I felt heavy in heart because strangely enough, I had been asking after him just a month ago and had been told he was sick and I had been thinking a lot about him – the first time we met, the things I learnt from him, the good times we had – but I didn’t try hard enough to make contact because it seemed everybody I knew had also lost contact.

Such is life, you wait and it passes you by.

Mike was the man who brought TTG Asia to the region and gave me my break in travel journalism, the one who gave me that first job back in Kuala Lumpur as correspondent for TTG Asia and Asia Computer Weekly.

I had just walked out of a job at the New Straits Times, in rather dramatic fashion. I wrote a letter to the chief editor complaining about my boss whom I felt was incompetent and unworthy of respect. Ah, the arrogance of youth. As a reporter, my ambition had been to work for the national daily and when it turned out not to be what I expected or rather what I had feared, I got a bit lost – didn’t know if this was what I should be doing in my own country.

And then I saw an ad for the position of correspondent for an international travel trade newspaper and computer newspaper. I applied. I met Mike. He was a round, jolly fellow.

I remember him asking me, “What would you like to be? ” And I said, rather tritely, “You. But just your job.”

Mike, who was managing editor as well as an owner of Asian Business Press, which owned TTG Asia, gave me the job, helped me set up office in Kuala Lumpur since I was their first Malaysian reporter. I sat in a corner of the Burson Marsteller’s offices. “There you go,” Mike said. “Now you can start filing stories.”

Mike came from the old world of “baptism by fire”. Do it. Learn it. Fast. I will catch you when you fall. But don’t fall too often. He came from Fleet Street, and he was particular about grammar, style and headlines.

And so I learnt about travel and computers. The latter was tougher, ACW was a trade paper for techies – I knew nothing about it. Travel was more accessible. But soon, I was juggling both subjects and managing two editors whose demands were different yet similar – lots of copy please.

I have to thank Mike for showing me the editing ropes. As a reporter, you like to use words. As an editor, the fewer words the better. “When in doubt, cut it out,” he said. He loved writing headlines and that too I learnt from him. Short, sharp, crisp.

Even though there was an editor for TTG Asia, it was Mike who spent more time with me in those first few months. After a few months, he asked if I’d like to be transferred to Singapore, which I accepted, promoted me to Deputy Editor of TTG Asia, and after a few months in Singapore, he asked me if I’d liked to be posted to Hong Kong after his company bought Media magazine – and I subsequently became editor of Media, while retaining deputy editorship of TTG Asia.

So you can see, what I am today, I owe it to Mike who gave me my first and subsequent breaks. I am now writing about computers, travel and marketing.

I don’t think Mike got the credit he ought to for bringing an English travel trade newspaper out to Asia in those days, when the travel industry was just developing and Asia was an infinitely foreign market. But, like a true editor, he was happy to stay in the background while we journalists got the trips, wrote and got the bylines.

I remember Mike as a jolly fellow. He was also caring. And he was reserved and intensely private.

He loved a tipple or two though. “One for the road,” and we would laugh. I remember long lunches – he loved his curries as well. I remember once he came back from Penang and he had a tan line that cut lengthwise down his face. He had fallen asleep in the sun with an umbrella covering half his countenance.

He was a kid at heart, I suspect. He loved his work, he was proud of journalism, he was old-fashioned about that and I don’t think he cared much for what the new owners did to his business after he sold it to them. But by then, I believe, he was out of the company.

I wonder what he thought about the Internet and all that. “Rubbish,” he would say. “These people can’t spell.”

I had a good relationship with him because we didn’t have to talk about money matters too much, since I didn’t have to manage budgets at that time.

We only talked about words, headlines, journalism, travel – things which mattered to us.

I lost touch with Mike after he left Singapore for Gold Coast, Australia where he spent the rest of his years. I am sorry we didn’t stay in contact but then the tidal wave of life had washed us both apart.

But I will always remember Mike as the first man who mattered the most in my working life.

(I did another post about Mike and mentors here)