BetweenTheLines

From left to right: Heena Grover Menon, Ena Jain Kejriwal, Tanvi, and Sameer Arshad Khatlani. By Sameer Arshad Khatlani I have no control over how quickly I crawl back into my shell. That is perhaps how I am and I have finally made peace with it. People mostly give up on me and rightly so. But there are a few who have not and I cannot thank them enough. Among them is Heena Grover Menon. Heena and I are chalk and cheese. Outgoing uninhibited and pleasant, I can go on and on using similar adjectives for Heena that do not even remotely apply to me. There were, as such, heavy odds against Heena and me becoming acquaintances let alone being friends.  But Heena overcame and how! I was as usual on the sidelines of a social event—my first Times of India party at the Hotel Samrat in Delhi's diplomatic enclave in 2008—when Heena had enough of my reclusiveness. She literally dragged me to the heart of the party. Only Heena could have pulled this off.  I had joined the Times of India over a ye

  By Sameer Arshad Khatlani In the summer of 2004, I arrived in Delhi for good to live my dream of being a journalist. Though eternally optimistic, lurking fears did weigh me down. A teacher subtly fanning the kind of prejudice that is now in one's face, and some classmates openly expressing it confirmed these fears. Hanging onto my firm belief in the innate goodness of humans was among the ways I dealt with it. The belief has since stood me in good stead. Vanita Raghuvanshi, one of my classmates at the journalism school, was among the first ones in Delhi to strengthen my belief in the values that I grew up with. She personified what innate goodness means: humans are inherently good and doing good comes naturally to them. Vanita is among the rare people completely devoid of prejudice. Her disarming innocence and pleasant and friendly demeanour offered me a much-needed sense of inclusion to stay the course to live my dream. Vanita was not alone in being a source of strength