Raipur Live

Deliciously snarky
Heartbreakingly blunt
Your exaggerated sighs
The twinkle in your eyes

I thought you hated me
For being boring and foppish
For my timidity and caution

Ah! What self-hate I bore
For wanting you to like me
The stray tears shed
On cold quiet mornings
Inside the warm quilt
For 40 days

An early morning catharsis
Oaths made on secret papers

Struggling through the Raipur Lives
Nervously seeing off midnights
Learning to edit fast
For edgy page makers
Fighting with headlines and deadlines
And precision over 13 hour days
Learning your craft
Earning a reputation

And then one night
You made my day
When ‘Do it like her’ you bellowed
As they cowered and mock glared at me

And just like that
For the first time ever
I was part of a gang; your gang

Then came the 3am rides
To the city outskirts
In a dilapidated Omni
Full of hungry, tired bodies
Two women and five men
Searching for hot naans
And fast readymade chicken

The truckers thought us insane
When we poked irreverent fun
At words, languages and politicos
And cussed every region in India
We, who came from Nagpur
Indore, Patna, Calcutta, Delhi
Orissa, Punjab and Kerala

Tearing into food
Telling histories
Listening to tales
Shaping thoughts and minds
Forming everlasting bonds
Over paneer exotica and Pepsi

Greeting dawn at the railway station
With hot creamy teas and aloo bondas
Watching people embark and land
Enough times, to be homesick at 21

I mourn the loss of those times
Those nights and dawns that made me
Freed me then, they defined my now
You made me
I like it and hate it
I have your precision
I have your flaws too
What irony!

Amol and Perneet and Rohit
Pagemakers par excellence
What trouble shooters!
Kshama – You deadline juggler
May your daughter be as naughty as you
Chandan – for the slowest ever editing
But say ‘Chandan did it’
To get any editor off your back

How I miss you all!
The Live team, they called us

Ah Manish!
This was all about you, always
Thanks for all the whipcracks
Literal and otherwise
For all the listening
For setting high standards
For making me seek perfection
Even within nightly deadlines

Thanks for the sunrises
The madness of nights
The introspective afternoons

And for being there, always.