A Wild December - PART 1

Oh, december 2007, the last month of the year, I couldn't have asked for a better climax to the already "best in my life" year.

It was the middle of the first week of december n I was sitting over an e-mail sent by shazmeen, inviting us to experience the two new wilderness lodges by Taj n CC Africa in madhya pradesh. I tossed the idea of having a wildlife holiday series on our travel show - The Great Indian Traveller. As it turned out, all I had to was ask, coz my boss shweta was completely game for the idea. We had a short brainstorming session on the no. of episodes to produce under this series and the national parks that we would feature, n the plan was on.

Once the list of national parks was in place, the team got in top gear to line up the acco, safaris, travel arrangements for the shoot. It was december first week and we had less than 30 days to shoot, edit, package, promote and finally telecast the wildlife series. Our goal was to premiere GIT on Safari on the first weekend of January.

We had to slot our shoots over weekends so as not to disrupt our weekly scheds, I had to produc ethe weekly tech show for which we were doing best gadgets of 2007 episodes and my two other colleagues were tied up with year-ender stuff too. I slotted my shoot for the weekend beginning 14th december, I dont know if my boss knew that it was my birthday on the 14th and I had deliberatley got our rooms reserved at the Pench resort for that day onwards. Frankly, I was least interested in spending another birthday in the city, with me feeling older n everyone else having a hearty laugh at it. Hence, this was a godsent escape route, n a fabulous one.