Time...stand still, and fast forward!

I sit by the window in my study bleary-eyed and sleepy. I have no one to blame for my situation other than myself.

I squeeze my tummy and wish if I had been more prudent with my time. Ah, time, that’s what I am hard-pressed for these days. I have so many things to do each day. I have to file my stories to my magazine, edit all the stories for the portal whose beta version begins in two days, pull up reporters without hurting their delicate egos and yet tell them how a feature should be different from a news story; convince my friend-and-boss-rolled-into-one that I am actually working these days. And yet find time for the IPL, and for someone special.

In the past few days I have unlearnt a few things and learnt a few. One, it is not a sin to get charty and plan your week or day or to keep a tab on what each reporter is doing. I had fought tooth and nail against this when my boss suggested it in the beginning of our honeymoon a month ago. I had the cheeks and naivety to write to him that my style of working is different. One of the first improvisations I brought in to the system was that I removed “sir” from in any form of addressing me. I had a noble reason for it. I still believe that respect doesn’t begin and end by adding a suffix to someone’s name. It irks me.

When I first walked into the newsroom of Emirates News in Abu Dhabi which had a rich mix of international staff—Indians (from all zones), English, Scotts, Welsh, African, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Chinese and Bangladeshis—my editor, a pipe-smoking six-footer Brit with a walrus moustache, warned me, a junior on the desk, that there was no ‘sir business’ in the newsroom. But, even when we youngsters called him by his first name, the sight of him storming out of his cabin (den) and swaggering into the newsroom sent chills down our spine!

He never demanded that our knees should fellowship with each other at his sight, but I confess, every time he came and looked over my shoulders into the page I was doing or the copy I was editing I struggled to keep my knees apart from knocking each other! But in Thursday and Friday nights we knew he would be coming after some party or the other, and would be in a lighter mood. He’d walk up to the three of us—three young men who joined the team in the same month—and ask if we were doing okay, before chatting up the thick Scott girl whose accent was more difficult to follow than the Chinese proofreader’s occasional outbursts of frustration in his mother-tongue.

In my new office here, I made a public declaration in one of the team meetings that I don’t like it, and they lapped it up, and began screaming my name for anything and everything. I still had no issues with it.

But things were to change as we neared the launch date. My friend-boss, who had agreed to give me a long rope to have my way of managing the editorial bandwagon, slowly began to tighten the screws, and I felt it. Surprisingly, as days went by, I also realised the need to, first of all, to have screws (no pun, please) in place, and then to tighten it.

Relationship is hard work. You need to work on it. A colleague of mine says she won’t get married because she feels marriage will kill love. For me, as the editor of a thin team, it is not about to marry or to marry (too late though), but about managing relationships. Having given them the freedom to have fun in the office (I still believe in it), I am finding it difficult not to tighten the screws but not to hurt them when I do it.

One of my senior colleagues says that it should be mandatory that Mallus should address others with a “sir” suffix, just to keep that essential and healthy distance and to remind them of the rightful position of their proverbial ego.
I am still skeptical, but then having lived and worked in an international mix for most part of my career, I sometimes end up wondering what is the right stand. No shop in this beautiful State sells respect. But unfortunately no one is seen deserving it also. So, thrust itself on oneself. Make all those working with/under you call you ‘sir’. I rest my case here.

It is frustrating that I don’t get time to do what I like the most: writing. I have three book ideas. I have to start writing. But by the time I come back from office after all those hours hunching over my tiny keyboard, I wilt like a touch-me-not. I just can’t find time to watch the IPL. Or write my blog.
But a small voice inside keeps telling me that if I am a little more organized, things will fall into place.

Oh, that voice and its promise of hope! Now, I want time to fly!

If I can take a breather from work today I will write about the other things that I unlearnt and learnt. And, some transcontinental SMSes.