Dear Express reader, Chandan Mitra, editor and politician, died on Wednesday night. His going leaves an empty space. He was the reporter-editor who opened up the newsroom to so many young people who knocked on his doors, often with nothing more to recommend them but a few articles they had managed to get published and a conviction that, if given the chance, they could write more and better. He was the editor who was also a generous teacher. Though his stint in politics was not anywhere near as distinguished as his achievements in journalism, he brought to both professions an arc that was lively and vivid — and in these polarised times, so very rare. Ideologically and politically, he had traveled from Left to Right, but the disillusion or bitterness or vehemence that may have propelled that journey were leavened with an optimism, a merry sense of humour and a magnificent memory for event, idea and detail that seemed to put everything in perspective and in its place, before anything could become overpowering or oppressive. As much as he was intensely political, he was deeply and passionately in love with (not in that order) music, film, travel, dogs. Those passions mingled in his writing and politics as well, made them warmer and more humane, opened them up to the outdoors and rescued them from becoming self-righteous or solipsistic. The passing of someone like Chandan Mitra would have been widely mourned at any time. But the loss seems especially felt in times when both journalism and politics are increasingly denuded of the richer and mellower spaces. And when in both professions, only the harder and shriller voices, that have lost the language to speak to one another, rise to the surface. Whether it was in the smoke-filled editorial meetings he presided over with relish — before it became politically incorrect and generally unfashionable to smoke in indoor spaces — or at the evening soirees he loved going to and being seen at, disagreeing with Chandan Mitra was a bracing thing to do. And he was always up for it, provoking you to take him on, even as he, clearly having a good time, took you down a peg or two. He was in the BJP, and as a two-time Rajya Sabha MP, bore witness to both the hardening of its politics and its spectacular electoral rise. In 2018, he left Narendra Modi’s party to join Mamata Banerjee’s TMC, which ruled in West Bengal, and was on its way to becoming a powerful challenger to the BJP, even on the national scene. But being on the winning side did nothing to dim his love for a pugnacious opponent, his enjoyment of a good fight. Well before illness forced him to withdraw from public life, the space was receding for those like Chandan Mitra, in a political climate that is being drained of colour, where disagreement and dissent are forced to lie low, and in which, vis a vis the dominant common sense, there is a premium on agreeing to agree. He was my first editor, and it seems so bare, so inadequate, to say this: RIP Chandan. Till next week, Vandita | 
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