NDTV Journal: week 1

This is the first in a series of posts that will chronicle my time as an apprentice at NDTV in New Delhi:

I knew I was back in India when I glanced out the window of the sweaty cab and was met by the bored stare of a cow. I felt greasy, slimy, and I was sticking to the cab’s upholstery. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. For the first time since I had applied for NDTV’s Broadcast Training Program did I encounter doubt and even some dread. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe everybody had been right. I am unrealistic, and now I and the money from my savings that I had used to pay for the program were stuck. What business did an IT professional have attending journalism training anyway? So what if I used to play around as a kid with our old tape deck, making my own radio news shows? So what if I’d nurtured my interest in filmmaking alongside my day job? So what if I was already a published author three times over? This sort of a thing, this sort of a drift, was just not done. What made me think that I could pull it off? They were right. I had set myself up for disaster. I was going to ruin my future. What had I been thinking? And now it was too late. The evening traffic mirrored my predicament – it didn’t seem like we were moving ahead, and we certainly could not go backwards. These things don’t work that way.