Ten years ago today, I was a producer with CNBC. I lived in Manhattan and had just finished the overnight shift. I took the network transport back to the city from Ft. Lee, NJ (where CNBC was based at the time, now it is in Secaucus, NJ). I came to my apt., which was on the Upper West Side, and made two pieces of toast and turned on the TV, something I rarely did. I usually just put in my ear plugs and tried to sleep during the day, as I worked nights. I saw everything happening with the twin towers on TV. There was no way for me to get back to work, because the bridges and tunnels had been closed. The first phone call I got was from my cousin, Anjali Bajaj Dooley, who wanted to make sure I was ok. Later that day I had dozens of phone calls and emails from friends and relatives from India, who wanted to make sure I was ok. That night I had no idea how to get back to Ft. Lee. I walked outside my apt. and the streets were bare. As I walked to the subway, I saw someone just stop and shake the hand of a police officer for doing all he could to keep the city safe. I took the subway (subways and bridges were open again) to the George Washington Bridge and walked across the bridge to get to Ft. Lee. Have you ever walked across the George Washington Bridge? As soon as I got to the newsroom I called my parents. Dad was traveling at the time, and mom had his contact information. I finally got in touch with him, and he, too, was in shock with the news. I remember him feeling sad as he appreciated the beauty the twin towers added to the New York skyline.
The next month was filled with emotionally draining 16 hour/day shifts trying to understand the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the aftermath of the demolished World Trade Center. My newscasts were filled with a minimum of four live shots from Ground Zero, The Pentagon, Afghanistan and the State Dept. These were live shots that were available to me with a simple phone call. The resources available at the network for the Sept. 11th coverage made my experience with CNBC the highlight of my television news career.
Another memory: When I was looking for a place to live in New York, I was going to rent an apt. in Battery Park (a neighborhood on the south end of Manhattan). My father came with me to help me find a place to live. We saw many places in the Wall Street area, but finally I settled on something on the Upper West Side. Had I lived in Battery Park, I would have had to evacuate my apt. after Sept. 11 as it would have been nearby to the twin towers.
Today I’m in Bangalore, India listening to the drum beats of the procession for the 10th day immersion of Ganesh Chaturthi. There’s some coverage of the 10 year anniversary in the newspapers and on television. But being on the other side of the world, I feel a greater sense of remembrance from Facebook and of course, U.S. news websites.
Indira S. Somani, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Media, Journalism and Film at Howard University, Washington, D.C. Somani studies effects of satellite television on the Indian diaspora, specifically the generation of the Asian Indians who migrated to the U.S. between 1960 and 1972, and their media habits.
She has been published in the Howard Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication Inquiry, International Communication Research Journal, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and the Asian Journal of Communication.
For the fall of 2011, Somani was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship to study the Western influence of Indian programming in India.
Somani is also an award winning independent producer and director of documentaries. Her most recent production, Life on the Ganges (2016), is a 10- minute documentary short about the life of one boatman, who rows tourists along the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, particularly around Dev Diwali when people from all over India travel there to bathe in the Ganges to wash away their sins and purify their souls. The film has been screening in film festivals all over the U.S.
Another production, Crossing Lines (2007), is a personal essay 30-minute documentary about her struggle to stay connected to India after the loss of her father, and about how Asian Indians maintain and preserve their cultural identity. The film has won numerous awards, screened in film festivals nationally and internationally, screened on PBS affiliates, and has also been distributed to more than 100 university libraries in the U.S. through New Day films.
Somani brings 10 years of broadcast journalism experience as a television news producer to the classroom, most notably with CNBC and WJLA-TV, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C. She has been a leader of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), where she has also won several “Outstanding” awards on her coverage of South Asians in North America.
Prior to joining Howard University, Somani was an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA) and American University’s School of Communication (Washington, DC). Somani earned her Master’s in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University in 1993, and her Ph.D. from the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park in May 2008.