What I’ve learnt about PR so far

In my first year of college, I had a class on Public Relations where my teacher announced PR is Pyaar (love). A few months later, we studied what PR actually was and I never truly understood it until I was neck in deep in the industry. Now I know PR is not remotely related to love. It isn’t, it isn’t. So here’s a list of what I have learnt so far about the industry in the past one year.

Pros

1.      It’s good money. I wouldn’t get paid as much in a newspaper or a magazine.  

2.      You get a chance to learn, a lot! That’s the thing about reading newspapers every day and meeting journalists and clients. As my boss tells me, you should know something about everything so you can have conversations with intellectuals, be at par with them, which brings me to my third point.

3.      You get to meet really interesting, intelligent and brilliant people. These include businessmen, journalists, artists and innovators. Some could really inspire you.

4.      Then there are those occasional parties, celebrity events and the fun part. You won’t find any BFFs in celebrities but there’s glamour in PR too. Not really a party hopper but who doesn’t want to meet SRK?  

5.       You have to be a jack of all trades whether it is designing invites, managing digital media, making strategies or marketing plans, among other things.

Cons

1.      Journalists hate you, they will never respect you. They will dodge your calls, refuse to come out of their offices to meet you and pretend you don’t exist. Why? Because they can.

2.      There’s no ‘I’ in PR. You will never get credit for anything you do. Deal with it!

3.      Your client will never be happy because they have unrealistic expectations and don’t understand how media works. Get his quotes on the front page and he will still complain that his photo didn’t appear.

4.      Try as you may, you can’t explain to your family what you do.

5.      Submissive. Subservient.  You are expected to bow every time, regardless to who it is on the other side – journalist, client or your boss.

PR is not something you can learn in a class, I know now. There’s only so much a teacher can teach. Of course, writing and communication skills are important but when you have to think on your feet, that’s something you grasp when you sink your teeth into it.

Is PR for me? Well, I’m still trying to figure it out sitting by the fences. 

My Blank Paper

There’s nothing to lose and there’s nothing to prove, I’ll be dancing with myself!

I am in a very Glee mood. I was staring at the blank paper (MS Word) and it suddenly hit me – Mera Jeewan Kora Kaagaz, Kora Hi Reh Gaya. One thing led to another and I here I was typing ‘Dancing With Myself’ on Youtube and scrolling the mouse over the first few results that appeared. Then I found it – GLEE!  

It’s like an itch, you just have to scratch it or you won’t be able to sleep at night. Well, I have been sleepless for quite a few nights but no more. Tonight, I will dance with myself.

For all there is wrong with my writing, one thing is right – it gives me peace; it makes me happy. I have been tiring myself out thinking what I can do to fix my technique and in the process, I stopped. I stopped doing what I love the most; I kept my mind occupied with things that are secondary and my blank paper stayed as is. Until tonight. Tonight I did the first sensible thing all week – I strayed in search of an inspiration and before I knew it, I was humming Mera Jeewan Kora Kagaaz.

Watching Jaya Bachchan pretending to read a book called, ‘Principles of Literary Criticism’ with a sad song playing in the background may have been the highlight of my day. Now, I don’t know why she is so sad and the context of the song but what I do realize is that my paper will be inked after all. I am writing, am I not?

Call it an epiphany - the lightning struck in my head and it all makes sense now. I need to write for myself. My theory is that you are a confident dancer in your bedroom, strangely melodious in your bathroom so why can’t I be a creative writer on my blank page, a page I’m sure no one would read? I’m complicating things again. Here it goes in simple words – stop thinking about who will read it and how they will react to it. Amish Tripathi (yes, I know him – interviewed him for a magazine and can’t stop bragging about it even though it was just over the phone) said the same thing to me – don’t dwell upon what your readers will think, you will never be able to write if you do. He was right because it happened to me. I haven’t been able to write a single word since someone called my writing flat. I was too hung up on the fact that whatever I write next will be flat too, I embedded it in my mind that my prose has no curves, no twists and turns, no life. Then Glee gave me the answer. 

Well if it’s flat, I’ll try to improve it. That can’t happen if I drop the pen and surrender.

My newly found common sense: “No hands up! Get back to your laptop and type away. If it sucks (which it doesn’t), you can only improve by writing. Let people critique your work. Take it personally and do better next time.”

I love writing. Always have, always will. I will just have to deal with the criticism that comes with the territory. I should think of it this way – it’s highly unlikely that my bestselling novel (and I will write one) will be loved by all. I will get frequent hate mails when I kill my characters in my books. And what about the critics who would hate the adaptation of my novel? There is always, always going to be “Oh, I don’t like it” and “It isn’t really good” but my paper can’t stay blank.

And it won’t.

P.S. Cory, you are a star :)