It is going to be a very long Saturday, as always. But not as long as it could have been, given what had been planned for me before I knew that it was. To be fair, it was an offer rather than a mandate, and one I was quite willing to take on, in spite of the added stress to the already endless end-of-the-week load of stress that needed a Sunday cutting frantically into a pile of onions to defuse.
The long story made short is that contemporary dancer Pina Bausch was going to be in Mumbai for a brief few hours before flying out to wherever she was going next, and I was to catch her for an interview. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and third-party information, I finally managed to grab the person who was doing the liaison for interviews, reaching through the long arm of the mobile network to do so. No time, he said apologetically, it will not be possible during this trip. All articulated in a thick German accent over a long-distance line that crackled with what seemed to be the dry leaves of every coconut tree in Kerala.
But what I felt was not irritation, or frustration at having missed out on a story, but intense relief. I have watched the Pina Bausch troupe perform and, while it was not an incredibly aesthetic experience, I did enjoy it as a form of movement and expression I had not seen before. It was strangely moving, astonishingly evocative and extremely difficult to digest, a sort of bad dream mixed with a lot of rather hysterical laughter. There were chopped onions involved, some frantic running about and a certain degree of violence that made me colder than the air-conditioning that was, as always, too high. It would have been interesting to meet the person who had thought up that degree of disturbing chaos, but it was not written on my to-do list, fortunately or not.
But interviews tend to be of that ilk, especially today, when communication and travel are so easy and close to instant. And if timing does not go off track, something else inevitably will, I find. Consider my last such misadventure: Some months ago I went to the far end of Mumbai meet master-designer Ritu Kumar. It was not a first-time for me, but a must-do. The trains (those were the days I travelled in trains rather than by car) were on time, the auto-rickshaw took less time than I could possibly have anticipated and I was there an hour early. I sat in the foyer of the multi-star hotel and waited…and waited. The lady was busy, unfortunately, and came over herself to tell me we could speak on the phone if I preferred. I decided to wait.
During the wait, fortunately, my over-efficient instincts kicked in and I rooted around in my bag to check on the recording equipment that was at that time in my life attached to me, as it were, by the wires that it worked with. I had all the bits and pieces, new batteries included…but not a blank cassette. What I did have was a music tape, one I had been listening to on the journey there. So, at the end of all that waiting, I had to take notes in my execrable scrawl and probably missed a lot of what she had to say.
This is not new, not for any journalist. I remember when I was talking to Shashi Tharoor and the batteries of my recorder died. When I talked to Vikram Seth, my recorder was working over-efficiently and I got every single noise that reverberated through the hotel, from the splashes in the swimming pool downstairs to the buzz of the vacuum cleaner three floors above. And when I talked to a bigwig in the advertising business, he walked off with the recorder, as I have already written about in an earlier blog!
This is what makes a journalistic writing career so much fun. After all, you never can tell what will happen next!
No comments:
Post a Comment