Fighting against all evil in the ‘Fourth Estate’ and keeping parallel journalism alive without any support system, is difficult but not impossible. Since morning messages, mails and calls were pouring in from readers and well-wishers but my dear staff forgot about the anniversary. Afternoon Voice has a big struggle story behind its success. I am trying to keep this media house and treat its staff as family members but due to different attitude of people working here, creating that bond is very difficult. We are small group and trying to manage the show in given limit. This success is dedicated to those hardcore workers of newspaper who literally live for it.
We talk about professional ethics, discipline and many other bookish things but practically this is not possible. People with low esteem and “just doing it for the sake” kind of attitude is the biggest hurdle in progress of such organisations. Internal enemies are much more dangerous than the outside obstacles. Politics, groupism, lack of will and compassion sucks entire energy. In spite of all odds, I boast of being a prompt and sincere pay master. My staff never suffered due to delay in salaries. They receive timely increments, treats, appreciations and gifts.
It’s been six years and we are constantly struggling to survive. Everything is fresh in my memory. The reason to start the endeavour, the reason to cope up with the trends, the challenges against the ethics, those threatening phone calls from the impotent and many other ways of spamming on social networks and the ever famous blogs against me; there have been millions of incidents and many of them I do not want to recall at all, which have tried to delude us in our way. We have skipped all hurdles and reached so far; the next level is still to arrive and we will go a long way.
Starting from year one, the first problems which we faced were finances. The lack of finances where one lady had to toss the gambling coin in the air, with a possibility of either getting it or losing it all and guess what, the ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ soon followed. It was totally a game of guts that we did. So far, media was always owned by the ‘rich’ or ‘capitalists’ who had their own backing and they relied on them. Thus, the basic idea of parallel media died and pseudo journalism flourished right from the early times. It was surely difficult for all of us to survive in the market. The ‘pehchaan’ required from distributing the newspapers to holding up the cameras, it was a true challenge against the odds but the challenge was accepted and it had to be won; after all, my only house was on mortgage for the gamble. Soon after the first year passed, we tried to dive in the various fields and tried to explore the potential talents from various phases of life.
Hence, our journey continued and year after year we finally completed six years. The honour of having a television media was about to succeed but, unfortunately, we again met the wrong people at right time and right place. Though, there was a slight set back but that was not enough to stop us. We have promised to go ahead and reach out to keep extending our own records, year after year. In the year 2012, our award event was honoured by his gracious hands of Late Balasaheb Thackeray. Thackerayji honoured us and accepted the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ from us. It was truly an honour to have been blessed by the person who was a living legend and had times when he actually ruled the city. Soon, as life passes, even he made his glorious journey to the afterlife. We thought of following his principles of being honest to journalism, being unbiased and presenting the facts as it is, as much as possible and letting the masses judge us. There are people who have taken away powers from the people but we believe in giving power back to the people. Thus, we even came up with an idea of letting common man or the citizens of India speak up and give us news about anything and everything that they feel is happening with factual evidences. Thus, citizen journalism started flourishing. With power back to the people, it feels like we have created a revolution. There were gimmicks to stop us, various hurdles were created like income tax raid in our office, which made us wait for about three days and this happened thrice. We kept to our words but let them do their work peacefully. By now, even the income tax office must have our office address in their mind. The event of coming out clean from various challenges itself was the proof that we need not give more proof of our honesty and dedication. Honesty comes with a huge price and we are constantly investing in it, without hesitation. Such things do not affect us anymore, which includes RTI for what we do.
Wise once said, if you speak a lie, you need to remember and be smarter but if you speak the truth, you just have to remember the event and rest the God stands right next to you. With high regards to my readers who have kept us strong and high respect to people who have taken the time out and contributed in our journey, thanks is a small word for them. We have pulled up our socks with this 6th year; we stand up with the pride of being what we are today and will continue carrying on with it. Any hurdles may come but we are committed to being… unstoppable.
I would like to thank all my readers and well-wishers for being such a great support in this journey.
