Columns

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.