Once Upon a Time, in AB-10

As we bid goodbye to Outlook's home of 30 years, magazine-veteran Bishwadeep Moitra gives us a glimpse into the joy, optimism and guts with which it opened and thrived

- Bishwadeep Moitra

FIFTEEN-odd journalists were slowly brought together over nearly three months in the summer of 1995 to bring out the “most exciting news weekly.” They dutifully came to the office every morning—two rooms hired at the now-defunct Lodhi Hotel that served as Outlook’s temporary editorial and business office—for the lunch hour. Then they waited some more for the clock to turn to an hour in which it could seem acknowledgeable that the day’s working hours had ended. The in-between hours were spent trying to expand the flock by the big boys. The others enriched themselves through casual exchanges around what was not right in other media organisations. Those three months were like a paid holiday. Until one day, the Boss said, “Playtime is over.”

AB-10 Safdarjung Enclave, on Chaudhury Jandu Singh Marg, was chosen as Outlook’s address. The editorial team whispered resistance to this choice. They red-flagged that the ministries and party offices would be far from AB-10. The fact that the Press Club of India, the only watering hole for the scribes until then, was at an inconvenient distance from AB-10 for most of the not-owning-a-transport editorial team bothered us more.

The nearest location to AB-10 one would tell an auto-driver in those pre-Google Maps days was Kamal Cinema. Kamal was a movie theatre that had long shut, falling to the vagaries of video piracy that had taken away cine-goers from theatres.