For the strangest reason of all, I have never been able to publish anything that’s even remotely personal on my website. And I only realized this recently that how fun is it to read ‘I’ and ‘me’ in a blog post. I bumped into a friend’s profile where she has spoken about her experience meeting a potential groom every week. Before you get any ideas, it’s the arranged marriage circle that she was fixed in.
Thankfully so, she is happily married to a man of her dreams but that hasn’t made her blog any boring. So, I have derived some inspiration from her blog and have sort of convinced myself to go a little personal at this space.
So, I have started anchoring live for a business news channel – ET Now. Eee... that’s professional, not personal! But the hurly-burly that I was going through when I was on the hot seat for the first time, now that’s personal.
The director started by saying...one minute to go. And I was fine and confident till then.. actually until he started counting backwards – 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 cue... “Hi there, this is Business Saturday and I’m Kamiya Jani. Let’s first take a look at the headlines.” Now, inspite of rehearsing this line almost all my life, I could sense my heartbeat literally beating me hard from inside as if it want to step out.
Thankfully so, I was covered with visuals immediately after that so that helped me hide my fake smile. But that didn’t last for too long. Thirty seconds and I was told ‘cue’ again. This time, my hands shaking in a weird fashion, was that shivering? Oh yes! But did it show? Oh no! Thank God. I had almost forgotten how to feel nervous after school but this experience was good enough to remind of the bad old days.
I went on without paying attention to my dancing hands or shouting heartbeats. And sooner did I realize that I have become indifferent to it. Well, I have no special skills of ignoring what I wish to but the fact that I didn’t have the choice of running away from the studio – helped!
And you know, all of us have been blessed with an ability to find ways of hiding nervousness. Few speak faster, few go extremely slow, few start making weird faces and the rest of us smile too much :p No matter how much the sensex has lost or the global economy is crashing, my smile was my companion through out! Thank god there was no news of an air-crash or a bomb-blast that day.
Doing things for the first time is always very exciting. As much as you want to do it, you want to avoid it too and save yourself from the turmoil. Though I must add - What a lovely experience!