‘Reporters like to believe stories are won through persistence, planning and instinct. But sometimes they are carried across the finish line by people whose names never appear in the byline’
| Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Journalism rewards preparation. But every reporter eventually learns that preparation alone is not always enough. Some stories survive because, at the exact moment things begin to fall apart, someone with no stake in the story decides that they will not let you fail.
End of last month, I was travelling to Om Parvat, situated over 18,000 feet above sea level, in Uttarakhand for a story. Days of rain had left the mountain roads unstable. Near Malpa, remembered for the devastating 1998 landslide that killed at least 60 Kailash Mansarovar pilgrims, villagers say even a brief spell of rain can send rocks crashing down.
They were right. Our vehicle was stopped twice by fresh landslides. The debris blocked the narrow road completely. I paced along the roadside, calculating what every passing minute meant for our reporting schedule. If we failed to reach Dharchula that evening, we would miss the train to Delhi the next day and, with it, the deadline. After waiting for hours, the photographer travelling with me, along with a few stranded passengers, rolled up their sleeves and began clearing rocks and mud with their bare hands. We knew it would hardly make a difference. It didn’t.
Then help arrived. An Army convoy happened to be travelling behind us. The soldiers got down and cleared enough of the road for vehicles to move. That day, it wasn’t a reporter who got the story home. It was a group of soldiers who probably never knew they had rescued a deadline.
The episode reminded me of another assignment years earlier when I was travelling to Bah, on the edge of the Chambal ravines in Agra. It was an important story scheduled around the launch of the newspaper I then worked for. Just before reaching the area, our cab driver received a frantic call. Another vehicle from his fleet had been stolen on the Yamuna Expressway and his colleague assaulted by thieves. He had to rush to the hospital.
Returning the next day was not an option. I tried calling local contacts, but to no avail. A villager sipping tea nearby overheard my conversation and offered to help. He called his brother, and the two ferried my photographer and me on their motorcycles, for almost 30 kms. After the road ended, we walked for nearly two-and-a-half hours through the Chambal ravines in the sweltering August heat. There was no drinking water, no mobile signal and barely any sign of habitation. Residents told me no marriage had taken place in the village for nearly 50 years because there was no road, electricity, or phone connectivity. For a brief moment, I wondered whether I had taken one risk too many. I hadn’t. The story existed because two strangers decided it should.
Years later, another stranger did the same. While covering a Rahul Gandhi rally at Girodhpuri in Chhattisgarh, heavy rain brought everything to a standstill. Roads were flooded, shops shut early and Baloda Bazar’s patchy mobile network disappeared altogether. My laptop battery was almost dead and filing the report seemed impossible. Hours of searching for electricity or internet access led nowhere. While standing under a tin shed outside a wedding card printing shop operating from the verandah of a modest two-room house, I called my editor to say the story might not make it.
The shopkeeper saw me drenched and exhausted and asked the reason for my condition. I shared. He asked me to wait until he finished printing the last batch of cards before offering me his ageing desktop computer. It was painfully slow, but it worked. I wrote my copy, emailed it to the newsroom and met the deadline.
Looking back, what stays with me isn’t the landslide, the ravines or the storm. It’s something that I was never taught in journalism classes. Reporters like to believe stories are won through persistence, planning and instinct. But sometimes they are carried across the finish line by people whose names never appear in the byline.
Perhaps every byline has invisible co-authors. We just don’t know their names.
Published – July 17, 2026 01:05 am IST
