Veteran journalist Samuel Rajappa, whose association with The Statesman would have extended to six decades in another week, passed away in Canada late last night, according to information received from his family. He was 85 and is survived by his two sons, Sanjiv Samuel, who lives in Canada, and Manu Prabhakaran, who is based in Fiji.
In the course of a career that began with the Free Press Journal in 1960, and where as he would laughingly recall he sometimes shared his tiffin break with Bal Thackeray, then a cartoonist with the paper, Sam played several key roles – as a political correspondent, editor, leader writer and mentor to many journalists, including the editor of this newspaper. For his long and distinguished service to the cause of journalism, he was awarded the Raja Ram Mohun Roy award by the Press Council of India in 2017.
Born near Kanyakumari in the erstwhile Madras Presidency, Sam joined The Statesman as a Sub-editor on 22 January 1962. A few years later, he was posted as the paper’s Special Representative to Thiruvananthapuram and then moved to Chennai. For many years, he covered the four Southern states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh for the paper, single-handedly and with great distinction.
Rajappa took two brief sabbaticals from the paper – to be the Southern bureau chief of India Today in the early 1980s and to be founder-editor of AP Times a decade later. But The Statesman, as he would often say, was his home. Concurrently and for about a decade and a half, he was also the South India correspondent of BBC.
In 2008, he agreed to relocate from Chennai to Kolkata to become the first Director of The Statesman Print Journalism School and set up the academic protocols that are followed to this day. A few years later, he moved back to Chennai because of his health, but continued to be associated with The Statesman as an Editorial Consultant, contributing editorials and articles, and with the school, where he would return annually to deliver a series of hugely popular lectures. His last piece, written from Canada where he was visiting his elder son, was published on 25 December and his annual sojourn to Kolkata was planned for later this month.