That was the beginning.
learning about the newest city of my life- Kolkata. Love and
Hate relationship with this city, still goes on. Newspaper writing and its craft
was straightforward: find something true, make it clear, give it to people. The
machines involved were a computer and a dial-up connection. I worked as a struggling
reporter journalist in Kolkata, putting up in a 5X3 mess bari at Moulali, for
long was getting difficult. Hated to leave the city, but 2004 had different
plans for me. I moved to New Delhi. writing blogs, managing operations for a Noida
based KPO Vedainformatics, with a team of ‘writers’ and super writers. learning
backend coding and knowing what CMS’s are — "content writing" as it
was beginning to be called. My journalist friends considered it a step
sideways. I considered it a laboratory. The web was a different kind of reader:
patient for structure, impatient with obscurity, completely indifferent to ego.
Over the next decade and a half, I watched every platform getting
launched with its own promises. Yahoo Chat Rooms, Orkut. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube,
Instagram, LinkedIn. Each one was declared a revolution and we were awed, some
of friends, cringed till date. Privacy is gone. Each one (platform) was, in
some way. Each one also eventually became another surface to navigate.
In July 2022, I incorporated TDC Ventures with my late
father as co-director. We sat with a CA in Bhowanipore and signed the papers.
Two months later, ChatGPT entered the world for public use.
I started using it in September 2022. Not experimentally. As
a practitioner. I wanted to understand what it could do and what it couldn't —
because that distinction would matter professionally, and quickly.
It mattered. Quickly.
Cut, 2026- Last week, Neil Patel — who has spent twenty
years teaching people to rank on Google — sent me an email explaining Answer
Engine Optimisation. How AI assistants now build responses from published
content. How businesses whose content the engines trust will win. How
AnswerThePublic can show you what questions people are asking.
It was a good email. The advice is sound.
But what struck me was the strange completion of a circle. A
marketer who made his name on search algorithms is now explaining to a
Kolkata-based communicator — who started in print journalism before Google
Analytics existed — that the machines have changed again. The answer engines
are different from the search engines. The rules have shifted.
And yet.
The thing AI engines pull from is clear, useful,
well-structured content. The thing Google rewarded was clear, useful,
well-structured content. The thing a good editor wanted in 2002 was clear,
useful, well-structured content.
The engine is new. The job is old. People are asking
questions, and during the print era, people had to wait 24 hours to get the
answers. People, then would still be solving this problem – to answer people.
I think about this often: the people most rattled by AI in
communications are the ones who were primarily optimising for the machine — the
keyword stuffers, the listicle factories, the volume-over-value shops. They
built for algorithms and the algorithm changed on them.
The ones who have been writing for people — with real
perspective, real experience, real care about clarity — are finding that AI
engines treat their content as source material. Because it is.
I'm not nostalgic for print journalism. I'm not mourning the
old ways. I built TDC Ventures precisely because I believe lean, AI-augmented
teams can now punch far above their weight class. I use AI agents, as
instruments the way a journalist uses a notebook — to think faster, draft
cleaner, research deeper.
But I do think the Millennial communicators — the ones who
crossed from print to web to social to AI without ever having had a stable
medium — have something that the pure digital natives don't quite have yet:
memory of the full arc. We know what it felt like when each revolution arrived.
We know what survived each one.
What survived was the same thing every time: honest work,
clearly expressed.
That's the answer any engine will eventually reward. It
always has been.
