Maya Sreekumar

Maya Sreekumar is one of the best news anchors in the Malayalam media industry born in Chelakkara, Thrissur, and after marriage, she moved to Trivandrum. She did her pre-degree at St. Mary’s School, was a graduate of Vimala College, and was the rank-holder in Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. During school days, she was active in both studies and extracurricular activities; she participated in all the school fests and was a member of her school’s volleyball team.

Though she was quite an all-rounder, she never thought of creating a career in the media industry; she never had a Television at home since childhood or seen news reading before. Choosing her career as a newsreader was an unplanned one where after her studies, she was looking for various jobs, and that’s when she saw the advertisement in the newspaper. She applied for the newsreader job and passed the interview. She got the job of a casual reader in 1985 at Doordarshan which was her first time watching television, and she was pretty nervous, but she did everything as instructed.

Working at Doordarshan taught her everything, starting from wearing a saree to reading the news properly. There were rules and regulations to be followed there, and the most important rule was to control their emotions while reading the news. They were not allowed to change their facial expression even while reading death news and she still remembers the day she read the death news of the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi without any emotion. Though she was shocked, she ought to maintain the rules; after eleven years, she joined Asianet, a private channel at that time whose office was in Singapore. At first, she worked at the desk and learned how the news is collected, organized, and arranged in bulletins. Later, she got the opportunity to become a newsreader, for which she had to go to Singapore for which she was not ready because she didn’t want to leave her family. But her family supported her and encouraged her to take up the job. The experience she got while working at Asianet was entirely different from what she got at Doordarshan as she got more freedom at Asianet.

At Doordarshan, she was afraid to make errors while readin, but her colleagues always asked her to be calm while reading. They said that news reading should be more like a conversation and she had the freedom to wear comfortable clothes and accessories. Her confidence increased, and she started to consider news reading more seriously and within years, she saw an improved version of herself. After twelve years, she joined Amrita TV and she got even more freedom there. She got to a shift in dressing from formal sarees to formal Kurthas and pants. She experienced many changes as a newsreader with changing technologies where she read news from paper pinned on cardboard to news bulletins on laptops.

She received two State awards for the best newsreader and although she is retired, she is happy and energetic as usual. She says that the definition of happiness differed from one to another and for her, living with her family makes her happy. She advises the youngsters to choose their dream career and should give their complete determination in that.