When it comes to writing a story, I am the most confident. But today, as I sit at my desk, trying to jot down a few words on my journey as a journalist, I am having a really hard time. Why so? During my journalism course in college, I was constantly reminded that a story is never about me. My attachment to them, if any, should not be reflected in my work. In other words, you never show your hand as a journalist. But for today, I’ll let that go.
At TMS Features, we bring stories that might slip through the cracks otherwise. But it isn’t easy to pull it off as our feature edition is a daily. On my part, I have to constantly keep an eye out for something new and happening in Delhi. But I have a secret weapon.
Growing up in the city, I spent a lot of time wandering around gullies on a motorcycle with my dad and took pride in knowing the Delhi nobody else knew. The city I first knew came through his stories of boyhood. Delhi is an old city, filled with pigeon-racers, he would tell me, often imitating their calls, which kept me thinking if any women were participating in it. And then I found Shahina Parveen.
Climbing a wooden ladder, I reached her roof. TMS photographer Parveen Negi pulled off some stunts to capture perfect shots of Parveen with her pigeons. The story turned out beautifully, and my dad was the proudest. Little did he know that it was one of his stories that led me to Parveen.
Dad often told me stories about his favourite hangout spot (or as he calls it, adda), Old Delhi’s Maktaba Jamia. Wondering about the fate of the bookstore he frequented in college, I went after this story, with no idea of what I would find, only to realise that the bookstore had almost risen from the ashes. “The caretaker, Ali Khusro Zaidi knows me, ask him about me,” my dad said with utter joy when I told him where my next location for a story was.
Delhi has changed a lot,it does not look like the one from his stories, but what did not change were the routes. Even though there were many places I had not gone to, I knew how to find them all because dad’s stories were heavily filled with navigation.
Years have passed since he last went to any of his addas, but he still remembers the routes, even the by-lanes that may look like they are opening into someone’s house but actually lead to one of my stories.
