A debonair publisher who had scandal-hungry India panting for more

MUMBAI: “We were South Bombay kids, and so stars didn’t mean anything to us,” wrote Nari Hira in the 50th anniversary edition of ‘Stardust’, once India’s premier film magazine. This irreverence resulted in an array of nicknames for stars that passed into popular parlance: ‘Garam Dharam,’ ‘Idli Malini,’ and ‘Shotgun Sinha,’ to cite just a few.
But ‘Stardust’ was just one of Hira’s successful creations. The debonair magazine publisher who died on Friday in Mumbai aged 86, changed magazine publishing in India. He hired top talent—giving Shobhaa De who used to be a copywriter at his ad agency called Creative Unit, her big break in journalism—and gave them carte blanche. The brief was to be irreverent, sharp and stylish. “He was very shrewd at identifying people who would take his brand forward. He had a great instinct for identifying talent, whether it was movie stars or people from other fields,” says De who created the altogether new vernacular of Hinglish through the gossip column Neeta’s Natter in ‘Stardust.’
Big headlines, sensational revelations about the private lives of film stars and glamorous photo-shoots soon had scandal-hungry India panting for more. “He was the epitome of sophistication, far from then stereotype of the media mogul chasing profit,” says De says. He combined sharp wit with an uncanny eye for the sensational, but always with a certain panache, she adds.
“The magazine revolution began when he launched ‘Stardust’. He broke every convention of film coverage and then created a magazine empire based on those principles: be sharp, be blunt but write well and make it look good,” tweeted Vir Sanghvi who edited ‘Bombay’ magazine contemporaneously.
The publisher who shortened his name from the distinctive Hiranandani to just Hira had an uncanny knack of being always being ahead of the media curve. In addition to the film magazines ‘Stardust’ and ‘Showtime’, he launched ‘Society’, one of the earliest magazines that wrote about wealthy and the elite. This was well before ‘Page 3’ celebrity became standard newspaper fare. Artists, politicians, business folk, the colourful stars of India’s nascent fashion industry, they were all featured in the pages of ‘Society.’ Hira was the first to showcase the idea of aspirational India.
But perhaps, one of his most radical publications was ‘Savvy’ magazine with its main feature– Savvy woman of the month. At a time when divorce was still kept a secret in the upper echelons of Indian society, ‘Savvy’ featured a slew of women who spoke openly of breaking away from abusive relationships; it put one of India’s first transgender models on the cover in the late 1980s as also the pioneer behind India’s first test tube baby, Dr Indira Hinduja. Savvy broke the mold of what most people thought women’s magazines should be like until then.
“His brilliance with copy was unmatched—every headline had to meet his exacting standards. If something fell short, he’d transform it in seconds. It empowered us to be the same way. Our brief was clear: we weren’t there to win popularity contests; we were there to be bold. Irreverence was the mantra,” says De for whom Hira remained her only ever boss.
“His energy was electric—a few minutes with him left you brimming with optimism and drive,” recalls Suma Varghese, the longstanding editor of ‘Society’ magazine.
Hira, who never married but adopted a son, Vikram, divided his time between Mumbai– where his penthouse spawned some literary writing by one of his mentees– London and New York. With restless mind and sharp news sense he was always looking for the Next Big Thing in the media. In the 1990s when the advent of VHS threatened the film industry, Hira launched Hiba Films that made several shows, inspired by Hollywood hits like ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ which were thinly-plotted but invariably featured a few risqué scenes bringing a certain prurience right into the purportedly puritanical Indian home.
As the magazine boom ebbed, Hira retreated into complete privacy, stepping out only occasionally to attend a soiree or two where, invariably, he would bump one or the other of his old colleagues like De or the film producers Ashwin Varde and Sarita Tanwar. “The thing that stood out about Mr Hira was how he treated his staff—with generosity and genuine concern for their well-being,” says Tanwar who worked with him at ‘Stardust’. “He treated everyone with respect and kindness, regardless of their position. It was classy.”