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Of Dots, Dashes & Hashes

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DQI Bureau
New Update

It’s like a Diwali bash or a ritualistic reunion–it happens every year,

there’s a mad scramble at the nth hour despite being planned well in advance

and involves volumes of back-breaking, mind-numbing work. And though you are

relieved when it’s over, you’re already planning how you can do it better

next year–that’s what the Top 20 means for Team DQ.

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For Yograj Varma, life’s been one extended excel sheet for

months–he crunched enough numbers to stop wanting popcorn. As his MSN ID said,

he is ‘Getting Numb’er’. Shubhendu Parth, buried deep in the stories that

he wrote at the pace of a tortoise but with the content quality of a lion, was

Varma’s fellow number-cruncher. He christened himself ‘One More Zero’–a

reference to the revenues of one of the companies he profiled.

Shweta Verma, with her "strategic planning and

efficiency", was the first to hand over her stories, and leave office every

day. Likewise, Amit Sarkar too had his bunch of write-ups ready and done well in

time–perhaps that’s why he was seldom seen in Cyber House after that!

Mumbai and ED (Easwardas Satyan) were the other seldom-found

forces–the former was covered in rain, the latter in a deluge of hate mail

from the copy desk, each demanding either all of his writeups or his head,

preferably both. Composed and unassuming as always, correspondent Shrikanth G

sent his despatches from Chennai. Don’t let his wiry frame fool you–that guy

is all muscle where it counts (!), and all efficiency. Manjiri Kalghatgi used

his performance as a starting point–she finished her stories, cleaned her

copies, conceptualized the visuals, fretted and fumed and struggled with

pagination, and still found the zeal to feed us every evening. She is now

affectionately referred to as ‘Mommy’.

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And given its significance on India’s IT map, Bangalore saw

hectic activity. Sarita Rani churned out write-ups, chased deadlines and worked

mostly at night–("the days are for calling, the nights for

writing"). Surprisingly, she’s still alive after two months of

sleeplessness…

…As is the desk and DTP sitting at the Gurgaon HQ. Families–children,

husbands and wives were forgotten–as were sleep, food and bathing. Digamber

Prasad juggled with the ad department’s demands for "six strip ads on

consecutive pages, followed by one LHP of editorial matter followed by a full

page ad on the RHP"…Whew! His left arm, Paras Jain, created a new DQimca

Book (sic) record by creating 1,500 complicated graphics in 30 days–needless

to say, his only reaction on being led to a cake on his birthday was–"It

looks like a pie chart!"

DR Lohia was at his creative best (and loudest) as he tried

to shrug off Rajeev Narayan’s diktat’s on colors. But Rajeev is the boss,

and his colors (not necessarily the ideal ones) prevailed. DR managed to have

his way with the section covers though, and they are all his doing (or undoing).

RN was too busy to notice, for he took upon himself the task of attending all

the meetings that we are now globally famous for, and reading every word

published in the Top 20 issues–so any glitches that went through are his

mistakes.

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TEAM

DQ

Manjiri Kalghatgi

DR Lohia Easwardas Satyan Sarita Rani Shubhendu Parth

Manjiri Kalghatgi

DR



Lohia
Easwardas Satyan Sarita



Rani
Shubhendu Parth
Dhanya Krishnakumar Yograj Varma Shweta Verma Pradipta Sengupta

G



Shrikanth

Dhanya K Kumar

Yograj Varma

Shweta Verma

Pradipta Sengupta

Rajeev Narayan

Digamber Prasad Paras Jain

Amit Sarkar

Rajeev Narayan

Digamber Prasad

Radhika Bhuyan

Paras



Jain

Amit



Sarkar

Dhanya Krishnakumar, having got "my news pages, NAs and

FAs" out of the way, was still busy–routing data for graphics to DTP,

surfing to confirm spellings of CXO names and running to MSN to chat up her

latest collections–the latest brood of men trying to marry her. Radhika Bhuyan

was her diligent and I-have-to-get-off-the-desk self"–she got stuck in

quicksand called ‘Jharkh-and Supplement’. Surprisingly, given her (ahem)

nimble frame, she pulled herself out with remarkable ease.

Pradeepta Sengupta had reams of data to type in. He did, and

he did, and he did, and is still doing… On all working holidays (what’s a

holiday?), there were Joydev Chatterjee and his team, Yoginder and Shiv Kumar,

ensuring everything worked, there was cold water around and Team DQ had its

meals–if anyone died of hunger, who would bring out the next issue?!

TEAM DQ

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