This title is the official broadsheet produced by the students of K G Joshi College of Arts and N G Bedekar College of Commerce, Thane. I feel fortunate even today that this newspaper gave me the platform to develop and showcase my managerial, leadership, communication and editing skills.
In my final year of Bachelor of Mass Media (B.M.M) programme, I was elected the editor-in-chief of Rta. I was responsible for planning, designing and coordinating the entire process — right from collecting news stories, editing articles, designing page layouts, meeting potential sponsors for advertisements, giving constant updates to the college administration, planning circulation and arranging for potential guests of honour.
Each stage of planning had its own set of challenges. The most difficult task for me was to resolve conflict within my team and keep them motivated. There were times when we were falling short of stories. During other instances, we were not able to convince sponsors. One of my team members had had a personal tragedy, where her father suffered a stroke.
Two days prior to the release, when my friend and I went to the printing press, we realized that the newspaper file format was not compatible with the software. A two-hour procedure, it took us eight hours to resolve the issue. Despite all these constant setbacks, we stuck through and got the job done. My core team and I put in 16-hour shifts for nearly two months.
After the successful release of Rta, I was able to leverage my newspaper to get into one of the best schools of journalism in Asia – the Asian School of Journalism, Chennai for a post-graduate diploma. This eventually helped me bag a job at the Times of India, where I was directly under the mentorship of editor-in-chief Mr. Jaideep Bose. In spite of having an arts background, I was assigned the business desk, where I worked for two years — being involved in two Union Budgets, the WalMart-Flipkart acquistion, and Urjit Patel's resignation as RBI governor.
Rta gave me the most important learnings in life — perseverance, team spirit, communication, negotiation, decision-making skills and empathy.
PS: I am the bald guy on the extreme left in the picture.