On April 10, 2014, I stepped into The Hindu ’s MetroPlus office for the first time. The cosy room, with its soothing warm yellow lights, was a flurry of activity — phones were ringing off the hook, broadsheets were being passed around for approval and people were frantically typing away at their computers. And me? I was shuffling uncomfortably, sweating profusely and desperately hoping that I wouldn’t jumble up my words while talking.
I was unemployed at the time and the only compelling argument I was armed with was, “I really want this job”. MetroPlus head, Bishwanath Ghosh, who was poring over a broadsheet, looked up at me absent-mindedly, handed me a visiting card and said, “It’s production time now. Why don’t you send me an email?”
I smiled weakly; there was no chance that a Senior Deputy Editor of The Hindu was going to check an email from a then 22-year-old who was looking for her first job and hadn’t even gone to journalism school. I felt decidedly dejected even as I churned out an email with writing samples later that night. I received a response in a little over an hour. And exactly a week later, the first piece I wrote went to print, and was published alongside a piece by the boss himself, in the first edition of Melange. Two weeks after that, even before I received my offer letter from the company, my story went on the cover of the new supplement. And just like that, even before I realised it was happening, I’d become a part of MetroPlus.
When I started out though, I was clueless. Daily deadlines and an everyday production cycle shrouded everything in a sense of madness. It took months of asking incessant questions about people, places and punctuations before I got used to the everyday rhythm of working in a newsroom.
In the year since, it’s been a roller-coaster ride of churning out stories with often impossible deadlines, meeting interesting people doing eclectic things and devouring so much food that I’ve had to revamp my wardrobe along the way. For, in Metroplus, we eat. We eat because Susanna Myrtle Lazarus decides that since she’s going to stay up all night writing, she might as well bake a batch of warm chocolate chunk cookies for the office. We also eat when food critic Shonali Muthalaly brings back a bag of delectable goodies after a review — a culture she has thankfully striven to incorporate. And other times, we just whisk one of workaholic Esther Elias’ biscuits — she usually has a treasure trove of it because it’s the only food that lets her work away with minimal interruption. However, we don’t eat health-conscious Preeti Zachariah’s salads, even though she always politely offers it around, because even though we are gluttonous, we are still elitist in our sin.
When we aren’t eating, we are usually laughing. Either because Chitra Swaminathan has found a new person to imitate, or Priyadarshini Paitandy has ordered one more complicated outfit that none of us can figure out how to wear, or simply because Srinivasa Ramanujam has come up with yet another “mokka joke” which has the rest of us in splits. We usually stop laughing when even-tempered Akila Kannadasan reminds us that she is trying to write — an activity which is often a challenge in the noisy MetroPlus bay. As each day wears on, and we get closer to our everyday deadline, the otherwise chilled-out Maya Menon starts humming in panic and Deepa Alexander, who is usually calm and collected, starts typing in caps mid-sentence.
We work our way through six-day weeks that are interspersed with food and laughter. Yet, we often have days when the workload makes us skip meals and shut ourselves in for hours trying to come up with a stellar piece of work. Tempers flare, people argue and quite a bit of time is spent staring into the distance for a “sparkling new idea”. The boss, however, has an easy and often incomprehensible faith in our abilities to write and support is often at hand from colleagues. But most importantly, we are aware that most people of this city complement their morning cup of filter kaapi with the words we pen. And that’s just about enough reason to keep writing every day.
The work, even when it drowns us, also binds us. While Shonali once flared up on my behalf when an artist I was interviewing yelled at me, strong-willed Apoorva Sripathi left an open offer to punch any boy who may cause me trouble after we wrote a story about Tinder dating. With work and all else we do together, we’ve all found ourselves a little family in MetroPlus and working for this newspaper is grand fun.
As Melange turns one, I too age a year as a MetroPlus writer. It’s been an incredible year. I’ve woken up at 4 a.m. to watch boys from North Madras play football and wrapped up at 1 a.m. after an international stand-up comic had the audience in splits. I’ve met bad-tempered monks, cheery millionaires and some celebrities I never knew about. As I’ve learnt to write faster, describe better and ask marginally fewer questions at work, Melange has chiselled an identity for itself as the supplement that lures readers on weekends.
There’s still a long way for the both of us — every day is an opportunity to learn and every edition is a chance to get better. But for now, we are glad for how far we’ve come. And excited for how much farther we have the ability to go. Happy Anniversary, Melange!
