T R Gopalakrishnan, former editor-in-charge of The Week, died in Bengaluru in the early hours of Wednesday. Popularly known as Gopal or TRG, he was with The Week from 1983 until his retirement in February 2018. Of his 34 years at The Week, he spent 29 at the helm, steering the magazine to the top spot as India’s largest-selling English newsmagazine.
His LinkedIn bio had this to say about his early life: "Born and brought up in Delhi, took a brief stab at engineering at the IIT, Kanpur, but switched to journalism in 1974. My first assignment was as reporter cum subeditor at Motherland, a daily run by the then Jan Sangh party (now the BJP). The paper was shut down during the Emergency."
After Motherland, he spent three years with the Hindustan Times in Delhi before becoming the news editor of This Fortnight, a Delhi-based fortnightly. When former prime minister Chaudhary Charan Singh set up the Kisan Trust, Gopalakrishnan was appointed executive editor of the trust’s magazine, Real India.
He then changed his beat and city to move to Bombay to cover showbiz. He was assistant editor of Super, a film magazine, and news editor of Current, a tabloid newsweekly. After he retired from The Week, he joined Citizen Matters as a consulting editor.
He was part of the media delegation for Prime Minister A B Vajpayee’s visits to South Africa and China. The hardcore football fan visited South Africa as a special invitee ahead of FIFA World Cup 2010. He was widely travelled and had built up an impressive library over the years.
His wife, Geetha Srinivasan, predeceased him by 72 days—on September 4, 2023.
Gopalakrishnan hailed from a family with roots in journalism. His father, T V Rajagopalan, was a journalist and his mother, Vijayalakshmi Rajagopalan, was the librarian at United News of India (UNI) in Delhi.
He is survived by his sister, Malathi Ramachandran, and brother, T R Ramachandran, a senior journalist who was with The Tribune among other publications.
