The Man in the Red Tie
It’s an airport afternoon with me moping over a delayed flight and even getting my hands around a fresh smelling bestseller “The subtle art of not giving a fuck” is not helping! My mind feels a tad lost, almost asleep, and in that that daze moves on to not so current times –a time two decades ago, where as a fresher, the burden of experience and existence did not exist, and where one worked to be happy and just have enough money for an auto ride home and weekend booze.
And somewhere then, I met the man in the red tie — comfortably seated on a large maroon leather sofa with his lovely wife. The interview was under 60 minutes for the role of a television correspondent and eventually became one for leading NDTV’s 1.5 member motley web team in the digital space!! Fate or just their gut but I started a career on the worldwide web in 1999, when no one but these two people, believed I could do it.
Kandahar happened a few years later, and my back hurt from not going home for 3 straight days and staring into my desktop, with the bellows of “kaun sa tel” breaking my stupor occasionally. The man in the red tie pulled my large red chair ( we were famous for the red by then) and told me to take a break as he finished the last part of my work — converting an enthusiastic P2C ( piece to camera) to the more comprehensible written word for the web. Awestruck, I said, Sir I will finish it and he said “they call me doc around here” with a beaming smile.
In the years that went by had the privilege of learning how to build businesses, fail, make history and get shit done. But most importantly learnt how to work with people and not manage them. Still remember how on long days these little eye drop bottles would miraculously emerge on my desk with a call or a note that I need to take a break.
We built NDTV Convergence — the first web and mobile media company then, even before people knew what the internet really was… I turned COO and a mom at 29 and yet a gazillion success and failures later, my fondest memory is my last conversation on the same maroon leather sofa, where I was told that while it was my choice to move on to another company, my son who was just a few months old then, should continue at the NDTV crèche so that I could adjust in my new role without having to worry about him.
It’s been over 10 years since I moved out of NDTV and yet when I travel getting goodies for my team remains second nature (doc got us liquor chocolates though!), stopping and checking if all is well with a colleague is default and an ode like this one for Doc — Prannoy, or the man I learnt my craft from, comes after 17 years…but straight from the heart.
