Annirudh Nakum
Rajkot
Race Course Ring Road, Rajkot
It’s not every day that Rajkot makes an appearance on national television. But in July when a woman stripped and walked on Rajkot’s Race Course Ring Road to draw attention to the harassment she faced from her in-laws, not just Gujarat but the entire country watched in sympathy.
As she protested, taking a round of the office of Commissioner of Police, the police didn’t even notice her. But Annirudh Nakum did.
A photographer with the vernacular daily Divya Bhaskar and cameraman for a local news channel, he was on his way home in the evening when he spotted Pooja Chauhan.
Nakum, who was crime reporter with an eveninger, smelt a story. He took out his video camera and followed Chauhan.
Then he told a friend who worked for a national channel about the story and in half an hour he had every channel calling him up for the footage.
‘‘I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Though I am a photographer-cum-reporter, I always carry a video camera,’’ says 26-year-old Nakum.
A college dropout, Nakum struggled and did every thing from reporting and filming for a couple of years before he got a permanent job with Divya Bhaskar. But his passion for filming breaking news is abiding.
‘‘I like to expose things which would otherwise go unnoticed. I am always ready to shoot for my cable channel,’’ he says.
He learned to work with camera from friends. ‘‘My parents are in Idar. My father is retired and to support myself, I started working for vernacular papers 10 years ago,’’ says Nakum.
He was 17 when he shot his first story. ‘‘I accompanied a police team that went to a village to conduct a raid on gambling den. It was my first story on air. I’ve been on many exciting assignments in the last few years but my first story remains my most favourite assignment.’’
For the Pooja Chauhan story he got precisely three minutes to think, act and film. ‘‘She was very agitated and had a baseball bat with her. I just decided to follow her and got the footage,’’ he says.
–Hiral Dave

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