Remembering Pranay Gupte
My former boss and mentor Pranay Gupte passed away this weekend in Florida.
Pranay's path was one I hoped to follow: Brandeis University, Columbia Journalism school, and an illustrious career at the New York Times, on the foreign desk. I matched him on the first two, but though I never was stationed in Ouagadougou for the Gray Lady, Pranay did hire me to be the General Manager for the launch of the Earth Summit Times in 1991. Pranay conceived and founded the Earth Summit Times (later the Earth Times) to cover the UN's "prepcom" (preparatory meetings) in 1991 and then the actual UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, the grandfather of all of the UN climate meetings (call it "COP Zero"). It seems obvious now, but his insight in seeing that space as unique, critically important, and underreported was profound.
Working at that newspaper at 26 years old — staffed almost entirely by brilliant, retired ink-stained legends from the NY Times and other major news organizations — I got an incredible education that I could not have dreamed of elsewhere. Besides Pranay, there was the late Dick Shepard, Gerald Fraser, Evan Jenkins, and Jack Freeman, Joy Elliott, Lynne Bundesen, and Khalid Ansari — just some of the giants from whom I learned. And amazing professionals in other fields who taught me so much, like Marian Rivman, Lianne Sorkin, Steve Berman, and so many others.
One of the responsibilities Pranay gave me was to reach out to Earth heroes — like Robert Redford, Nobel laureates Oscar Arias and Wangari Mathai, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Al Gore — and try to get them to write for us. (A practice I later resumed at HuffPost, connecting with global thought leaders and bringing them onto that platform.)
The Earth Summit Times position was the gig of a lifetime — a lightning-speed introduction into the complex but essential environment and climate space; access to the halls of the UN with associate-delegate status, and getting to know every hallway and corner of that institution, getting to meet both leaders and lifers, who were only too happy to share details that later turned into "Talk of the Town"-type pieces for New York magazine (like the story about the battle between the City and the Chinese UN mission in the East 30s over the placement of a restroom in a park across the street, which had negative feng shui, or another on scofflaw diplomats not paying their parking tickets — a story that later drew inquiries from "60 Minutes").
Through it all, Pranay — at times loving and embracing, at times hot tempered — was the leader of that three-ring circus, and he kept that paper going for another dozen years. Born in Mumbai, he also authored a number of well-regarded books, including a political account of Indira Gandhi, “Mother India.”
Sending love and warm wishes to his son Jaidev and to the many other colorful characters that got to know him from the Earth Times ecosystem. — Lance Gould
