All it Takes

Against the background of dusty rooms, against all odds, a tenacious news magazine proved that print is, after all, alive and well

- Sunil Mehra

IT all began in a suite of dusty rooms at the then-government-run unglamorous Lodhi Hotel on a couple of tables and chairs, random couches with mouldering upholstery. A makeshift office where a pouty-mouthed Vinod Mehta would interview us before grunting, “And when can you join?”

Every morning was about coffee, joyous whoops of welcome to yet another new recruit from the fraternity, excited chatter at the Press Club of India and hotel coffee shop lunches. And then we moved to our office! Cheek-by-jowl with Kamal Cinema and, more happily, right next to Rajinder Dhaba: home of legendary tandoori chicken.

We tumbled into the three-storied building like excited school kids: racing up and down the staircase checking out our desks, swivel chairs, PCs, a library stewarded by the whip-wielding Alka—“No, you cannot take this copy of Esquire, Sunil, because the design section wants it”—and the all-important Accounts section where our taxi/ travel bills were reimbursed as we tore around town gathering material for our inaugural dhamaka. 

And what a resounding dhamaka it was!

Vinod set the cat among the pigeons with that controversial Kashmir poll story: an overwhelming Kashmiri majority did not want to be a part of the Indian Union. They voted for Azadi.  We used that as a headline on our cover. He/ We were not dubbed seditionists/ anti-nationals (this was 1994, remember? The vocabulary of political discourse was… ahem, different), but TV talking heads and rival editors went batty. We’d given them much to natter about!

We’d tasted blood! 

We were on a roll!