November 4, 1977. An Indian Air Force special aircraft carrying Prime Minister Morarji Desai and his son Kanti Desai took off from the Palam airport of Delhi on an official tour. That night, it crashed into the slushy paddy fields near Jorhat in Assam. The Prime Minister and his son survived miraculously. But five members of the crew died in the accident.

Among the 17 other survivors were two journalists deputed to cover the Prime Minister's tour: K Govindan Kutty of All India Radio and NVR Swami of the Press Trust of India.

Kutty, then in his early thirties, lived 49 more years, long enough to tell this extraordinary tale along with many other explosive stories, before he passed away quietly in a senior living home in Thiruvananthapuram the other day. Kutty, known to friends and colleagues as “KGK”, used to recall the incident with his trademark humour that literally made him “accidentally famous”.

Most remarkably, the accident also gave KGK his biggest newsbreak. Wading through the marshy fields on that ill-fated night with mud up to his knees and nearly blind in the pitch darkness after losing his spectacles, KGK, along with Swami, trudged about eight kilometres to the nearest army camp. From there, he managed to book a trunk call to the AIR’s Delhi office. By the time KGK got through, barely 15 minutes remained before the last bulletin of 11 PM. In those precious minutes, he conveyed to the world the eyewitness account of the Prime Minister's survival, which was his own survivor story as well. The journalist’s instinct was to turn the catastrophe into history. However, many years later, KGK said in an interview with a sense of modesty, rare among journalists, “As with most great stories, everything about it was accidental. I just happened to be at the right place, at the right time. If I were unable to stand up and walk that night or if a Malayali Havildar Mathew had not directed me to the nearby army camp, the story would not........

© Mathrubhumi English