Vinod Dua speaks during a TV show. File

The pioneering and anti-establishment television journalist, and a walking encyclopaedia on India's culinary secrets, Vinod Dua, passed away on Saturday, months after he lost his wife, the well-known radiologist Padmavati 'Chinna' Dua, during the peak of the pandemic earlier this year.

Vinod Dua, a recipient of the Padma Shri and the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, was suffering from post-Covid complications and was 67 at the time of his death.

Most recently, Dua was in the news when the Supreme Court invoked its 1962 judgment in the Kedar Nath Singh case to quash the charge of sedition brought against him under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code by a BJP MLA in Himachal Pradesh.

Dua had been accused of making comments critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Sharing the news of his death on Instagram, Mallika Dua, Vinod and Chinna Dua's comedienne daughter, wrote: "He lived an inimitable life, rising from the refugee colonies of Delhi to the peak of journalistic excellence for over 42 years, always, always speaking truth to power."

A generation has grown up seeing Vinod Dua, back in 1974, anchoring 'Yuva Manch,' Doordarshan's popular programme for young people in the age of black-and-white television.

This generation remembers the warm, affable and politically outspoken Vinod Dua as the first television personality to make Hindi 'cool', long before the late SP Singh and Udayan Sharma became the bridges between Lutyens's Delhi and the Hindi heartland.

Indo-Asian News Service