Life's like that: The life of the guardians of the newsroom

Khaleej Times

20-03-2025

'You missed the Iftar?'
Charles messaged closer to putting the newspaper to bed sometime in the past week. The CEO was talking about that night's Iftar party hosted by the group for its KT staff.
The air in the office had been thick with all the euphoria that accompanied a mega night. Anamika was seen in her cabin unabashedly putting on another round of highlighter. Somya floated around in casual elegance with her maroon cardigan flapping its wings in the air she carried about herself.
Ajanta and Meher had a spring in their steps when they put on their new abaya to add an Emirati touch to the evening and stilettoed many a heart as they played hide and seek in the newsroom and left in a jiffy.
No sooner had Alia'a from HR barged in and shouted in her idiosyncratic high decibel to keep moving, than an eerie silence enveloped the newsroom. With just five print desk journos left behind, it felt as cold as a morgue. I felt like a lone pianist playing to a gore of zombies in the ungodly hours. I crooned the old number What a Feeling by Irene Cara a bit louder than usual. My office room occasionally turned into a concert hall when the world spined as dull as ditchwater with little tragedies reported to satiate our souls.
To quote yours truly himself, night editors in the newsroom are like grave diggers; the business of tragedies keep them young and energetic. Or like a pack of bloodthirsty hyenas sniffing around for carcasses in the wild. Like kindergarten children merrily count, 10…20…30, the editors would keep counting death tolls to get higher numbers in headlines.
Charles's query, 'You missed the Iftar?', immediately scrambled a flight of memories.
'No worries. Have been missing evenings since 1982,' I replied and continued with my production work.
Yes, circa 1982. That's when I joined this profession, not really knowing it would wrench all my mornings and evenings, and other paraphernalia packaged with the phenomena. Was I really ready to miss out on such wow moments that inspire millions across the globe? I'm not sure.
Thousands of years and millions of verses later, the literati are still mining words to glorify the sunrise and the sunset. Millions spend billions travelling to the best vantage points in the world such as Santorini in Greece, Uluru in Australia, Serengeti in Tanzania, Isle of Skye in Scotland, and Mount Bromo in Indonesia to capture the magical moments, while I sit in an obscure newsroom lecturing the difference between the colon and the semi-colon.
Back in time in Mumbai where I initially worked, we closed the newsroom when the city shuttered most activities for the day — err night. Police would roam in the city to enforce the closing time for pubs and night clubs. Hungry and tired we would slither out of the press looking to grab something to eat, and a drink or two to satiate our egos. With pub doors slammed on the face, we would knock on 'auntie joints', or roadside huts where women moonshined to make a living. We would mostly make do with a few gulps of hootch and a boiled egg and make the beds on the wooden desks back in the newsroom.
We were people who swam against the current all through our lives. When we went home sleepy-eyed after a night's work, we walked against a steady stream of fresh-looking officegoers. It was vice versa in the afternoon when we returned to our night jobs. We weren't there when our children went to school; we weren't there when they returned home; we weren't there to tutor them for exams. We failed to watch their progress from toddlers to teens.
Gone with wind after choosing the profession were some of my long-nurtured ambitions. In Mumbai, I always wanted to master the violin at the iconic Shanmukhananda Hall, but the classes were in the evening. The night job again threw a spanner in my dream works when a Singapore film institute rejected my candidature on the ground that I wouldn't be available for all-night shoots.
Social life was a big no-no as such things always happened in the evenings. Wellbeing was pushed under the mat as we slept through the mornings and slogged through the evenings when others were out and about. People would gradually stop inviting us, so concerts, ballets, poetry nights and such gala events never happened to us.
Our existence has shrunk to a little bubble the profession has blown into our lives. We are prisoners of our own identities, our own thoughts, and our own device.