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Saturday, November 21, 2009

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Ranjona Banerji
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Ranjona Banerji’s introduction to journalism came when she attended and then dropped out of a mass comm course at a well-known Bombay institution. She learnt nothing except that the timing of the evening classes clashed with the hostel dinnertime. Before that realisation dawned, many vada-paos were eaten.

That was 1984. She also pursued her lifelong (four years’) dream of being a copywriter. An utter failure as a copywriter (no one told her it was about marketing even if the word “creative” was used fairly often), she stumbled into journalism via Bombay magazine, where her first job was to write headlines and captions. That dream job lasted about two months. Then the grindstone was presented to her and she spent the next few years as a sub-editor-cum-correspondent.

The grindstone never went away. Bombay magazine closed in 1991 and Banerji shifted to India Today for a while before joining Gentleman magazine, where she wrote about politics, books, gender issues, health, fashion, and anything else that had to be done, as well as columns on food and gender issues.

She joined Mid-Day, Mumbai’s most popular tabloid, in 1993 and worked in a number of areas in the newspaper in a variety of roles (features editor, in-charge of Sunday Mid-Day, columnist on serious and funny issues, the edit page, deputy editor of Mid-Day, and editor of Sunday Mid-Day). In 1997 she and Ayaz Memon, now DNA’s editor-at-large, co-wrote and edited a book on 50 years of Indian Independence.

In 2001, Banerji went to Ahmedabad as deputy resident editor of The Times of India, a month after the devastating earthquake of January 26. She was there right through the horrific riots. She left Ahmedabad in 2004 for a two-year sabbatical in Dehra Dun to write another book (which is almost there) and joined DNA in 2006 to work on the edit page. For almost a year she was also the paper’s city editor, before she shifted back to the edit page.

Banerji’s edit-page column is usually about religion and politics and being Indian; her city columns are observations about Mumbai.

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The rash of skywalks

You look up at the sky and all you will soon see is a series of criss-crossed walkways, high up in the sky, going twinkle twinkle.
November 16, 2009

Maharashtra’s issues come home to roost

To attack Abu Asim Azmi of the Samajwadi Party because he took his oath in Hindi carries language chauvinism too far.
November 9, 2009

Old divisions die hard

Does Bombay end at the end of Hornby Vellard and Mumbai begin at what was once Lotus cinema? Or would you prefer the traditional Mahim creek border check post?
November 9, 2009

Memory loss

Stepping into this restaurant is like being attacked by some giant deja vu monster.
November 7, 2009

Sea-link test of belonging

On a recent trip to Hyderabad, almost everyone I met asked me about the Bandra-Worli Sea Link (now called the Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link, I think, but you and I both know that no one will call it that).
November 2, 2009

The vote for religion has run its course

Pakistan’s obsession with India has not allowed it to tackle problems within its own society.
October 26, 2009

What the taxi driver couldn’t tell me

It is incumbent upon journalists, every now and then, to try and gauge the mood around them.
October 12, 2009

Banishing the North-South divide

Are you descended from an Ancestral North Indian or an Ancestral South Indian?
September 29, 2009

So what’s a poor, confused voter to do?

As recent elections across the country have shown, voters are looking outside their confining pigeonholes.
September 14, 2009

The RSS cracks the whip in the BJP

The family may be large and powerful but recently its most public wing was looking distinctly weak and spent.
August 31, 2009

The clever swine flu deflection ploy

The focus of the media and the country’s thinkers — when they are not obsessed with the H1N1 virus is the failure of UPA 2.
August 17, 2009

Great debate: will Mumbai sink or swim?

The amount of hot air generated in discussions about Mumbai’s future could by itself perhaps solve all the power problems faced by its satellite cities.
August 3, 2009

To the moon and back out there

The whole excitement over the 40th anniversary of the moon landing might just seem like so much bleah to some of us who are sophisticated and blasé.
July 20, 2009
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