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Tejeshwar Singh was known for baritone voice and perfect diction

Tejeshwar Singh

NEW DELHI: Tejeshwar Singh, former managing editor of SAGE India and long-time Doordarshan newsreader, died at his hillside home in Landour (above Mussoorie) on Saturday. He was 60, and is survived by his wife and twin daughters.

Son of a former diplomat, Mr. Singh did his schooling in Doon School and went to St. Stephens College here and Balliol College, Oxford. Back home, he joined the publishing industry as an editor with Macmillan India and later headed its Delhi operations.

In 1981, Mr. Singh left Macmillan to set up SAGE India, starting with two employees, a portable typewriter and a room above the garage.

In 2006, when he retired as Managing Director of SAGE after facilitating its incorporation into the global SAGE group, it had grown into a company with three imprints, SAGE India, Response Books and Vistaar Publications, 150 employees, over 1,300 books and 28 journals in print.

While SAGE India is his lasting legacy, Mr. Singh is most remembered as the Doordarshan newsreader with a beard, baritone voice and perfect diction.

It was he who announced the Emergency on Doordarshan.

He left it in protest against the Emergency and returned three years later to continue with the network till 2003.

Besides being the non-executive chairman of the board of directors of the SAGE Group, he was helping Independent Publishers Distribution Alternatives (IPDA) — a collective of eight small, progressive publishers — with their business plan.

Recalls Ritu Menon of Women Unlimited — one of the eight publishers in IPDA and someone who has known Mr. Singh since the two did their under-graduation in Delhi University together — “he would have been a consultant with us.” Also, according to Ms. Menon, he had plans to write a book. About what? She was not sure because he was a “very private person.”

A view shared by T.N. Madan, former director of the Institute of Economic Growth, who was introduced to Mr. Singh in the 1970s by Macmillan’s managing editor Samuel Israel as someone who would become the finest editors of this country. “His big frame might have made him look aggressive, but he was an extremely cultured and gentle person, and a highly competent professional.”

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