Barkha dutt kargil professional#
Barkha dutt kargil tv#

In her book, and this interview, Dutt speaks of how вЂњeven the middle class has been damagedвЂќ by the pandemic вЂњin a way that we havenвЂ™t fully comprehendedвЂќ. But then on the other hand, you had these extraordinary volunteersвЂ¦ and in the second wave, the way people turned to each other.вЂќ (Juggernaut Books) There was this baseness that came out as prejudice and this propensity to stigmatise. вЂњThere was a kind of a Dickensian dualism in our responses. I felt sad.вЂќ A year and more into the pandemic, she revisited stories she had covered, and there were rarely any happy endings. On the road, she says, вЂњI felt alone, I felt brittle. She decided, for instance, not to cover the Bengal elections, held in March-April 2021, to protest the rallies and campaigning permitted amid the devastating second wave, and the way in which the election was being allowed or used to divert attention from the Covid-19 crisis.

Barkha dutt kargil professional#

It made me step back and ask, вЂHad I lost touch with why I became a journalist to begin with?вЂ™вЂќДЄs the pandemic lashed out across India, and Dutt took to the road for what was indubitably some old-school pavement-pounding reportage, she says she underwent a personal and professional transformation. вЂњTelevision, with all of its scale and all of its resources, did not shine. The pandemic, she says, made her reflect on her own approach to storytelling. The channel now has over 700,000 subscribers. It gained momentum amid the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests of late 2019, about five months before the pandemic hit. That same year she registered Mojo Story, which began largely as a YouTube channel. вЂњThis was not televisionвЂ™s moment,вЂќ she says.Дutt left NDTV in 2017, citing censorship of her political reporting. In the pandemic, Dutt says, people simply tuned out and turned to local coverage, the newspapers, and independent platforms (Dutt runs her own now, called Mojo Story).

Barkha dutt kargil tv#

TV news has changed dramatically since those early, pre-internet days of measured debate beamed into homes via cable and satellite, a change perhaps symbolised most tellingly by another peer, Arnab Goswami, who started out at NDTV, but grew steadily angrier at Times Now and then at his own venture, Republic TV. She was then a senior television journalist with the news network NDTV, where she also conducted hard-hitting nightly debates, often focused on politics.Дutt belongs to a generation that helped shape TV journalism in India in the 1980s and вЂ™90s (others include Rajdeep Sardesai, also formerly of NDTV and Rajat Sharma, best known for Aap Ki Adalat).

Over the past two decades, Dutt has reported (rather controversially at times, but more on that later) on the 1999 Kargil war, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. The book is an account of her time on the road, amid the migrant crisis of the first wave of Covid-19 in India, and through the two years that followed as cremation grounds became overwhelmed, as the death toll mounted, and as a humanitarian crisis unfolded across the worldвЂ™s biggest democracy and second-most-populous nation. In her new book, To Hell and Back, journalist Barkha Dutt, 50, calls them all вЂњthe humans of CovidвЂќ. These are the stories of lost jobs, dying businesses, children pulled out of school, all a result of the massive fallout of the pandemic. The rest are linked only indirectly to the virus. Another 40 million involve a Covid-positive report. About 500,000 of them involve the loss of a loved one. There are now an estimated 1.3 billion pandemic stories in India.