How journalism guru Roy Peter Clark helped to turn a classified ad into a heartwarming newspaper story

"Bird — Cockatiel, grey with white face. St. Pete Beach area. Whistles at toes!  Heartbroken. [Phone number]..."

This was the classified ad that senior journalist and columnist Roy Peter Clark of Poynter Online saw in Florida's St. Petersburg Times (now renamed Tampa Bay Times). But why was Clark looking at the classifieds in the first place? And how did this ad then become a news story?

First, the answer to the first question: Clark is writing a new book titled Help! For Writers. "The book will list 25 of the most common writing problems, with 10 suggested solutions for each," he writes on his Poynter blog. "The problem in question was 'I am out of story ideas.' "

Clark continues:

...what better place to find [stories] than in the news.

Begin with the small stories, the ones that play inside the paper. Look for announcements of events you might write about. Scour the classified ads, in the paper and online.

He says he realised then that he needed a real-life example and he rushed downstairs to grab a copy of that day's St. Petersburg Times.

And now comes the story about the story:

Then I wrote: "It took exactly 30 seconds to find the telephone number of a person who lives on the beach and is heartbroken because her cockatiel — who whistles at toes — is missing. So what are you waiting for? Get to work. Dial that number."

A little later it occurred to me that the bird story deserved more than a mention in a book that might not be published for more than a year. So I sent a message to editor Kelley Benham at the Times. I had confidence that Kelley, who once wrote an epic story about a rogue rooster named Rockadoodle Two, would give it a good look. Not only did we have a lost bird and a heartbroken owner, but the bird apparently had a foot fetish.

Kelley messaged me back that reporter Stephanie Hayes was "all over" the story. And she was, producing a piece that got good play in the paper, and told the sad tale of an old man living on St. Pete Beach, whose beloved bird, named Shadow for its gray feathers, had flown away.

All novice reporters and aspiring journalists and college students working on the editorial desk of their newspaper should read Clark's post to learn what happened next. And to learn how to originate and develop local stories. Because that is the big challenge, isn't it? How do you find stories every day? And how do you write them so that they are good enough for your publication?

Read Roy Peter Clark's post in its entirety: "Need a Story Idea? Check Lost and Found". And then read Clark's superlative column on how to tighten up your writing.

• For some practical tips on finding stories, read "100 places to shop for stories", by Gregg McLachlan, on the News College website.

• And also check out this Reading Room post: "Point your mouse to Poynter" (Poynter Online claims it has "everything you need to be a better journalist". I believe it.).

• Photo courtesy:  St. Petersburg Times/ TampaBay.com

So you want help with job interviews...

Who doesn't?

That is why Matthew J. DeLuca and Nanette F. DeLuca have written Best Answers to the Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions.

And that's why Mint has, helpfully, published edited excerpts — questions and answers — from the book.

Here are a few questions featured in the book:

• What is the reason you left/are planning to leave your organisation?

• Do you instant-message? Do you twitter? Do you like to use emails? Do you have a BlackBerry or iPhone?

• Have you ever worked for or with a difficult person?

• What do you like the most about this position? What do you like the least about this position?

• What is your current salary?

Want to know the "best" answers? Go to "An ace up your sleeve".

• Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions: By Matthew J. and Nanette F. DeLuca,Tata McGrawHill, 217 pages, Rs. 250.'

UPDATE (October 1, 2013): Read these two posts before you head out for that job interview:

1.  Five Things You Must Not Do in an Interview and Five Things You Must

2. What Interviewers Wish They Could Tell Every Job Candidate 

UPDATE (April 24, 2014): Richard A. Moran, CEO of an American company, offers a thought-provoking riff on what he calls The #1 Interview Trap Question. You'll be surprised, as I was, to learn what that question is.

What makes us tick?

If you want to understand what makes India tick, read India Unbound, by Gurcharan Das.

If you want to understand what makes the world tick, read Longitudes and Attitudes, by Thomas L. Friedman.

(Both books are available in the Commits library.)

MARK HADDON

But, surely, we also want to know what makes us tick. In that case, read A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon, to better understand the human condition. Yes, it's a novel, a work of fiction. But it smacks of reality all the same, dealing as it does with the madness of family life.

There's so much we can learn from the book that was hailed by the New York Times as "a fine example of why novels exist".


FROM A SPOT OF BOTHER:

• Aphorisms to live by-1

George chewed this over for a minute or two. When men had problems they wanted someone to give them an answer, but when women had problems they wanted you to say that you understood.

• Aphorisms to live by-2

You could say all you liked about reason and logic and common sense and imagination, but when the chips were down the one skill you needed was the ability to think about absolutely nothing whatsoever.

• Aphorisms to live by-3

...it occurred to him [Jamie] that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people.The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.

• Aphorisms to live by-4

Perhaps the secret was to stop looking for greener grass. Perhaps the secret was to make the best of what you had.

• Aphorisms to live by-5

And Ray said, "Eventually you realise that other people's problems are other people's problems."

FYI, Mark Haddon is the author of that massive bestseller, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (also available in the Commits library).

• Photo courtesy: The New York Times

"Push us. Push yourself."

In a recent post titled, "What's the point of being educated if you're illiterate?", I criticised our education system and our educators for failing our youngsters. I highlighted the inability of many undergraduate and master's level students to even spell simple words correctly and I wrote:

Neither at the high school level nor at the undergraduate level do teachers bother, I am told, to check and correct spellings in their pupils' written assignments and examination answer sheets. One reason for this may be the inability to deal with, and lack of time for, 40 or 50 or more students. However, I suspect that lack of interest is also a problem.

Yesterday Faye D'Souza (Class of 2004) sent me the link to a brilliant blog post by American entrepreneur and author Seth Godin lambasting "mediocre professors" and the education system in the US. See how much we have in common?

Godin, who popularised the concept of "permission marketing", is highly critical of...

"...professors who spend hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook... professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field, professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. ... And most of all, professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt."

And Godin concludes by coining a slogan after my own heart when he urges students to tell their teachers:

"This is costing me a fortune, prof! Push us! Push yourself!"

Now, Commitscions, where have you heard that before?

***

Earlier this month, on October 20, Seth Godin made another astute observation on the importance of reading (thanks for this link, too, Faye):

If you're in the idea business, what's going to improve your career, get you a better job, more respect or a happier day? Forgive me for suggesting (to those not curious enough to read this blog and others) that it might be reading blogs, books or even watching TED talks.

I am so glad that there are others out there who believe that reading can transform our lives. And who are happy to rant about it.

To read Godin's post in its entirety, go to "Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant]".

• Photo courtesy:  #SethSaid.com

Street artist extraordinaire

Not many may know that an anonymous artist known only as "JR" last week received the 2011 TED Prize, a $100,000 (approx. Rs.44.5 lakh) award given by the non-profit organisation.

TED, or Technology Entertainment and Design, sought someone "who has a track record for changing the world in innovative ways, who hopefully has mobility and charisma, and who works on a global level," TED Prize director Amy Novogratz told the US magazine Fast Company. "And he does all those things."

"THE HILLS HAVE EYES IN THIS INSTALLATION IN A BRAZILIAN FAVELA."

 The article, by David Zax, continues:

JR, who keeps mum on the real name his initials stand for, joins the ranks of Bill Clinton, E.O. Wilson, and U2's Bono, previous prize recipients.

JR's canvas is the world. The Parisian guerrilla artist eschews museums, favoring the crumbling walls of the world's slums to the austere halls of its museums. (Even so, the Tate Modern did give him 100 feet of an external wall, and a 2009 auction of one of his prints fetched over 35 grand). Somewhat in the vein of the British artist Banksy, well known for his politically charged graffiti murals, JR will show up at slum, shantytown, or favela, often braving streets so mean that its children run around in bulletproof jackets. Once there, he enlists a crew of locals and erects enormous black-and-white photographic canvases on the walls, typically human faces or figures that lend a dignified air to a forgotten neighborhood.

You have to take a look at these "enormous black-and-white photographic canvases" to realise that TED has made a wise choice.

Watch the slide show: "Street Artist J R Wins the TED Prize".

• Photo courtesy: Fast Company

Salman Khan gets a glowing video testimonial from Bill Gates

That's because he's a really, really good teacher. No, this is not Sallu bhai we're talking about here but his namesake, a Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager who runs Khan Academy, surely the world's most unusual educational institute, from his home in Silicon Valley, California.

"This guy is amazing," Gates wrote in an email quoted in David Kaplan's article in the September 6 issue of Fortune. "It's awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources."

Kaplan continues:

Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. Then, several weeks ago, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave the 33-year-old Khan a shout-out that any entrepreneur would kill for. Ruminating on what he called the "mind-blowing misallocation" of resources away from education, Gates touted the "unbelievable" 10- to 15-minute Khan Academy tutorials "I've been using with my kids."

So what is Khan Academy?

According to Kaplan:

Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere and is by any measure the most popular educational site on the web. Khan's playlist of 1,630 tutorials (at last count) are now seen an average of 70,000 times a day ... Khan Academy has received 18 million page views worldwide.... Most page views come from the U.S., followed by Canada, England, Australia, and India. In any given month, Khan says, he's reached about 200,000 students. "There's no reason it shouldn't be 20 million."

Isn't that an incredible statistic?

What is also interesting is the way Kaplan structures his feature, which is not only a profile of Khan but also a look at individual achievement and a study of how venture capital companies and entrepreneurs sniff out the next big idea.

Read the article here: "Bill Gates' favourite teacher". You can visit Khan Academy here.

Outlook's peerless issue on the Indian media crisis

If you've an interest in the media (and every right-thinking person in our country should have an interest in the media), if you are a journalist, if you're an aspiring journalist, if you're a media student... rush to the nearest newsstand and grab a copy of Outlook's 312-page 15th anniversary issue.

In a brilliant section of essays, helmed by foreign editor Ajaz Ashraf, the magazine dissects what it refers to as the great Indian media crisis. For old fogeys like me some of the articles may have made for depressing reading but I take heart from the thought that Outlook has done Indian journalism a singular service by highlighting the ills that plague our newspapers, magazines, and television news channels. Younger journalists and would-be journalists, who will now understand better what is wrong with our media, thanks to Outlook, will be inspired to make an effort to put our house back in order. For that I am very grateful.

Here, to give you a flavour of this thought-provoking — and provocative — issue are excerpts from the stand-out essays:

1. The pen points to us, by Ajaz Ashraf

For Outlook’s 15th birthday, instead of cutting cakes, blowing out candles and printing inane power lists, we decided to tweak a popular cliche and say that journalists who live in glass houses must throw stones at others. Heck, we are journalists, taught to blow against the wind, even live dangerously.

The 15th anniversary issue you hold in your hands does precisely that: it throws stones at the giant media houses, their ambitious owners, their flamboyant editors and wily marketing honchos. We have chosen to defy the norm that dog won’t eat dog because the media is palpably in crisis. What’s worse, the deep gashes are all self-inflicted, by those like us in the media itself.

2. Why I quit the media, by Sumir Lal

I reported from Ayodhya in 1990 on a storming of the Babri Masjid, the police firing, the many deaths, the mayhem. After filing my story, I called my wife to let her know I was safe. While BCCL [the publishers of The Times of India] was raking in record profits, the accounts department refused to reimburse me the few rupees for that call. The expense statement went all the way up to the general manager, who did not approve. On another occasion, a colleague covering an election in a sprawling constituency had his taxi bill turned down on the ground that he could have used a rickshaw. That epitomised the contempt for the newsgathering process of a paper that the BBC mysteriously certified as one of the world’s six greatest.

3. Cut-rate democracy, by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

... corruption in the mass media in India and elsewhere is as old as the media itself. If there is corruption in society, it would be unrealistic to expect the media to be free of this affliction. In recent times, however, corruption in the Indian media has gone way beyond individuals and specific media organisations — from ‘planting’ information and spinning views in lieu of favours received in cash or kind — to institutionalised and organised forms of corruption wherein newspapers and TV channels receive funds for publishing or broadcasting information that is sought to be disguised as ‘news’ — but are actually designed to favour particular individuals, corporate entities, representatives of political parties or cash-rich candidates contesting elections.

4. Reading the reader, by Patrick French

Today, the media is in crisis; but that is not unusual, and it may not be a bad thing. The churning marks a moment of creativity. Anxiety about the state of the press indicates that people in India care about what newspapers, magazines, TV channels and websites are doing and thinking, which is not the case in countries with a less vigorous public debate. Now, Indians face further problems — trivialised reporting, predatory press owners and stories that are paid for by politicians and others.

5. "Our paper isn't for our editors. It's for people." Anjali Puri interviews the Times Group CEO, Ravi Dhariwal

Q: It was the Times that taught the Indian media that newspapers must pay for themselves. But readers have also seen walls collapsing between advertising and editorial. One question that comes up time and again is: is there a cap to greed? It seems like everything is on sale — the masthead, the front page, the editorial columns, the headlines....

 

A: Our editorial is priceless; it is never up for sale. I have worked here for 10 years now, not once have we ever influenced editorial decisions. We have no political agenda, our agenda is only reader engagement and relevance. We believe it is because of that that we get great advertising. Our editorial department and advertising department are totally separate. There is a Chinese wall. But if a client wants a particular design on the front page, why not? It does not upset what our editors write. To say that editors own that entire real estate, and nothing else should happen on it, is an old-fashioned formula.

6. What the hack!, by Shashi Tharoor

On the positive side, our newspapers are more readable, better edited and usually better written than they were. Every newspaper looks at the news more critically, with a clearly visible slant on the events it is reporting. Investigative stories are frequent and occasionally expose wrongdoing before any official institution does so. ... On the negative side, newspapers seem more conscious than ever that it is not they, but TV, that sets the pace.

THE OUTLOOK FEATURE ON SUNANDA PUSHKAR. "AN APPALLING PIECE," SAYS THAROOR.

Tharoor does not spare some of the media bigwigs, including Outlook, in his critique, citing the example of the hyper-coverage (most of it, including the Outlook article, was distasteful, in my opinion) given to his soon-to-be wife:

Part of the problem is a genuine disinclination to take the trouble to research a story, and a disregard for the need to verify it. Outlook ran an appalling piece on my wife Sunanda, in which every second statement was provably false or inaccurate, without consulting either her or her friends about their veracity. (To the magazine’s credit, it also ran a flood of letters pillorying it for the piece.) The Times of India got taken in by one of the many fake Facebook sites purporting to be Sunanda’s (she is not on any social networking site) and ran an entire article quoting her supposed views, without ever checking as to whether the site was genuine. Mid-Day placed words and sentiments in the mouth of one of my sons at my wedding that he would never have thought and did not utter. Perhaps it is our country’s weak libel protections that lead publications to feel they can print anything with complete disregard to the fact that it could amount to character assassination. But it is a sad commentary on how low our print standards have fallen that the very notion of what is “fit to print” has ceased to have any meaning in India today (and in India Today as well, but that’s another matter).

7. Pow! Thud! Diss!, by Mark Tully

The most obvious place where the editor is missing from is the Breaking News slot, which usually deteriorates into a desperate struggle to fill airtime. After the BBC’s early encounter with 24-hour radio news during the first Gulf War, an old veteran of the newsroom said to his editor, “I reckon we’ve been broadcasting untreated sewage.” Apart from the lack of content, Breaking News consistently ignores two basic lessons I was taught. It was drummed into my head that film should never be used as wallpaper. But that is exactly what film is, or at least is for most of the time, in Breaking News.

8. Mainland discourse, by Sanjoy Hazarika

It could be argued ... that poor basic services and slothful, insensitive and corrupt administration have aggravated the political crisis both in the Northeast and Kashmir. This is often where the media fails to make the connection — insurgency and bad governance are part of the same coin, the same story — and often misses the point that lack of services exacerbates alienation. These are the kind of stories that must be leadership-driven, by editors of vision and perspective. For that, you need the kind of determined editors represented by the ilk of B.G. Verghese and P. Sainath. There aren’t many of them around.

9. Just bite, don't chew, by Dipankar Gupta

To a large extent, the poor quality of TV debates is largely because our broadcasters have little faith in their viewers. They believe the ordinary person wants to see only blood, gore and spittle. They’re probably right. The masses are like potatoes, true, but in different sacks of potatoes. They are switched on to their favourite channels, but with their minds switched off. Where TV anchors go wrong, very wrong, is when they disrespect their own, quite awesome, talents. Given their backgrounds and training, they should want to be tested by the best worldwide. TRPs are mere fig leaves. Why not go for the whole tree, figs and all?

10. Slips, a silly point, by Peter Roebuck

You can see why it isn’t easy for reporters to keep the BCCI on its toes. N. Srinivasan and company resent the critique provided by Cricinfo so much that they refuse to give them passes to Test matches. It is pettiness on the grand scale. It is also a warning to other scribes. Cricinfo has one million readers and is the second most important institution in cricket behind the BCCI. And still it can be ostracised.

And you must especially read, and try to answer, the questions Outlook editor Krishna Prasad has for readers (and viewers). "This isn’t about us, it’s about you," he writes. "While you, as a consumer, have the power to read, watch and listen to what you like, you, as a citizen, also have a responsibility that goes beyond paying for what you buy. Question is, how often do you exercise that right, since it’s in your name that a multitude of sins are committed?"

Go to "A manifesto for readers". 

There is more, much more to read, absorb, and act upon. This is a veritable collector's issue — why won't you want to own it?

Why is India TV what it is?

This is the television channel which was launched with the best of intentions, as Rahul Bhatia writes in a recent issue of Open. But somewhere down the line, after it failed to make any headway with viewers or advertisers, founder Rajat Sharma, of Aap Ki Adalat fame, decided on a change in strategy. "It was becoming a question of survival," Sharma tells Bhatia. "If I perished what would I do with my idealism?"

Bhatia also quotes extensively from an unnamed former bureau chief of India TV, according to whom the place was a haven for journalists, but it struggled to maintain its ideals and, as Bhatia writes, "slowly, quietly, the bureau head believes, the rules disappeared".

And then all sorts of bizarre programmes began to be telecast on the channel:

The former bureau head says, “One day they picked up a YouTube clip and ran it, saying, ‘Shaitan ki aankhen. Dekho shaitan ki aankhen’ (Eyes of Satan, watch the eyes of Satan). They made a half-hour show around the clip. Woh dikhaya. Log dekhte rahe. Baad mein kuch pata nahi chala (We showed it. People couldn’t stop watching it).”

Read this cautionary tale to understand why India TV is what it is today: "The world according to India TV".

"Open" sesame...

Aniruddha Bahal is unlike any journalist I know of. While his claim to fame rests largely on the sting operations he carried out for Tehelka.com, Bahal is also an accomplished author and writer who has worked with both India Today and Outlook. For a brief period in 2008, he also hosted the irreverent Tony B Show on Channel V.

ANIRUDDHA BAHAL

Five years ago Bahal founded the online investigative journal Cobrapost, which was responsible for Operation Duryodhana (also known as the "Cash for Questions" scandal), in which his team secretly caught on camera several MPs accepting cash in return for asking questions in Parliament.

Bahal's life as a novelist began in 2003 with Bunker 13, an espionage thriller. Last month, he published his second novel, The Emissary, a 500-page tale set in ancient Greece. Why ancient Greece? How did the idea originate? And how did he write this story without first visiting Greece? That is what both media students and aspiring writers will want to know. Obligingly, Bahal has written a detailed account in a recent issue of Open, in which he explains how Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul nudged him towards history:

“It is essential for a writer to read history. It widens the scope of his imagination, amongst other things. But what kind of travel writing are you reading?” he [Naipaul] asked with some sternness.

Naipaul’s gaze can rattle one in the best of times, and right now he seemed to be calibrating whether I was someone he should be wasting time with.

“Well, I was going through a lot of Ryszard Kapunscinski and Bruce Chatwin,” I said, shakily hoping the names would pass muster and get me past some duffer classification that his gaze seemed inclined to thrust me into.

Naipaul’s gaze mellowed as he heard me belt out a few Kapunscinski titles: Shah of Shahs, Imperium, Another Day of Life. “That’s good,” he said. I felt like I was sliding out from the gutter. There seemed a warm hum of approval. The conversation veered elsewhere.

That’s the point that I decided to brush up on history.

You can learn a lot about generating original ideas and about doing the right kind of research by reading Bahal's highly entertaining article here.

(Contrast Bahal's working style — I am tempted to call it "laid-back" — with that of Jonathan Franzen, hailed by Time magazine in a recent cover story as one of America's best novelists and whose fourth novel, Freedom, has just been published. Here's an excerpt from the profile-cum-interview by Lev Grossman:

(If Franzen finds prepublication media attention difficult, at least he doesn't have to deal with it very often. It took him seven years to write The Corrections. You'd think that having done it three times (his first two novels were The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion), he would find the fourth easier. But no. Freedom took him nine years. "It was considerably more difficult," he says. "It was a bitch. It really was."

(Read the article to get a good insight into the writing process: "Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist".)

***

TISHANI DOSHI

In the same issue of Open, dancer and writer Tishani Doshi pays tribute to Chandralekha, one of India’s most controversial and celebrated choreographers, whose "refusal to separate art and life inspired my parallel careers, one drawing upon the other".

Doshi writes: "My twin lives of dance and writing have flowed in and out of each other fairly seamlessly. Dance taught me the rigour and physical discipline that every writer needs, and poetry and literature in turn added dimensions and depth to the dance".

What does this tell us? That writing, even full-time writing, does not really have to be a "full-time" occupation. That is the beauty of being a writer — there are so many other cultural options that you can indulge in simultaneously. (Don't tell that to Naipaul, though.)

***

I have saved the best for last.

HEMANT MORPARIA

One of our most famous cartoonists, Hemant Morparia, bemoans the decline (and possible early death) of the political cartoon in India. In his well-founded critique in the same issue of Open, Morparia lists seven reasons for India's poor track record in producing good cartoonists. What's exceptional about his argument here is the quality of the writing: each item in that list, for instance, runs on, and leads, to the next item — you have to read it to appreciate it.

And he tops it with a brilliantly telling cartoon.

Read "Death of the political cartoon" and revel in some sparkling originality.

• Photos courtesy: Outlook; Sunday Times (Sri Lanka); Cartoonnews.blogspot.com.  

STRIP SEARCH
Speaking of cartoons, I have always wondered why most of our daily newspapers give such short shrift to the good old comic strip. And why the majority of comic strips hail from the good old US of A. Don't readers turn to the funny pages first any more, as they used to do in the good old days? And are there no Indian comic strip artists who are good enough?

Writing in in Outlook's 15th anniversary issue, Manjula Padmanabhan, playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author, offers a convincing answer to that second question:

Publishing Western strips is not merely cheaper, it also permits a newspaper to dodge the issue of socially relevant humour. When Blondie throws a jar of mustard at Dagwood’s head, Indian readers are unlikely to think “Oo! Husband abuse!” But if a sari-clad, middle-class, middle-brow Indian Blondie were to follow suit, Indian readers would very likely howl with righteous disapproval. In Bombay’s Sunday Observer edited by Vinod Mehta, where Suki made her debut in a strip called Doubletalk, readers whined about her constantly, calling the strip a “horrible eyesore”, “Double Gawk”, “dragging and brazenly repetitive”. The reason I was able to carry on was that I had my editor’s full support. That was almost three decades ago. Today? I don’t know which newspaper editor would champion a lowly strip cartoonist against sustained reader-rancour.

Read her enlightening article here: "Strip the skin".
 

The 1 a.m. call that led to a scoop

Bangalore Mirror has been publishing some hard-hitting stories on its front page for some time now. Yesterday it took the police to task for unlawfully keeping a law student in custody (October 23, Page 1) for 16 hours and not even informing his frantic family about his whereabouts.

Today, October 24, it has headlined, with telling photographs, the case of a family traumatised by a drunk BBMP official who went on a rampage at 1 a.m. Of special interest here to media students is the first-person account by the reporter, Manasi Paresh Kumar. Here is the intro:

I WAS JUST TURNING in for the night at around 1.30 when my phone began ringing. Wondering who it could be at that hour, I was taken aback to see it was Dinesh Kumar, the president of the RWA in Panduranganagar. I had met the elderly gentleman a couple of days ago with regard to the story about Vijay Patil’s harassment and demolition orders. Though I was expecting bad news, the fear in Kumar’s voice was unnerving. “Patil has come with a demolition team and vehicles to (Parameshwar) Bhat’s house. He has hit him and is now threatening to go for the house. What do we do?” was his shaky query. Assuring Kumar that I was on my way, I reached the place in just under 15 minutes along with our photojournalist P Muthu.

When you're a reporter you have to be prepared to be rung by your sources at all odd hours. In Manasi's case, the phone call that came as she was about to go to bed gave her a Page One exclusive. Which is more important for her than the fact that she was up all night, as she relates in her first-person account, and only got to return home at 6 a.m.

Read her account in its entirety here: "OUR REPORTER WAS THERE WHEN IT ALL HAPPENED".