In a sequence from Vinay Shukla’s documentary While We Watched, his protagonist the renowned TV anchor Ravish Kumar and a senior producer get into an ugly spat during an ongoing broadcast. Kumar, known for his eloquence and grace, looks dishevelled and flustered. “It was a pressure cooker moment and I wanted to capture the vulnerability and challenges of working in a newsroom,” Shukla says, about the scene that offers Kumar, otherwise an impresario of diction and gravitas as a crumbling mess of nerves. While We Watched follows Kumar’s last days at NDTV, as an intrepid but defiant TV journalist, trying to both stay afloat as a body of ideas and as a medium for public service. 

Kumar, who has since 2022 migrated to YouTube to continue his work as an independent journalist, repeatedly instructed his audience to stop watching TV news. “It’s what made him a fascinating protagonist. As this unique media icon, who was openly critical of his own ilk and an audience willing to indulge the melodrama that prime time news has turned into,” Shukla says from Goa, where he lives and works. Shukla debuted as an actor, in Anand Gandhi’s (also a long-time collaborator) seminal Ship of Theseus (2012). In the year of the film’s release, he decided to pick up a camera to follow the India Against Corruption movement; an endeavour that would culminated in An Insignificant Man (2016), his first feature length documentary film and an intimate peek into the early days of what we now know as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).