the industry’s leader, New Straits Times, within 20 years of its launch in Penang in September 1971 is one of the more remarkable stories in Malaysian journalism.
This supersession helped lay the ground for another, more momentous, derangement of the status quo – that of Pakatan Harapan’s upset of Umno-BN in the general election of 2018.
Here will arise a query as to how it could be possible that the MCA-owned Star had laid the ground for PH’s defeat of Umno-BN?
Well, from 1981 till the paper’s five-month suspension in late October 1987, at the onset of Operation Lalang, The Star tread a delicate line of being an “opposition newspaper” within the stable of largely government-affiliated or BN-owned media.
This was a huge service to indirectly subverting the then growing authoritarianism of premier Dr Mahathir Mohamed.
On its return in March 1988 from suspension, The Star became a subservient paper, intent on only raking in the profits of the business community’s sympathy for its victimisation by the government. But that is another story.
Several journalists who worked on making The Star the vehicle of discreet opposition to Mahathir– newspaper licensing laws precluded overt opposition — either worked with Sugu or trained under him in the larval stages of The Star’s growth in the early 1970s.
Intra-office politics forced the departure of several of The Star’s pioneering journalists back to New Straits Times from which they had decamped for The Star in its early days.
The Star was initially owned by a business concern affiliated to Gerakan in Penang but after the MCA-affiliated Huaren Holdings took over ownership in 1977, it accelerated its trajectory to becoming the “opposition” within the field of government-compliant media.
Sugu and the coterie that had returned to the NST once again beat the path back to The Star, as participants in the effort to recapture and magnify the paper’s initial lustre.
His weekly Sunday Star columns were a highlight of this phase of the paper’s rejuvenation.
The best of them were laced with wit and delivered in a style that conveyed the conviction that journalism was a matter of sensibility as well as sense.
Several of the columns alone were worth the price of the paper.
Sadly, that phase of his career did not last long, or was it that he could not sustain the concentration needed to sustain the flow?
Sugu then recessed from newspaper work to enter a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, probably as salve for wounds to the psyche.
After that spell, he returned to newspaper work as a sub-editor in the Nation, an English daily in Bangkok where he worked for some years before returning to The Star and later the Sun.
But, by then, the promise of his early years in the 1960s in the Straits Times (it became New Straits Times in late 1972), where he began his career in 1964, had diminished considerably.
The practice of journalism is such that if you take yourself off the treadmill, you will find it hard to recover the old flair.
As description of the arduousness – and the pleasure — of writing columns, the great American sportswriter Red Smith said, “’All you do is sit down and open a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.”
Sugu could not sustain the bleeding out. But while he did, his was stuff that was like the payoff line in the 1960s advertisement for Arnott’s biscuits – “There’s no substitute for quality.”
Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.