She Was There When Parliament Opened, And When It Closed: You Were Made For Big Things, Payal Mehta

“Tuesday ko aa jaungi… I will get you a Minister interview. All is lined up…”

Payal Mehta sounded excited when I called her on Friday night, around 8 PM. She was in Mumbai with her family, on a trip she had been looking forward to for a long time. She had particularly wanted to take her mother to Mumbai during the Ganpati celebrations.

We spoke about work, as we so often did.

At 5 AM on Sunday, Pallavi Ghosh woke me up with the news that I still cannot bring myself to believe.

Payal was no more. I have spent the day trying to come to terms with it. I have failed.

There are people who come to work. And then there are people who become inseparable from the work they do. Payal was the latter.

There is a perception that television journalism is all about

the noise, and shallow. But people like Payal Mehta reminded us of what really goes into making television news: long hours, physical exhaustion, relentless travel and the willingness to stay back when everyone else has gone home.

In Parliament, there was a running joke about Payal. She was there when the Makar Dwar was opened in the morning, and she was still there when it was locked at night.
I remember asking her once, “Kyun rehti ho Parliament mein itni raat tak? I’ve never asked you to stay put.”

Her answer came without hesitation. “I don’t like to miss any news. What if a Minister calls somebody else and says something off-record, and we miss it?”

That was Payal. Live at 8 AM. Live at midnight if the story demanded it.

She never needed to be told to chase a story. She never shied away from a work tour. She loved being on the ground, and election interviews were her forte. She was, in every sense of the word, a reporter.

But lately, life had been particularly unkind to her. Last month, she lost her father. She called me that morning to say she was rushing to Kolkata. She was supposed to leave for a Japan assignment that very day. That trip never happened.

Earlier this month, at a memorial function for her father in Delhi, I met her mother for the first time. “Maa, this is my boss… see, he came,” Payal introduced me, with a certain pride.

Today, that mother is having to deal with the loss of her husband and now, her daughter. There are no words for a loss like this. Life can be unbearably cruel. And frighteningly fragile.

What stays with me is that, even after returning from bereavement leave, Payal was eager to get back to work. “I am available for lives from home,” she called to tell me.

Earlier this week, she came to the office and sat down with me to discuss the coverage of the Prime Minister’s birthday. “Vadnagar jaana hai?” I asked. She immediately said she wanted to go. She wanted to be back in the thick of the action.

From Vadnagar, she called me on Thursday. “I am liking that I am back live on the channel from the ground. This place is special. Thanks for sending me.”

I can still hear her saying it.

Payal and I were the same age. We came from very different journalistic backgrounds when I became her reporting manager at CNN-NEWS18 around three years ago. She was a thoroughbred television journalist. I was a newspaper junkie.

We had our differences. We argued. We disagreed. Sometimes, we drove each other up the wall. But somewhere along the way, we developed a grudging respect for each other. And beneath the professional disagreements was an understanding that both of us cared deeply about the work.

That understanding came to the fore during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Payal and I teamed up for interviews with the Finance Minister and then BJP president JP Nadda. After interviewing the Finance Minister in Delhi, we drove down to Bilaspur to interview Nadda the same day.

Later, Payal looked at me and said, “Yaar Aman, ab tujhe TV samajh aane laga hai.” I laughed. It was her way of acknowledging that perhaps the newspaper guy was finally learning the ropes of television.

But perhaps the warning signs had already appeared.

In 2024, while we were covering the Prime Minister’s roadshow in Varanasi, Payal was positioned at the starting point near BHU. I was stationed at the other end, near Kashi Vishwanath.

Suddenly, our video journalist called me. Payal had briefly lost consciousness, and he was taking her back to the hotel. When I checked on her later at the hotel, she brushed it off as possible heat exhaustion.

It wasn’t. A few days later, she suffered a mini-stroke at home. Her friend Himanshu, who works with Aaj Tak, rushed her to Kailash Hospital in Noida.

I visited her the next morning. The doctors had found that her health parameters were seriously out of order. They wanted to keep her under observation for a few days.

Payal was upset. Not just about what had happened, but about the timing. The final leg of the election coverage was underway, and she was worried about missing out.

I told her to put her health first. She recovered quickly. A few days later, we were together again, interviewing Prime Minister Narendra Modi at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg, for an hour. I drove down from a tour in Punjab for the interview and was worried about getting a Covid test done in time – a requirement before meeting the PM. Payal helped me get my Covid test and result done quickly from the same Kailash hospital — “chal mere bimaar hone ka koi fayada toh hua,” she told me with a laugh as we drove into 7, LKM later that evening.

Before the interview began, the Prime Minister asked about Payal’s health. She had clearly left an impression on him.

After that episode, she told me she was wearing a glucometer and monitoring her health closely.

And then she was back out there. Super-active. On the field. Doing what she loved.

She travelled to Bihar for the elections. She covered the recent elections in West Bengal and Assam. She chased the big interviews, the difficult interviews, the interviews that required the kind of physical effort most people never see.

I remember one particular night in Patna. Payal had landed from Delhi and then driven nearly six hours to interview Asaduddin Owaisi. By the time she got to him, it was midnight.

She got the interview. And made sure we ran it the next morning, before anyone else could get to him. At 2 AM, my phone rang. “Ab maine kar diya hai. Tum chalao.” She had done her job. Now it was my turn to do mine.

That was our relationship, in many ways. She chased the story. I worried about getting it on air.

And somehow, it worked.

Last month, Payal was promoted. She was delighted. I told her she deserved it for the sheer amount of work she had put in for the channel – the big voices she had brought on air, the political scoops she had chased, the effort she had invested in every assignment.

She was happy. And, as always, already looking ahead.

The last long conversation I had with her was at our BRICS Dialogues event at the Leela hotel last week. We sat together and spoke about life. I asked her if she planned to move her mother with herself in Delhi after her father’s death. I told her how my mother is my big support system at home after I lost my father too three years ago. Payal said her mother likes it in Kolkata. “I have CCTVs at home. See, I monitor all the time,” she showed me on her phone. She was observing a fast and said she would have khichdi. We promptly got some made for her. She ate it with relish. Now I think, who will monitor that CCTV?

And then she said something that has been playing in my head all day. “Aman, mujhe bade interviews karne hain. PM ka, CM ka, sabka. I am made for big things.”

She said it with that familiar conviction. The conviction of someone who believed there was still so much left to do. So many interviews to conduct. So many stories to chase. So much more to accomplish.

She was 46. She would have turned 47 this coming Tuesday, September 22.

On Sunday, the Prime Minister, almost every Chief Minister in the country, several Union Ministers, Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge, among many others, expressed their condolences.

Politicians across the spectrum had known Payal. They had dealt with her questions, her persistence, her phone calls and her insistence on getting the story.

They respected her work. And perhaps that is the most fitting tribute to a journalist who spent her life making sure that no story passed her by.

For CNN-NEWS18, this is an immeasurable loss. For journalism, it is the loss of a reporter who understood that the job was not about being seen. It was about being there.

For her countless friends, colleagues and, most of all, her family, it is a loss that words cannot begin to contain.

For me, it is the loss of a colleague who was sometimes infuriating, often funny, fiercely committed and, in her own way, irreplaceable.

On Friday night, Payal was planning her next interview. On Tuesday, she was supposed to return to work. Instead, on Tuesday, we will remember her on her birthday.
I wish I could hear her say it one more time. “Aman, mujhe bade interviews karne hain. I am made for big things.”

Yes, Payal. You were. And you did. Om Shanti