While Tombat's ability to put forth persuasive arguments eventually convinced me to accept this task, I was determined not to remain 'stuck' with correspondents for long. There were many reasons for this. Firstly, working with correspondents invariably meant that one would end up merely re-writing their stories and would not have much time to work on my own stories. And with barely two years of journalism under my belt, there was no way I would allow my ambition be condemned to the mere restoration of correspondents' news items. Secondly, co-ordinating with correspondents involved vast amounts of patience, as each correspondent had to be handled differently. Moreover, since most were part-time correspondents and could devote only a few hours to the profession, I could only expect them to function for a brief part of the day. Then again, these correspondents were based in different parts of the state and my interaction with them was largely dependent on telephones and other means of remote communication. The correspondents were certainly happy to have me around, as till then their complaints seemed endless. "Our stories don't appear promptly in the newspaper and, sometimes, they don't appear at all. People in our locality then get upset and complain that we are not sending in their stories," was a commonly echoed grievance. "No one attends to our telephone calls and, when they do, they keep transferring our calls from one person to another and they finally disconnect the phone," was another general complaint. Their complaints certainly had some degree of legitimacy. It is a common perception -- especially among English-language newspapers in the state -- that correspondents are third-class passengers, who deserve little or no decent treatment. Let me cite two instances to prove this point. In one English-language newspaper, a correspondent sent me a crime report, which, under normal circumstances, should have been carried the next day. To my surprise, the report was not published for the next two days. The correspondent called me and sought an explanation for the delay. Unable to give him a suitable reply, I transferred the call to the concerned sub-editor, who simply snapped back and insisted that the correspondent need not bother about his report and, that, the report would appear only when there space was available in the paper!