• I had handled the co-ordination of the IT bureau.
• The TOI had a dedicated page for technology called Cutting Edge where technology related articles appear and I had been a leading contributor for the success of this page, which is extremely popular among IT community. ( Earlier, it was called Silicon Notes).
• The TOI group used to come out with a quarterly technology magazine, B-Drive, whose audience is the CXOs in large enterprises. Here, I was instrumental in working out the layout of the magazine along with generating the topics in the five sections of the magazine. The responsibility also involved writing cover stories as well as overall co-ordination – not only with other writers but also the design team.
• Whenever the group had to come out with supplements including Ascent (which is on employment opportunities and HR) , I was responsible for providing the content matrix for them – be it on technology, business or HR- related topics whenever required.
• For the online edition, I had been one of the few journalists whose stories have been constantly flashed on the website’s home page.

During this period, I had the opportunity of interviewing some of the global CEOs of large corporates including Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, Craig Barrett, Larry Ellison, Tom Engibous, David Filo, (Yahoo co-founder) as well as a number of visiting dignitaries like the ambassador the state of Washington and British UK Minister for Trade and Commerce among others and the Russian ICT minister.

Among the leading Indian software houses I have been constantly interacting with, Infosys Chairman Narayana Murthy, Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani, Wipro chief, Azim Premji, TCS’ S. Ramadorai, HCL’s head, Shiv Nadar, Ramalinga Raju of Satyam are some of the people I interact with on a continuous basis.

Some of the breaking news stories which I have been acclaimed for : Qualcomm picking up stake in Reliance, Discontent in Infosys and Wipro( which led to a spurt of articles in the print media as well as the electronic), hardware tech park coming up in Bangalore and a number of other stories (linking technology and software leaders which have appeared the front page of TOI) both in Bangalore as well in national editions.

Apart from pure-play tech stories, human interest features (where technology plays a key role) have also been written by me. Stories like HP’s effort in introducing e-literacy programmes and how cellular base stations employee inexperienced youth to align base stations, copyright infringements, schools (student database) going for automation, among others have also appeared on front page in TOI.

Previous Experience

Oct. 1996- 1999: Principal correspondent, Plus Channel, a leading electronic media TV broadcast company.

Here, I was anchoring business and stories from Chennai for the Business Plus daily morning show on the national Doordarshan (DD) network. I was responsible for both news and feature broadcast for this show aired from Mumbai.

As part of this, there were independent major features (especially at a time when Jayalalithaa, the Tamil Nadu chief minister was all-powerful – but started going through a roller coaster ride because of her arrests and imprisonment) and custodial deaths stories from Chennai.

Later, I was assigned the job of building up of the southern bureau from Bangalore and its editorial consolidation.

July 94 - 96 : Senior copy editor cum correspondent, The Economic Times, Chennai

My beat revolved more around business than IT. This was a time when IT in India was not too much in the limelight but was just beginning to take on a shape that would dwarf the rest of the global players. But this was a time that I had started working on IT trends as part of my business beat.

Sept. 91 to 94: Started out as a sub-editor-cum-reporter in the Financial Express, Chennai, part of the Indian Express group of newspapers, which at that time was the leading financial newspaper. During my three-year stint in FE, I was appointed as the feature-editor-cum- correspondent where in-depth features, mostly centering around business were regularly handled by me.