I hope Mr. J Murugavel, the founder of Bharatmatrimony.com reads this. (In case you are wondering, yes, it is the same company whose ads show incredibly good looking dreamy young people who apparently will settle for nothing less than good-old arranged marriage)

On the long way back from a press conference on the outskirts of the city, a journalist colleague of mine declared that female journalists are not ‘marriage material’.

“Let’s face it,” she said. “We can’t take the mother-in-law for shopping when she feels like it, can’t help out with the home loan with our salaries or worse, come home before midnight! The only category lower than us in the ‘prospective marriage market’ are chain smokers and females with two heads!”

“Make that three” said another member of our group dryly. She would know better. Despite standing reasonably tall at 5′5, with all her fingers and toes intact, having a lovely smile and a pleasant personality, my friend is yet to hear from a single “groom party”.  She touched the ripe marriageable age of 26 last year and her parents have spent the better half of this year frantically searching for a ’suitable match’ for her with no luck.

On the outside, the girl would make for a very attractive matrimonial ad. 27/f/Bangalore, very fair (killer of a quality isn’t it? :p), attractive, loves to cook and watches movies in her spare time, no siblings and parents are retired government officials. However, one line in her ad would shake things up. ‘Reporter in a newspaper, flexible timings’.

So, when prospective grooms from self-professed modern families knock at her door, the first thing they want to know is when she will be home. Of course they may not ask it that way. Here’s one gem of a question my friend got to hear from a prospective groom’s mother.

“Beti, I have heard that you make very good tea. So will I be able to have a cup of your famous tea at my tea time at 6pm??!!!”

Or this one from a guy who came to see her.

“Can you collect all your news before 5.30 pm? Actually it gets very dark in our area after 6..” Thanks for the heads-up, dude. We really appreciate you telling us in advance how sun-deprieved your area is.

“But your dad says your job timings are flexible..so can’t you work from home?” was another landmark suggestion thrown at her. Yeah sure why not, let’s all work from home and send the family dog to go collect information for stories and deploy pigeons to make news pages.

You see, the list goes on. Girls who were able to tag a fellow in their school/college/office etc are the smart ones ( Go on, gloat!). For the rest, I hope Mr. Murugavel of Bharatmatrimony.com comes up with something like a journalistmatrimony.com exclusively for journalists.

So instead of the option- “your skin colour” with options like Very fair, fair, wheatish, dark and very dark (lol seriously they do exist in most marriage portals), maybe we could have something like how many stories do you file in a week or how many pages do you make in a day! Maybe it could have an option of what beats do you cover or even how many cups of tea do you drink in a day! Options that would not require a furious use of fair and lovely!

The newspaper business is not easy to understand. Most people think the stork drops it on their door every morning and curse it for not coming by on the day after a national holiday. Perhaps it is not easy living with a person whose profession tends to consume most of his/her time. But that is not to say journalists make bad life partners.

We’ll be there for you if you need a lift at 2 am, we would probably know all the best places to eat and life will never have a single dull moment with us around. We might even consider waking up before 11 am if it’s really important to you.

Just one request.

Do NOT ask us when we’ll be home!

Absolutely right. I am a woman and I started watching cricket only because of Mandira Bedi.

If not for her outstanding taste in wardrobe, I would have been found chopping onions in the kitchen when a cricket match is shown live!

I saw Dada’s adrenaline pumping jig during the Natwest series and held my breath as VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid stood headstrong to climb out of the hole Australia had dug us butthat couldn’t be the reason for a woman to be crazy about cricket, could it?

Bring out Mandira with her noodle straps and we women supposedly appear magically infront of the television all set to take notes!

No offence guys, this isn’t really a man vs woman post. It’s just that it would be refreshing if people weren’t so surprised to see a passionate female cricket fan. By passionate I don’t mean just those who flock to cricket stands or check the score ontelevision once in a while. I’m talking about the category that will plan its day based onthe timing of a cricket match and google “cricket” the first thing in the morning.

I can’t tell you how many matches us females won for India because we stood/sat/walked/ran/drank water/cooked brinjal/sneezed for superstition! So it seems a little silly then that in the middle of a conversation with male colleagues about cricket, an odd comment about Yuvraj Singh’s batting average against Pakistan will inadvertently draw puzzling faces even if there is nothing earth shattering about it.

Here’s how a typical conversation goes :

X : Batting average? (with eyebrows raised). You watch cricket?

Me: Yes (Thinking here it comes!)

X : Wow, that’s great! Didn’t know girls also like cricket. So what do you watch?

Me : Cricket! (duh!)

X : Ha ha yes..I meant what kind of matches do you like?

Me : All involving batsmen, bowlers, wicketkeeper, umpires, crowds and dogs on the field.

X : Hey! that’s great. So who is your favourite player?

Me : (I know there is nothing wrong with the question..still…looks a little patronising). I like Dada, Dhoni and Dirk Nannes.

X : Dirk Nannes. Cool! (Then he steals a smirk with those around and comes back to me).

So..which country does he play for?

Me : (I pause for a second to let them enjoy the moment.And here we go!) Dirk Nannes, age 33, plays for Netherlands, Delhi Daredevils and the Victorian Bushrangers, left arm fast bowler, former world cup skier, founder of an adventure sports company, speaks Japanese and plays the Saxaphone.

X : Goes into shock! Mouth falls open and eyes bulge out

Me enjoying…

What a great moment for women cricket fans all over the world! And the men think we don’t know our cricket, huh! I feel like some kind of messiah..

X : Wow..you do know your cricket! So when is the women’s twenty twenty world cup starting?

Gulp! My breath stiffens. Panic starts spreading inside me.  I should know this one!! I wriggle an imaginary speck of dust from my eye to buy out time.

The messiah image breaks into a thousand pieces..Oh the shame of it! Sorry girls!

Finally I mumble under my breath.

Me: well…you know what…I wouldn’t know that…Mandira Bedi hasn’t announced the dates yet!

Moral of the story : Gloat by all means, know when to stop!

I was on the phone the other day with a seemingly bright young guy. A recent IIM graduate who is now with a reputed (so far) financial services company.

“Our current media mechanism isn’t structured well so I want to set it right,” he told me with enthusiasm that is usually inversely proportional to age.

“Our company is launching a new product and we want to ensure it gets good coverage,” he began, as I steeled myself to listen to the spiel we journos hear only a few hundred times a week. Little did I know how unusual the call would turn out.

After droning on for a few lines, he suddenly said something I would remember for a long time.

“So how much do we have to pay to get the news published on the front page of your newspaper?” he demanded, his tone-very much business-like, no doubt tutored well by one of the best business schools in the country.

I cringed the moment I heard it. Rewinding and playing it a few times again in my head only made it worse.

“What pay?” I blurted out feeling the sense of an impending disaster of a conversation.

“Payment Ma’am,” he replied in the same tone. “Cost to get our news item on the front page headline.”

“There is no such cost” I muttered under my breath and cut the call. I took a moment to compose myself before slumping into my seat with disbelief.

Is that what people think about newspapers???!! That we are some kind of a non-glossy 20 page advertising pullout where the highest advertiser gets the front page story! Had all those hours of forgetting to have lunch and running from pillar to post for quotes come down to this? That we are now viewed by a section of people as selling our main editorial space for cash!

I had a sinking feeling that maybe in all those countless press conferences we attend each week, sifting through endless heaps of “urgent” press releases in our inbox promoting companies and their products, perhaps we have forgotten to promote what we stand for over the years.

Perhaps in the race to break stories and gossip about our competitors (yep, everyone does it) we forgot to reiterate what we stand for, why we exist and how we function( pls, a crash course in this for the IIMs).

If the “elite” educated Indian could view newspapers like this, I am sure we are looking at a pool of thousands of people who think the same. This does not spell good news to the industry, which is already struggling with high input costs and a sluggish readership.

Maybe its time to re-introduce ourselves, or even re-invent ourselves in the way we present our industry to the audience. It does not need to be an outlandish outburst of promotion or anything. It could be as simple as climbing down a few floors from our ivory towers and listening (actual ‘listen’ listening, not just press conference listening!) to what people say about us without expecting to file a story out of it!

Like the IIM guy I am also tempted to make a statement like “I want to set things right” but at the moment as all of my colleagues are, I am occupied with far more pressing issues. You see, all of us journalists want to make difference, which is why we came to the profession in the first place. However, such is our lives that on a Sunday evening, all I can think about is –

What story am I going to file for the Monday page!!

disclaimer :Waat to do, we journos are like this wonly!

Would someone please explain to Mr Gill that a Formula One car is a teeny weeny little different from the car he drives. I’m sure our Sports and Youth Affairs Minister has the country’s best interests at heart ( like all sports administrators do) but casting doubts over whether Formula One is a ’sport’ in the first place is amusing.

With warring sports associations and lack of sponsorships for Karting and Rally events, motorsport in India has survived despite the suicidal forces that govern it. And just when you thought the flamboyant Vijay Mallya brought a fresh leash of life for the sport with his purchase of Force India, in comes Mr Gill with his comment that “Formula One is entertainment and not sport”.

Agreed, Formula One is not something you can start playing in your backyard when you feel like it but to shun it under the guise of being “elitist’ looks to be a little too much. Let’s just take some perspective on this one (cos, it looks like we have nothing much to do today..)

Name the top three seeded Indian players (male and female) in the following sports:

1.Tennis 2. Golf 3. Badminton  4. Boxing  5. Swimming  6. Squash

Other than a few statistic crunchers, I’m sure most people will struggle to think beyond Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi, Sania Mirza, Saina Nehwal, Jyoti Randhawa, Joshna Chinappa and Vijender Singh.

The open secret is that these top players were sucessful on their own account and not because of the system therefore in a way these sports are elitist too.. (how many people can afford a golf club membership?) yet they have never been questioned. We have several international level tournaments in each of these sports despite them not having a mass following then why should motorsport be any different?

As for it not having enough followers, we shouldn’t ignore a sport just because the majority don’t play it. In that respect, the most popular game in India, played in every nook and corner is Pakda Pakdi (I have absolutely no idea of how to translate it..how about catch and run?) so shouldn’t we build a stadium to allow everyone to play the game on a bigger stage?

Those who have not followed Formula One say that there is nothing interesting in watching a sport where a car keeps going round and round in a race track. What could be the challenge in that? Well, throw in speeds of over 300 km/h  with engines revving up to a formula imposed limit of 18,000 RPM, gravitational forces that pull the driver apart, the tactical pitstops and mechanical wizardy and you would know why Formula One is not just a sport but one of the most demanding activities in the planet.

Do a google check on packages offered to Indians travelling to Singapore and Bahrain for F1 races and you might have a re-think on how many Indians watch this sport. (oh my God, that is a story idea!) This is not to say that the Indian government should pull all stops to host a grand prix race; just that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to see what a sport like this offers to a country’s tourism industry.