Posts

Showing posts from April, 2009

Sabbatical Yay!

It’s a very slow day in office. Voting is going on in Mumbai and the whole world is closed, except the newspaper offices. People are also enjoying this brief break from rusty Mumbai life. As per the initial reports, the turnout is only about 10% in polling booths. Why trouble yourself standing in the crowd in this heat when you can sleep the whole day! But … Why should a business paper be open when the stock market, banks or any other financial institutions are closed is beyond me. Anyway, the boss is pretty calm today. He is a great journalist. He was trying his level best of rubbing his enthusiasm to me but with all my non-activities I have hopefully conveyed the message to him that I am not interested in being a great journalist as him. After several brave attempts including some bursts of inspiring lectures, he has realized his futility and is pretty chilled out with me now. These days he asks me about the weather instead of developments in my beat. I have successfully conveyed to

Laughable stuff

Sorry for not writing here for so long. Sorry for my last post that hurt you. That was intentional. I wanted to pick up a quarrel with somebody, I was fighting with myself, a weight that I wanted to throw at somebody and relax. Sadly nobody gulped the bait. I am sorry for myself. Journalism is taking away too much of my time. It discomforts me a great deal when I think about it. But the joy of this profession is that there is no accumulation of profit. You get your due then and there. If you are in a newspaper, you get your reward the next morning. The fun ends there though. Next day is a new day, a new challenge, a new tension about what you will write now? Today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s wastepaper for the readers. For reporters, today’s newspaper is the filthiest of waste paper. When you were writing the article, you were busy, bosses were happy. Now you are done. Now you are story-less, worse than being penny-less in the world. But still, you somehow pull yourself to dig a new hole