You can call NDTV elitist, anglicised. But it defended democracy, gave us Ravish Kumar https://theprint.in/opinion/you-can-call-ndtv-elitist-anglicised-but-it-defended-democracy-gave-us-ravish-kumar/1244095/
Opinion by Yogendra Yadav • 01/12-2022
An epitaph to NDTV and an ode. Revati Laul
When I was finishing school, I forced myself into a sentimentality so I could sing Lulu's `To Sir With Love.' But the song needs to be sung now, when I'm truly brimming over as NDTV ends its current life and Prannoy and Radhika have resigned from their positions as majority stake-holders. For many of us who grew up and became working adults in the 1990s, NDTV was our first job. It was ours and the country's first brush with private television news and it was very exciting to be part of it.
It's a bit odd that someone like me who quit NDTV thrice, who was the proverbial prodigal daughter, who was always a bit of an oddity there, who never took her innings at the production house turned TV channel seriously should feel so sentimental. I was always doing an up-yours to everything while there. I didn't ever feel the need to show how much I was working, hang out with the right people, be seen to be in the right place at the right time. In fact I almost made a point of defying all of that because I hated to conform.
But in the first eight years of my work-life that I spent at NDTV and then the subsequent three years I returned to it, I became an NDTVian. We were and are still a sub-species. And that culture was engineered oh so carefully by the Roys and the rest of us had much to gain from it. The first thing we learned was to really mean and live equality. Eat together on shoots, lift equipment as part of a team whether you were a hotshot reporter or camera assistant - it was all the same on a shoot and in the office. Diwali bonuses were the same for all from the cleaning lady at our washrooms to the rest of us. The women's toilets always had quartered sheets of newspaper tacked to the door for us to wrap and throw our sanitary napkins - something I now make sure I do as I've started an institution of my own. But I imbibed this work culture there.
Going out on shoots and coming back full of excitement about the metaphors one used on location - shadows and clouds equals foreboding. Broken glass on a wall equals pathos. We were all mini-movie directors and we showed each other what we'd done and pat each other on the back. And sleep, heads bent over edit machines as we did 72 hours non-stop but we did it because it was fun. We were all part of a ginormous and forever playing movie. And we owned our parts.
And as each of us left and tried other things, we're still an NDTV family and wherever we meet, the thing we connect on is that singular fact. We all have a gazillion anecdotes each. "Do you remember the time XYZ buzzed the Roys home #7 instead of #67 for kitchenat 2am, asking for tea?" And "Do you remember the time XYX walked out of the studio mid-discussion because they were uncomfortable with XXX?"
I remember starting my career as a production assistant on our breakfast show, Good Morning India and turning up for a shoot with no tapes to record on.
I remember getting stuck in the lift as the electricity went off and having to climb over the 7th floor roof to get back in to the office.
I have stories of riding the back of a buffalo to try and do an interesting piece to camera. Of asking the sarpanch in a village in Gujarat about how much milk he gave instead of his cattle...because of my appalling Hindi.
I have stories of my sari pleats coming undone on the dance floor of our NDTV annual party.
Of going out for a few drinks before returning to office to do an edit before the Musharraf-Vajpayee summit and getting it done just in the nick of time.
Of going to report from Kargil and making everyone who didn't get to go jealous.
Of being taken on a very short camel ride after a shoot at a Harappan excavation site - Rakhigarhi, where the villagers were too scared to allow the camel to ride farther, because of my colossal weight.
Of climbing over the wall of a nightmarish asylum in Indore and tracking the same story of its inmates over eight years.
Most of all, what I carry with me is a work ethic and an egalitarianism that was cultivated while we all worked together and lived together.
All of us can pick up the phone and talk to each other no matter how long the gap has been because we were all once together at NDTV. It's like calling an old classmate but much more.
There's a silliness that today's dog-eat-dog world, today's cravenness and today's culture of money before all else doesn't leave room for. Those were different times. They weren't ideal. Lots of people were overlooked and there were a few that were especially favoured. There were some systemic gaps as there are with every institution. But overall, what I take with me is that NDTV is embedded in my psyche and soul and it's a Hotel California type of thing. None of us can ever leave.
Above is a note written by Revati Laul who is the daughter of 1960 batch Sherwoodian Anil Laul and who had worked in NDTV.