Jonathan Hiskes | Oct. 25, 2007
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| Photo by Ben Weller |
| Miranda Kennedy talked about working as a foreign correspondent in India. Seated next to her is Sadanand Dhume, a former correspondent for the Asian Wall Street Journal and New Delhi bureau chief for the Far Eastern Economic Review. |
Speakers offered stories about reporting assignments and diverse theories about the health of the Indian democracy. They disagreed on plenty, but several points of consensus emerged from their talks.
One improvement is that the American media no longer focuses only on the poverty and social dysfunction of India, several speakers said. Karl Meyer, a former correspondent for the New York Times, spoke of trying to convince the Times to drop the occasional headline “Calcutta, U.S.A.,” which the paper used as shorthand to describe squalor or mayhem in America.
But the new popular narrative about India can also oversimplify things, speakers said. By focusing on only the information technology boom and the growing middle class, journalists overlook the large swaths of urban and rural poor whose lives are not improving much, said Miranda Kennedy, who spent several years reporting from New Delhi for American Public Media’s Marketplace.
“There was a lot of expectation and sometimes pressure to report on the call centers and fast-changing parts of India,” she said. “I found I had to work carefully to balance that with the other parts of India, which American businesses might not want to hear about.”
However, she said the IT growth has created an optimistic “sense of the possible” that has spread more thoroughly, creating what she calls a “striving class.”
“That really has filtered down into the lowest classes and the smallest villages,” she said.
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| Photo by Ben Weller |
| Sumit Ganguly, director of the India Studies program, said the conference provided discussion "of the highest order. The exchanges have been not only extremely civil, but profoundly enlightening." |
Ganguly said he was disappointed with the conference’s low turnout; most events drew no more than 10 or 20 attendees. But he was delighted with the vigor of the discussions.
“The quality of discussion has been of the highest order,” said Ganguly, who also is a political science professor. “The exchanges have been not only extremely civil, but profoundly enlightening.”
Sadanand Dhume, a former correspondent for the Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review, urged journalists to provide a “reality check” in the face of excessive optimism about India’s economic and political progress.
“Most of the domestic media is unable or unwilling to provide it,” he said. “Compare India not just with its own past, but with other countries, because that’s the perspective India needs.”
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| Photo by Ben Weller |
| Ph.D. student Balu Pulipaka, former reporter from Hyderabad, added his thoughts to the discussion. |
- Bill Borders, former Delhi bureau chief for the New York Times, who spoke about covering India in the late 1970s;
- Barbara Crossette, a travel essayist and author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, who spoke about reporting on political crises;
- And John Schidlovsky, founding director of the International Reporting Project, who spoke about Indian foreign policy in the early 1980s.
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