There have been two occasions in my career when journalists known personally to me have lost their lives. The first time this happened was to the American journalist Daniel Pearl, whom I knew from the time he worked in Mumbai in 2001, before moving on to his next assignment in Pakistan. It was a fateful move that ended with him being kidnapped on January 23, 2002, followed by a brutal beheading nine days later. There was video footage of the killing posted online, which was the first such instance I had experienced.

I had no idea that such videos were fairly common even then, among some circles, simply because I had no reason to scour the Internet for information about kidnapped journalists. That murder, committed less than a decade into my career, shook me. Until then, I hadn't considered the possibility of journalists being murdered for doing their jobs, not because I was naïve, but because I hadn't been exposed to the full impact of it affecting someone I had known personally. The next time this happened was 15 years later, when my colleague J Dey, an employee of this newspaper at the time, was shot dead by four unidentified motorcycle-borne gunmen in Powai. It happened hours after I had been part of a meeting that he had attended, too, so his death rattled me.