24 Hours With...Bhairavi Jhaveri

Name Bhairavi Jhaveri

Job Senior Staff Writer, Hindustan Times weekend edition

Professional mission Honesty in your writing always connects with the reader. There’s nothing more wonderful to read than something simple with a sharp focus.

Personal mantra Chocolate, draught beer and lots of music can help you get through any bad day. 

9:00am Hit the snooze button, and wake up 15 minutes after.

10:00am I let the realisation of the day’s workload jolt me out of my slumber and into a frenzy of activity. Get ready for work, eat some breakfast and skim through the newspapers, to see what the competition has that we missed.

11:30am Make a dash for the office.

12:00pm Start making calls to schedule appointments for interviews for the feature story at hand. Put up statuses on all the various social networking mediums – Facebook, Google Talk, and BlackBerry messenger – while looking for leads.

2:30pm Lunch with a little banter with colleagues.

3:00pm Even though your friends, PR clans and acquaintances are tired of hearing all your sentences start with a, ‘Do you know anyone… who listens to drum ‘n’ bass… who makes personalised gifts… who is moving out of Mumbai…’ you continue to snoop around for some more leads.

4:00pm Tea with some serious surfing and magazine reading to see what other publications and websites are talking about.

5:00pm Back to phone interviews, sending questions over e-mail and scheduling interview appointments over coffee, for the evening. Did I mention evading deadlines and buying time?

6:00pm Go to meet absolute stranger at a suburban café, pick his brains on the topic you want information on, and you discover he is the best source for the story you were working on.

7:00pm Lift up your collar and tell yourself you’ve made it – to the other side. Ha!

7:15pm You realise, well, the story isn’t all that, after all.

8:00pm Delusion-free, go home, finish last minute interviews for the day.

9:00pm Dinner and some junk TV.

10:00pm Some more junk TV, a little bit of Calvin and Hobbes, often with a pinch of Haruki Murakami’s world of eccentricities.

1:00am Crash. Don’t burn.