Barkha Dutt In our Office

It was the annual awards ceremony in our office on the 18th Dec,06.

Employees who show exceptional performance over the entire year are awarded these annual excellence awards.

This is a function which is covered live in all the DCs(Development Centres) of the company, not only in the country but also across continents where ever it has its presence.

The epicenter of these awards however lies in Bangalore,India where our company's head office is located. This function is marked by a guest of honour, who is mostly a celebrity, but most importantly a person who has made his/her impact on the society with his/her work.

This year it was Barkha Dutt, one of the most famous journalists of this country,working with NDTV, whose one shot to fame was the valiant coverage of Kargil War of 99. Though many other journalists were there to cover the war, her being a lady journalist was what had surprised many a people.

It was sharp 7'o clock by my watch when she came up to the lecturn for the guest speech. She started by explaining the meaning of Excellence, the very essence of the award ceremony. She said Excellence is manhood's quest for being the best in his field. But there is no final destination one can reach as it is a process which calls for continuous improvement and hence doest have an end. Once someone thinks he has acheived excellence, then that is the last day of his being so. She emphasised this by stating how her knees tremble before any speech that she makes even after her having done so millions of time before. She then went on to say that everyone hears so many accolades that are bestowed upon the company's performance and how all the employees take pride in being a part of this cult. But many a times people fail to look into the flip side of this success. The cons of being so successful. She cited many examples from her life from the time she had covered the Kargil War to the Godhra carnage to the latest incident of Tsunami which had affected the southern states of the nation. She said everytime she had covered these News items she had to face loads of challenges. Enemies were born, hate and threat mails filled her mail box, how she was beaten up badly by unrelenting supporters of political parties etc..Not only this, how descision making was integral during all this. During one such coverage how she had seen hundreds of mutilated bodies of children in a grave, which could have easily been telecast live on the national television but she had to decide in a split second the aftermath of such a thing being telecast live. Not only this the attrocities taht one has to bear in her profession ex: not being able to even take bath for 12 days consecutively during Kargil War coverage. While stating all this she mentioned to us that excellence is all about going that extra mile...

Finally she concluded her speech by saying that once a person achieves a certain stature in society, the society wants him to behave in a certain fashion only. That is if someone is a communist then he cant fight for industrialisation, if someone is a human rights activist then he has to fight against capital punishment. But the very path of excellence is being different from others. While one treads on this path one may loose many friends, having to go may be all alone. But once someone achieves the goal he would end up only being a role model for others. The very path that many had objected to would be followed by them. This brought her to the end of the speech.

Her speech may have ended but it left everyone stunned rather speechless. It sent a thunder down my spine at least. How amazing the 30 min had been!! The real life anecdotes had left an undying sense of inspiration behind.

I was a fan of hers always!! Her speech had made me to being a bigger fan of hers.