Next morning, as I got off at the VT Station to walk to my college, the headline of my story stared at me from every vendor. It was my first breaking story and I didn’t even know it!
Soon Rauf quit Cinema Journal to launch a glossy magazine called Super. Journalists usually travel from magazines to broadsheets but Rauf was meant to break rules! Super portrayed exclusive pictures of the dream merchants and featured stars as humans. The film fraternity loved the magazine and the common compliment from everywhere we met was, ‘Super is really super’. Stars liked Rauf, he made an engaging conversationalist and more important, they trusted him and he never let them down!
Rauf was equally popular amongst his team because he was an easy boss, a man without formalities, a bit like Dev Anand. We never knew his age and always addressed him by his first name. He imposed no rules on us, no restrictions on office timings. We walked in and out of the office whenever we wanted, took long lunch breaks and disappeared without intimation. But when it was time to submit stories, he made us rewrite our copies till he was thoroughly satisfied.
He knew instinctively which reporter should be sent for which assignment. Initially he only sent me for shooting coverages because that involved spending a lot of time on the sets and chatting with filmmakers and artists. He did this because he felt I needed to break my inhibitions. I did and, in the process, built a lot of contacts and unknowingly enhanced my observations.
To be continued