Candles,cameras,action!

Will this come out tonight? asked one of the youngsters while reviewing the footage after the shoot.

Of course,there is no tomorrow for all this, came the reply.

Anna did not emerge that night and there was a tomorrow to the story.

Come Wednesday morning,and bleary-eyed reporters outside the office of the Director General Prisons at the Tihar Jail greeted audiences. A camera-on-a-crane had been installed in the night and tripods trampled the elevated gardens on either side of the gate. By the end of the day,there were 26 Outside Broadcast OB vans.

At 8:30 am,it was too early for news to break. I have been here the whole night. I plan to leave only after Anna is released, said a young man wearing a Nehru topi to go with his Wanted: Blood Donors T-shirt.

Both the TV reporter and the youth stood in the middle of sitting protesters. A slight turn of the camera would show them in the middle of a sea of people. Had it zoomed out,it would have revealed a crowd of not more than 300. The youngster moved away,removed his topi,wiped his face with it.

Even as studios were warming up,Manish Sisodia an associate of Arvind Kejriwal who was arrested with Hazare but chose to come out of Tihar late on Tuesday decided that it was time to talk. Silence. He is going to give a message to the nation, said a voice on the PA system. Sisodia talked of how Tihar will be the focal point of the agitation for as long as Anna chooses to be inside.

A conch was soon introduced to the protest,and everybody wanted the owner on television. As soon as the first microphone was extended towards him,the man started abusing Congresss Manish Tewari and Digvijaya Singh. Re-take,with the caveat for all protesters at the site extended to him: no personal attacks; just talk of Anna and his movement.

To their credit,the volunteers were doing a creditable job of ensuring that none of the crowd strayed out of the perimeter they created by linking hands. However,the crowd did not pick up by 9:30 am,and the carriageway from Mayapuri towards Lajwanti Nagar remained open. Reporters pointed beyond the road,to nothingness. The protesters knew their importance,and they broke into impromptu slogans of Media hamare saath hai.

Food arrived,first as a handful of bananas and packets of raw Mother Dairy milk,but soon supporters began chipping in,with packets of peanuts,bottled water,and cooked food doing the rounds. If you wore chinos,or genuine leather,or were among the few women in the crowd,television wanted to talk to you.

Most networks had designated at least two teams,as there were two sites around Tihar. There were islands of silence and opinion,as reporters waited with their chosen set of prospective speakers for the live anchor to come through.

Behind a TV reporter,three youngsters argued over who gets to wear the lone Nehru topi for a picture with the Tricolour. A group had written Anna with candlewax on the road,and had placed a metal statue of a Gandhi Samadhi on it. On the banner of another,Anna Hazares photo competed for space with that of a local organiser who was leading the jostling crowd before the cameras.

It was 10:45 am,and the volunteers began losing control of the crowd. Medha Patkar arrived and one of her first exhortations was to ask the swelling crowd to move into the second carriageway,still open to traffic. The cameras stopped circling the ever-widening perimeter,and moved to the terrace of the three-storey Doon Public School,across the road.

Sorry Anna I am late, read the placard held by Ashok Srivastav,who had changed his mind about staying at home. When I heard that all these famous people are coming here,I felt bad for myself, he said.

A face-painter appeared among the crowd,dabbing the protesters faces with the Tricolour. Kiran Bedi appeared at 11:35 am and was followed by Swami Agnivesh. Neither their sing-alongs nor Prashant Bhushans speech got the crowd going. There was a brief cheer when Agnivesh announced a soon-to-be-withdrawn plan about marching from Tihar to Jayaprakash Narayan Park.

At 12:20 pm,the crowd woke up briefly after an announcement by theatre personality Arvind Gaur that in a few moments,Anna will be in our midst. Microphones and cameras piled up near the garden-cum-media corner. Brief entertainment was provided by a supposed Anna lookalike who was carried into the midst of the cameras on a charpoy.

At 1:50 pm,the crowd got more than what it had bargained for. Baba Ramdev climbed atop his car,smiled,waved,got hold of a Tricolour,waved that too. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar,who arrived at the same time,was ignored by most. A placard read,We are the Parliament.

Gaur pleaded with the crowd to continue their maun vrat but they were too big and loud for him by then. Ramdev talked,but the faulty public address system did not carry his voice across.

After a long wait,Sisodia announced at 3.25 pm that there would be a protest march from India Gate by 4 pm. Most of the protesters were reluctant to leave initially; Anna had not made an appearance yet.

It was time for offbeat stories: a man carrying a charkha on his shoulders came in handy. So did another,under a tree and giving away photocopies of Jeet ya Maut posters. Left standing was a man with a microphone atop a vehicle,facing a camera on a makeshift wooden platform. His tie was uneven,the back of his shirt untucked. He kept talking.