A lot has been written about the serial blasts in Delhi and the following encounter in Batla House where the police gunned down two alleged terrorists. A lot has been said about the persecution complex that Muslims are suffering from. The BJP has left no stone unturned in showing it's disapproval to the Vice Chancellor's decision to provide legal aid to students who are randomly being picked for interrogation. But what happens to the ordinary citizen after the high drama ends and the newspaper headline fades in public memory? What happens to the men and women who have been pushed to deepest corners of the dark alleys? Jamia Nagar has suddenly become prominent on the Delhi map...it's narrow by-lanes now need to be policed. It is now being seen as the underbelly of the city, a place where thousands of Muslim families live hobbled together, conspiring against the nation...training young men and unleashing terror to wreck...

As journalists we end up working on multiple stories at the same time...hoping that one of them would materialize into a news report that might grab a few eye balls...but there are lots of stories that remain untold. Not because they are about insignificant people who are one in a billion but because we need to conform to deadlines. It's not possible to follow the same story for a year...when your job requires you to file fresh news reports everyday. Last September I was asked to work on the Citizen Journalist show. Our team decided to dedicate one segment of the half hour long - weekly show to real heroes...people who were doing commendable work in their respective fields. In my search for one such unknown warrior I came across a woman who was running an NGO that provided legal aide to minor victims of sexual abuse. But this story is not about her...it's about a child she introduced...

What do you expect to see when you go to the theatre to watch a movie?? Certainly not a spoof of everything you've ever seen in a Bollywood flick...Well, Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om is just that. A big budget spoof, starring best friend Shah Rukh Khan and a pretty Deepika Padukone thrown in. The first half of the movie is a good joke...that the director fell so much in love with that she goes on with it for an hour and a half. The movie is obviously a tribute to the good old Bollywood we love...but instead of telling a story...it focuses on the process of movie making. Not really a bad idea but way over the top. Somewhere towards the end of the first half...when all the funny one-liners are over...the writers realize that there is no story... and that's when they decide to pay tribute to Subhash Ghai's 'Karz' The second half frankly comes as a relief. A...

It may sound weird but I think in many ways journalism is like an adventure sport. Obviously by saying this I don't intend to undermine the seriousness of the profession in any way but just the pace and unpredictability of what lies ahead makes it addictive. If you've been in the newsroom when there's breaking news, you'll know what I'm talking about. And not just breaking news, there's a deadline that needs to be met every hour. The pressure, the urgency and the desire to put out the best in as little time as possible. It's like the night before your exam when you can't afford to waste a second. When you drug yourself with caffeine and curse the university board for making the paper so tough. But as you're doing that you're also loving every second of it. Only in the newsroom there's an exam every hour and the entire team runs around to make sure we pull...