Because... I just drained my encyclopedia of cuss words. Well endless cussing at the reporters (when they can't even hear it) has a tendency to lead to this rare condition.

Seven months back, having freshly finished my A' levels and planning to take a sabbatical from studies, I started looking for a job. I had decided that editing was what I would like to do, since I'm not capable of much else (scarcity of any talents coupled with extremely limited skills). Four months into the gap year, and still no job, me lapsing into depression, it was my newspaper hawker, the messiah in disguise, who dropped a different newspaper, than the usual, at my place. It was then that I saw the advertisement for the opening of a sub-editor at an English daily. I fulfilled the required criteria, so I applied for the post immediately and the rest as they say is history.

After A 'levels, it was a dream come true for me and 'it paid' too. I had indeed hit the jackpot! But today, when I'm actually sitting here, I don't think that was quite what I had wanted in the first place. Maybe it's a different experience, but I don't feel quite different except that yes I love coming back home at 2, 3, 4 in the night, no wait, its morning. Accuracy. Exact facts. They are important things.

I'm just getting the hang of being a sub. Sub? Sub-editor. As well as becoming a source of extreme annoyance for my friends and acquaintances, now I insist on using full words, proper English and correct grammar and spellings and tenses etc etc, even on Facebook and SMS (it was supposed to be short messaging service). Call me a technology-killer!

But hey wait, I'm getting distracted again, even in this distraction. What I wanted to relate here was the sordid tale of us sub-editors, not my personal saga.

Now I get up from my terminal and reach our city editor for a particular news item which had arrived a couple of days ago. He asks me astutely, “Why do you need it?”. “Nothing much, just like that” stops him from inquiring any further. I come back and take my seat and busy myself with copy-pasting it to this document as my pent up frustration finally finds a safety valve in my wish to enlighten all you ignorant folks. It goes something like this

“ISLAMABAD It's summer time and the beaming gleaming yellow and green mangoes are once again taking central stage and stand supreme amongst the other seasonal fruit in markets, pavement stalls and on shelves through the capital. People of all age, be it a 60-year-old man or a five-year-old kid, the fruit — reckoned to be the 'King of Fruits' — is their number one choice as long as it is available in the markets and if it is not they will go to hell to get the heaven of a mango. Says Uzma, 12 and a mango maniac 'I have a mango for breakfast and my lunch and dinner is incomplete until I suck the fruit up'.”

This is the untampered, unsubbed version.

I would stop short of including the by-line i.e. the reporter's name, after all “What's in a name and that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. And likewise, this particular reporter's English and reporting would continue to pester me always whether names are named or not. Forgive me, all literature lovers for making Shakespeare turn in his grave by seeing his art being so brutally maimed and used in so unbecoming a manner but I shalt make it up to ye.

Right now, I may sound like I'm demeaning reporters' skills. But believe me, it doesn't make me feel happy either when people ask me what I'm doing and I tell them I'm working as a sub-editor and they go like, “Oh, so you insert commas and correct some English”. This is called demeaning.

I mean we have to edit the whole piece of news. We make reporters' wild ramblings into newsworthy pieces. Correcting a bit of English and putting in a comma here and there is what is actually required from us.

Moreover, reporters grab awards for reporting and what not. The quality editors make their names too. It is us sub-editors who are left name-less, unappreciated, un-glorified soldiers of newsrooms.

As anger seethes inside me because there is an utterly annoying story still waiting to greet me as soon as I shall close this window, my only moment of glory remains the Facebook group that I joined a month back, “We super sub-editors, we turn journalists' ramblings into readable articles”. It would be pertinent to mention here that even this 'group' lies dysfunctional with zero activity on its wall whatsoever.

We demand justice! A revolution brews. And who knows, the next time you pick up the newspaper, sub-editors stare at you from the pictures wearing black, no white, no... I'm as yet unsure as to what would be 'our' insignia, so let us leave it at that for now.