It is an awkward situation or, at least, potentially so. A friend of mine is in town – he lives in another city – and we plan to meet. We have spoken for hours in the time we have known each other and look forward – mutually, I hope – to the time we will spend chatting in person over lunch, catching up on our lives and times and books that we read and want to. But there is one little problem that I worry about, if I think about it. I have no real picture of him, except as tall, long-limbed, black clad and bearded whom I met for all of about 30 seconds on a day when deadlines breathed heavily down my keyboard. Which picture could describe a lot of people in Mumbai in general and the community of communicators that forms a large part of my professional life.
And because of the profession that I have chosen – or that chose me – I have done a lot of that; meeting strangers, I mean. Many have been people in the news, so what they looked like was a fairly easy issue to deal with. At times, I have had to guess wildly, or else depend on a mediator to do the introductions, which has worked well, most of the time. More recently, it has become easier, especially over the last ten years or so, since the time mobile phones became standard issue in this country. Today, I rarely even meet some of the people I need to work with, since all dialogue is conducted over the telephone, email and online chat. But that is a different story.
Journalism is not a boring business and meeting people has always been fun for me. Perhaps one of my first lessons in judging whether someone was worth meeting or not came with the photographs they carried of their work – the really good images always merited a large spread, a smaller one, more substance and less visual. Many of these people come to you instead of you having to go to them, which makes it all a breeze, because you do the interview, ruthlessly shepherd the guest out, turn back to hammer out the story in a shorter space of time than it takes to meet whoever the subject is, and then get on to bigger and better things like going out to eat chocolate cake, shopping for shoes or heading home for dinner.
One of the few times recently I had to meet someone I did not know was a few weeks ago. I had no clue what the gentleman looked like and had only a voice over the telephone to identify him by. I did have a tiny panic attack, since I am remarkably inept at the introduce-yourself-to-a-stranger bit, but then I remembered the marvellousness of the cellphone. We were to meet in a bookstore, which made it rather more comfortable, since there was something to do before the rendezvous actually happened. Of course, with typical enthusiasm, I did smile beamingly at a couple of men - who were not my ‘date’ and so understandably rather startled by my cheeriness – but managed to recover my sang froid quickly enough to pretend I was laughing at something I was reading. The meeting did eventually take place without my embarrassing myself too much, and it made for fairly decent reading.
But nothing in my life happens in singles. Right after this little work-related get-together I had another man to liaise with, in the same bookstore. Him I had never seen either, just spoken to over the phone as I drove home. And it was even more important that he get a good impression of me, since it could mean a new job that would be more fun than what I do now. In my characteristically irreverent style – which he fortunately seemed to approve of – I asked if I should hold a rose between my teeth for identification, but he reassured me that a phone call would do the trick. And it did.
Now whether I should use the same strategy for my friend from out of town or no, I am not sure. But if things go as they tend to in all the rest of my life, we will manage to find each other fairly easily…and then have much to remember and giggle about for as long as we are friends.
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