How covering the 2004 tsunami tragedy was a grim reminder on being humane while on the job

Dubai: I was a cub reporter—read: glorified intern—on the news desk at Deccan Herald in Bangalore, Southern India, when the tsunami ripped through countries on the Indian Ocean back in 2004.

One second, the newsroom was in its usual post-lunch lull, the next it was pure chaos. Phones ringing, editors barking orders, printers spitting out wire copy. This was pre-social media, so no doom-scrolling for updates. We had to make calls and actually step out to meet our sources. Imagine that.

I was standing there, eyes wide, basically furniture and pretty useless, when my chief of staff—a total boss lady—clocked me.

She clearly thought, “Fine, let’s see if the intern sinks or swims.” Her brief? “Call every travel agent in the city. Find out what happens to holiday bookings to these countries now.”

Simple enough, right? Wrong. The first call slapped me in the face with reality. How do you even begin that conversation when people are literally drowning, losing homes, and finding their missing ones? “Hi, yes, so… is business dead?” was not the vibe.

The second call wasn’t much better. I fumbled around with, “Uh, any cancellations happening?” as if mass cancellations were the real tragedy here. The travel agent politely told me they were “not in the mood to chat” and hung up. Fair. By the third call, I was half-expecting someone to show up my desk and whack me with a rolled-up itinerary.

It hit me fast: this wasn’t just about getting a quote. There’s a way to ask, and there’s a way to sound like an alien who’s just landed from Planet Insensitivity. Unfortunately, I was very much the latter that day.

Anyway, I stumbled through some awkward starts, asked the wrong things, and when I finally filed my copy, I led with a line about “agents in a tizzy.”

My editor's editor promptly took me aside to give me a gentle dressing down on why being flippant during a disaster isn't encouraged. In other words, read the room. That sting stayed.

It was my crash course in the one thing no one teaches you in Journalism-school: tone.

You don’t have to be in the middle of a disaster zone to screw it up—your words can do the damage from miles away.

If I could go back, I’d tell that 20-year-old intern to take a beat and maybe a breath. Yes, we needed the story, but we also needed a brain-mouth filter. I figured it out the hard way: disaster coverage isn’t just about the dead and the numbers; it’s about the living, shell-shocked travel agent who doesn’t know how to talk to you without feeling like a total loser or a ghoul.

To this day, I think newsrooms need to do better by rookies. We’re drilled in speed, accuracy, and grammar. But no one sits you down and says, “Here’s how not to sound like an insensitive robot when the world is falling apart.”

That tsunami assignment wasn’t my career’s ultimate baptism by fire (that’s a story for another day), but it taught me something priceless.

It was the day I stopped writing like a machine and started writing like someone who’d actually been in the room. Turns out, disasters shape journalists too—they just don’t send out a press release about it.