A voice in the darkness

Journalism is one career that does not require you to have towering academic credentials. Although The Times of India needs you to! What this career takes is a passion for news, to believe that you contribute towards social change, to put work above self. Journalism of yore was hard. There was no money in it. The case is different today, which is also the reason many rotten apples have got into the basket. I don't think I am a rotten apple, but that is for others to decide and me to give a damn! I started out as a subeditor in The Navhind Times, Goa, a kid with an acute lack of will-power, but lofty dreams. Navhind happened when I was thinking about a dotcom venture, then an MBA. Circumstances conspired to chuck both in the trash! A little ad in the newspaper resulted in me sitting opposite Mr Arun Sinha's great table, talking to the editor who would teach me what it meant to be a journalist. "We'll pay you fifteen hundred rupees," he said. That was a lot of money...

After five years of working on the newsdesk of three newspapers I find myself pondering over one question, 'Whither commitment?' Is journalism all about achieving cult status and big bucks today? Not that these virtues are a problem. Prannoy Roy makes a lot of money, Vinod Mehta does too and so do a number of other senior journalists. So why do I respect people like Roy and Mehta while I can't stand some of the other journalists? Commitment, lack of initiative and a lot of times, paucity of grey matter! Yeah, a lot of people tell me, 'What do you know about people like Roy, they do this, they do that...' That's fine, I judge people by the manner in which they speak and conduct themselves. And, of course, what they produce! Today, quality has been slaughtered at the altar of sensationalism. Yes, there are feature editors who believe that Britney going bald merits a pointer on the front page. Tell them about a pile of children's bones found in the vicinity of ...