DC, Vizag & I: My, how we have grown!

I was 18 years old when I joined DC in Vizag —I think I was the first local reporter hired. We did a couple of dummy runs of the paper, and then launched it without much fanfare. But practically overnight, it became an important voice in Vizag affairs.

It was an exciting time: Vizag had finally got its first locally-published, English-language daily. It felt like an endorsement for us all, like an acknowledgement that Vizag was no longer a provincial town but a city.

There were three reporters at the launch: Shakeel Ahmed, Amit Mitra and myself. There were only a handful of other English-language journalists in the city, so we felt like an elite group.

The chief of reporters, S.T.G. Sridhar, was a terrific guy. He wrote mainly for Andhra Bhoomi, but gave us a lot of guidance. He was my first teacher in journalism. A great boss, he even gave me time off to court my then girlfriend, now wife, Bipasha!

Because the bureau was so small, there was no room for specialisation: we covered everything. I remember weeks when I did sports stories, political stories, industry pieces, crime stories, movie reviews and even covered the odd Rotary Club meeting.

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but this was fantastic training for my later career.

I stayed at DC for two-and-a-half years, then moved to Kolkata with Business Standard. In ’91, I moved to Mumbai with BusinessWorld, and after a couple of years they transferred me to Delhi.

In 1995, I moved to Hong Kong with the Far Eastern Economic Review, and then to Time Magazine’s Asian edition. Time sent me all over the world — to Japan, Korea, Australia, Thailand, the US, and even to places like Finland and Sweden. Here, again, the training I had received at DC came good: I covered all sorts of stories. I wrote about the World Cup in Japan and Korea and about the 1999 cricket World Cup (we put Sachin Tendulkar on the cover for the first time.). I wrote about business, about politics, about books. I covered the conflict in Kashmir.

Eventually, I settled on war journalism as a specialisation. I was drawn to the Middle East, and Time sent me to cover the conflict in Palestine. In 2002, with war in Iraq seeming inevitable, the magazine moved me to London, from where I could have better access to the Baghdad. I arrived in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq a few months before the war... and remained for nearly five years!

I then moved to Washington, to cover national security and terrorism.

Now I’m an editor at Time, based in New York. I oversee foreign stories in Time’s domestic editions, and also its Asian and European editions. Every once in a while, I still go out to do some reporting and writing of my own. I try to stay versatile: in the past couple of years, I’ve written about the Taliban in Afghanistan, terrorist threats to New York, about cricket-loving billionaires in Texas, about the Muslim community in Detroit and about new cities being built in the Saudi Arabian desert.

Every now and again, I quietly thank DC, not only for taking a chance on an 18-year-old boy, but also allowing him to try his hand at all sorts of stories. I know my career would have been without that initial freedom to roam.

I don’t get back to Vizag as often as I should: this winter, I will be going home for the first time in several years, to visit my father, my sister and her family. I’m looking forward to it.

Even from afar, I’ve followed the city’s evolution. A quarter of a century after DC’s endorsement of Vizag, it has now become a city of global consequence. It’s amazing: I would never have believed that one day, international cricket would be played there. Or that a call centre would be set up there, giving young people exposure to the world at a very early stage in their careers.

Young people also have more opportunities and places for entertainment. My sister Paripurna tells me there are disco’s in town — when I was growing up, the only chance to do any dancing came around once a year, at the Waltair Club's New Year’s ball!

And DC has been there through all of this, chronicling this evolution and playing a part in it. A great city deserves a great newspaper. Vizag has Deccan Chronicle.

The writer was DC’s first reporter in Vizag. He is presently World Editor, Time magazine