Whats in a name

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Everyone collects something. I collect names. Well, actually, just the stories around the names. I do have a number of really unusual and interesting name stories in my collection but today I'm going to tell you about how it all started. It started with my own name. Sangwan. Kids in school can be quite cruel and in a world of Singhs and Kumars and Sharmas I was ribbed a lot about my "strange" surname. So I decided to confront the giver of my name, my father, about why we couldn't have had a more common surname. The story he told me about how we, the clan of Sangwans, came to be, filled me with enough familial pride to make me love my byline and want to see more and more of it. It all started with a border raider called Sangu. Don't know how many centuries back, but those....

Female Wrestlers

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The idea was really fascinating - women wrestling Indian style in an open air dangal. The words of the song "I married a female wrestler as massive as can be; she had bulging muscles which quite fascinated me" rang through my ears the minute I saw the poster advertising the event. So I decided to sacrifice my Sunday off and venture out to do a feature on these strong young women. Full of enthu and already visualising a story around the love lives of the women wrestlers I reached the venue. From here on it was all downhill. The venue was little more than an empty parking lot. When we reached there, several "senior wrestlers" were being felicitated. We asked for the women's corner and were pointed to a sad looking marquee where some five-six girls sat huddled together."Yes, all right, this is the women's corner but where are....

Finally the launch

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It was halfway through the working day on Friday when Rajdeep casually walked into the newsroom and announced, 'Congrats guys, we are on air'. That was it. The champagne and cake came later. But the buzz has been there from Day 1. From August 1 when team IBN met for the first time at a day-long orientation to 16 December when the signal finally went up. Everyone who walks through the IBN newsroom can feel it. We had been prepping ourselves to go on air from Sunday but it came two days early. We were expecting a non-metro launch, starting with small towns and slowly hitting Delhi. But by mid-afternoon on Saturday, we were there in most parts of Delhi, Kolkatta and Mumbai. Moving to television after a decade in print journalism, I had enough 'well-wishers' asking me why I was giving up the comfort of a well-established newspaper to....