INDRANI MANTRIPRAGADA

Journalism is the quest for truth, and a journalist the seeker of facts. It may not be so all the time though. Over these years journalism has evolved to become a profession rather than an industry. The intimacy between a job and its doer is the highest in this field. It is my ardor to play a small but integral part in this quest.

“Don’t do something you become to like, do something that becomes of you” – it’s a revelation that brought me to where I am. As a child I did well at drama, elocution and arts. I had a distinct interest in reading and storytelling. Also, I was not particularly interested in the subjects of math and sciences. Ten years after my schooling I chose math and science as my specialization. It may sound uncanny, but I never faced any pressure whatsoever from my parents or my peers. It was entirely me that too the decision of science and later engineering as my subjects. I became to like engineering over the period of time, and also my job as a software engineer. But deep down in my heart, I knew I could never make the job become of me. Hence, I tried to escape desperately. But the question was – Which field? I wrote every possible management exam to get to the nearest exit – MBA. At the end of these efforts I still had an uneasy feeling about myself. I searched for a better understanding of my yearning. It was the year before this that it dawned to me. As an eight year old girl, I remember pestering my mother to be a newsreader after watching the DD news on TV. An eight year old may understand only the poise and the eloquence with which the newsreader spoke, but a twenty five year old understands much more than that. At twenty five, I finally decided to become a journalist. Deep down, I knew I never had to write anymore MBA entrances to run away to the United States. I was at home with the thought.

But obviously after working for four years, I could not take a decision of this kind just because news reading fascinated me when I was a child. It took a lot more than that. Firstly, it’s my love for the camera, I like being on both sides of it, though the prior excites me more. The adrenaline rush that comes with a camera in front of me can never be compensated in any other job. More so, because it comes with a responsibility of telling people what’s going on around them. Secondly, I love people. To my limited knowledge, the best way to reach out to a vast crowd was through journalism. I like candid talk, this being the third reason. Though I realize that today’s journalism may not be always be about candidness. But I still hope to find a light at the end of the tunnel that even today one can reach out by being frank. Lastly, I love travel, and I have not had a chance to travel much yet. I hope that someday journalism would take me places. Literally and figuratively!

Every person in this world may not have a movie inspiring reason to choose a vocation. But every person definitely would have a passion towards a field, which makes him choose it. Sometimes instinct works in such matters at least to a certain extent. There is nothing in life without risks and our choice of work is no exception. My conviction is that we enter this world to give something back to it. There are abundant ways to achieve this. As Henry Luce says “I became a journalist to come as close to the heart of the world”. This is what I desire.