It was the year 2002 when two reporters at the beginning of their careers stood before a furious ‘TNG’. One was me, the other was a fellow reporter who covered the crime beat.
TNG or T.N. Gopalan, then Tamil Nadu Bureau Chief of The New Indian Express, was in a fit of rage as he had to deal with idiot cub reporters when he would rather be re-reading Das Kapital in the original German.
I exited TNG’s cabin with a cataract of tears and a ruptured ear-drum. There was nothing for my colleague and me to do except drown our sorrows in the lemon tea at the Rajendran roadside stall outside the Express office. Rajendran kindly added an extra scoop of sugar, and the parakeet couple that lived in a tree on the pavement offered commiserating squawks.
On November 18 of that fateful year, I was the reporter on night duty. I was two months into my first job as a daily news reporter. While on the shift, I would make a round of calls on the landline to the police, fire services, government hospitals and the weather department to check on developments. There was also an informal arrangement where we would call night-duty counterparts in other newspapers to check if they’d learnt of any late news alerts. A reporter in Dinamalar tipped me off on what he knew. A gangster in the city had been shot dead by the police, he said. I dutifully called the police, who gave out some details. I typed about 150 words and submitted the copy. The city desk was staffed by another young colleague, only a couple of years older than me. She used it to fill up a single column in the newspaper.
I did not think of telling the News Editor. Nor did I alert the Chief of Bureau or Chief Reporter. The crime reporter, who could have called in with more details, was probably asleep.
A job well done, I thought to myself. I did not realise then that an “encounter death” required far more serious treatment. That politics and human rights issues would be involved. That such cases can occupy courts for years. I’d treated a top story as a routine brief.
The Hindu, the only other morning newspaper in English in Chennai then, carried the story prominently, running it across four columns: ‘Gangster Sura, alias Suresh, of Vyasarpadi had been shot dead in a pre-dawn operation’.
The next day, my boss, TNG, pinned a warning memo on the reporting section’s notice-board for all to read. It was printed out on a dot-matrix printer and was over a page long. My mind has blocked out parts of the trauma so I don’t remember the details but the essence of the memo was that the crime reporter and I had dug ourselves deep in a four-letter word ending with ‘it’. We had missed out on giving an important development the coverage it demanded. And I would be watched carefully to find out if I could continue with my job and, indeed, my career.
Over two decades have passed and I’ve managed to stick to the newsroom. Not that there haven’t been missteps. In journalism, there is little room for slacking if you want to do a good job. Becoming complacent can mean missing a crucial story. On the desk, it can be vital to remember pitfalls that seasoned editors tell us to look out for and to keep deadlines sacrosanct. Otherwise, one had better be prepared for a dressing-down on the office WhatsApp group.
Course correction after making mistakes requires resilience and reflective thinking. As the lines in Batman Begins go, “Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
Along my journey, I’ve met several interesting colleagues — those who served me the bitter but healthy lesson on humility, those who laughed with me over goof-ups, those who showed the way by example, and those who offered second chances. I may have become a little wiser.
And what of the former colleague, my Express partner in crime and punishment on the encounter story? Perhaps I did something right. Reader, I married him.