On the wire

As a journalist in a fairly hot and happening newspaper, I have to field some very strange calls. While the TRAI ruling doesn’t seem to have kicked in yet and I get all sorts of offers from credit cards and loan services, apart from free holidays, new schemes for car finance, grocery delivery services and more that I cannot for the life of me remember, but refuse to even listen to after the first sentence. Perhaps what annoys me most is that most of these callers get my name wrong and, for some mysterious reason, call me Mr. Last time I checked, I was not a Mr. But then maybe they know something I don’t.

And in the course of so many years being alive and visible through my bylines, I have had to field a whole lot of very strange calls from very strange people with very strange requests. Like the gentleman who calls from Kolkata every couple of weeks with some “vital information, madam” but never calls back to follow up or send me email to let me know details of whatever he wants to convey to me. He tells me of these fantastic leads, from an exhibition of Satyajit Ray sketches to an interview with a rarely heard and even less frequently seen classical musician. And then, after promising to forward me more information via email, he does a neat vanishing trick, until the next time he calls to tempt me with more.

Then there is the nice young lady from the PR agency who never fails to call at least once a day to demand that I do something about the artist that she is in charge of, hype-wise, that is. Unfortunately, the aforementioned individual lacks both talent and personal aesthetics and I have no space for her in anything that I may have an opinion on. The PR lady tries hard, I am unfailingly polite, but I cannot help her and she has to do her job. So we have nice, well-behaved conversations every now and then and part with mutual assurances of faith and good intentions, and then go our own ways, me doing nothing for her. I would like to, if only she would find me people I can write about!

Then there is the occasional caller with no discernible name and varying identity. He or she will call, demand to know my name and, when I ask for theirs first, will rattle off a string of syllables that means, at the end of it, very little, if anything at all. Then after I want to know why they called, they will say they need to know who does book reviews, or who writes about dance performances or who they should contact for getting a poem published. Why I still do not know, but they seem to trust implicitly that I will have all the answers, as if I had just popped out of a nicely polished brass lamp and possess infinite knowledge of life, the universe and everything else that lies in between the two. Sometimes I am in a mood conducive enough to provide answers. Other times I need to be left alone and will growl and hang up. Much of the time I ask them to call back, ask the operator what they want to know and wait with the certainty that they will be directed right back to me, since there is generally no one else in the office at that early hour.

When I am alone and trying to get some work done, I dread the telephone ringing. But I tend to almost always answer it, somewhere in my logical, sensible, practical mind knowing that it just possibly could be someone I do want to talk to or, more importantly, someone I need to talk to. So I answer, knowing as I do that it is all, once again, an exercise in wonderful futility.