Nisha Pillai

When crafting a speech you really need an audience to test it on. And presentations guru, Rob Geraghty, is the ideal sounding board, encouraging me to experiment while keeping my wilder flights of fancy in check.  Most important is Rob’s refrain, “this sounds great, Nisha, but what does it really mean for your audience? ” This month I’ve been working on a speech entitled ‘Getting Your Message Across’, aimed at a large audience of IT professionals. With a little help from Rob, it’s gelling nicely. (more…)

Hinglish – it’s not the easiest word to say out loud. You need to put the stress firmly on that initial  ‘h’. Spit it out almost. Not just to distinguish it from English, but also because Hinglish is a hybrid language with the emphasis on Hindi  – it’s mostly Hindi with a generous pinch of English sprinkled over the top like salt n pepper – or chaat masala.

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April Fool’s day was a day and a half in the studio. Working on BBC4 News with my namesake, and favourite editor, Nisha Kapur, turned into a master-class on how to stitch, unstitch, and restitch a programme till we got it right. The day started out with gameplan A – let’s go for an unusual lead story – is the Catholic church shifting it’s ground on contraception, following comments by the UK’s Archbishop Vincent Nicholl that he could understand why contraception is “attractive” in alleviating world poverty. But as the day went on, doubts emerged, is it really a strong enough lead? (more…)