A cheerful man who was a solid leader: B Sai Kumar remembers Monjit Sharma

I don’t know the exact year Monjit joined TV18, perhaps it was 2001. What I know is that it was significantly close to the time we took the rather brave call to get into distribution & ad sales ourselves, something that had previously been outsourced to Sony. All of this is much before TV18 became a formidable player in the media market, even before CNN IBN or Forbes or Viacom18 or A&E18. This was when we ran a TV18 channel, CNBC India, and had recently taken over moneycontrol.com. 

Those days Delhi was a significant contributor to the advertising business and media buyers were not as consolidated as they presently are. Time was of the essence (as it always was at TV18) and we were meeting a variety of people to run our ad sales operations in the North (& East). Enter Monjit Sharma, a strapping, cheerful fellow from ESPN, and he came in knowing only he could get the job done, and I was left selling to him which I didn't mind at all. 

For a business news channel, Delhi was literally a thousand miles away from the financial capital and Monjit helped us get legit and mainstream (we almost tripled our ad rates) with the auto sector, consumer durables sector and a host of other ones which were the mainstays of the Delhi market so much so that the lead sponsor of the first Budget spectacle on CNBC India was an auto client and not a bank or a brokerage. He and I traversed Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon sometimes multiple times a day through the despair of summer at 48 degrees when the ad sales market was at its bleakest (the AMJ blues) and in the beauty of 10 degree Delhi winter when the Union Budget raised our demand in the market and quite obviously we couldn't do this without a rock solid team. 

My memory is fading a bit again but Monjit was either directly or in some way responsible for Nimar, Alpana, Manek, Paurush, Vishal Srivastav (now a restaurateur in Canada), Vishal Bhatnagar (now BBC & a fine golfer am told), Pankaj Chandra ,Vivek Malhotra (now Aajtak/India Today), Seema (a lovely sales leader I keep bumping into at parent teacher gigs at the Oberoi School in Mumbai) and Basab in Calcutta - it was a fine team and Monjit was at the centre of it all. 

While there are a number of stories written on/about TV18, there are equally loads that get missed out since they happen in corners & certain pockets of time - this is one of those, a three- year great run by an exceptional team and a good, solid leader. 

My trips to Delhi gradually reduced and one fine day Monjit announced that he planned to leave. He had called Anil Uniyal (another exceptional leader, now NDTV) to let me know, to soften the blow, in very Monjit style. He joined MTV and there was a glimmer of hope that our paths would cross again when TV18 and MTV (Colors was yet to be) merged but he soon left that gig too. 

As TV18 went into a spiral of growth and our sales, content, distribution etc operations across news & entertainment became rather substantial, he continued very proud of TV18, but my interactions with Monjit were reduced to perhaps a message or a brief call every year and each of them was fond, funny & cheerful - eg "Be careful. you will have to work very hard"....or something wicked like that, when I was named CEO. 

Years went by as they tend to, & just after Covid, we met for dinner and while the old cheer was all there and he was very happy that kids in his team were following Arré, I could clearly see that he had taken his health for granted. But then a few months later I got a call from a friend who was now at the helm of the Indian Olympic Association and Monjit was working for his agency. I thought sport and renewed excitement, what with the Olympics and all that, will get Monjit back in fine fettle but that was not to be. I last called him on a whim on July 17 and the call went unanswered. R.I.P my friend. 

PS: I will be always be grateful to Monjit for our trip to Kumaon and the wonderful Himalayan range that envelops it. I was newly married then and Monjit decided that all of us should go to this resort in Kasardevi, close to Binsar. He didn't tell us how cold it would be - according to him, nothing that some vodka couldn't solve. And that afternoon as I lay crouched in the haze of vodka and the bone-chill of a sub-zero Himalayan winter, the clouds gave way to glimpses of the peaks of Nandadevi & Trishul in all their glory. I've never missed going to the mountains any year since then and every time I pass Kasardevi, I remember Monjit and that resort which, in sad irony, is now a health and wellness retreat.