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Here's one way to think about journalism.
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It's a business driven by supply and demand.
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People want news, analysis, narratives, whatever.
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You form a publication that delivers and cater to what readers want.
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Your bottom line is the bottom line.
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Your dharma, as it were, is to your shareholders.
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Principles matter only to the extent that principles are in demand.
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You gotta be rational, you gotta stay solvent.
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That's one way of looking at it.
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But there are other impulses that can drive journalists.
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You can say that truth matters, especially in these polarized and complex times, and
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that searching for the truth has a value of its own.
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You can be driven by the urge to tell stories about the world that would otherwise be lost
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You can tell yourself that the world is often shaped by what we know of it, and therefore
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it is important to seek out the full picture.
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And you may believe that enough people share this view for it to be worthwhile, for the
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bottom line also to be taken care of.
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As you would have guessed, I believe in the second school of thought.
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I believe we don't always have to follow our audiences and second guess what the political
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masters of this country may want.
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I believe journalists and storytellers can lead from the front, can form public opinion
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by informing public opinion, by relentlessly deepening our understanding of the truth.
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I admire the handful of people committed to this quest.
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One of them is my guest today.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Barkha Dutt, a fearless and pioneering television journalist who's
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She's been at the frontline of wars, terrorist attacks and pandemics, while others sit at
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home and pontificate or signal their virtue or wisdom on social media, Barkha goes out
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She started in NDTV and after more than two decades there has ended up forming Mojo Story,
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an indie outfit that is breaking new ground on YouTube.
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Her coverage of the pandemic over the last 16 months has been incredible.
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I enjoyed chatting with Barkha and we spoke not just about journalism, the media, Indian
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politics and society, but also about her own self.
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How she has grown, what she has learned, how she now looks at the world and her place in
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She also has some great advice for young people who may be trying to figure out who they are
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and what they want to do.
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Before we begin this conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Do you want to read more?
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I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books, but I also read more long form articles and essays.
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the problem we all face
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is how do we navigate this knowledge?
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How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
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Well, I discovered one way.
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A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com
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which aims to help people up level themselves by reading more.
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
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New batches start every month.
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They also have a great program called Future Stack which helps you stay up to date with
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ideas, skills and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future.
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Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
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Also check out their Social Capital Compound which helps you master social media.
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2500 rupees, 2500 if you use the discount
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code UNSEEN.
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Barkha, welcome to the scene in the unseen.
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This has been a long time planning and I'm glad we're finally able to do it.
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I'm glad we're finally able to do it and in fact I felt guilty even asking you because
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for much of this time in the last few months you were doing so much incredible journalism
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and going out there while very few others were and I thought I should not impinge on
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your time but we finally managed to make the time and it's a Sunday.
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Now typically I start by asking my guests about their childhood and how they grew up
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and all of that which I will do for you also.
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But before that I'm intrigued by what your routine must be and I'm sure all your viewers
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also must be intrigued that what is your workflow?
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What do you do on a Sunday typically?
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Do you get time to relax?
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Like where do you find your me space?
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First, thanks Amit and you know it hasn't been just a few months since I was counting
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the other day it's actually been 16 months of pretty much non-stop COVID coverage.
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There have been some other stories that I've turned my attention to but otherwise this
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has been a singular singular obsession for 16 months now.
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These now are difficult days for me before my father died and my father died to COVID
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earlier this year a few months ago.
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Sunday was the day that all of us gathered at the family house in a colony in Delhi called
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It's the house I lived in till I was 40 years old and I lived with my dad in that house.
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He continued to stay there and Sunday was always family lunch with my father and we
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continue to gather even after he's gone at the house for lunch and unless you know there's
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something catastrophic happening or I'm traveling in terms of work and otherwise that's it.
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I don't have the idea or the notion of a weekend I work pretty much through most weekends other
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than the Sunday lunch which is some sort of time out.
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My weekday and my weekend is not that distinct but because I think my team does need more
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time off than I do we do try and not do any show or broadcast on Sundays unless we're
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Let's travel back to your childhood now you know we are almost the same age I think you're
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just a couple of years older than me.
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I'm 49 how old are you?
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So pretty much the same especially if depends on your vantage point if you're 21 then yeah
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Barkha and I are exactly the same age if you're 48 we are not the same age.
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What I find interesting when I chat with a guest of this vintage on the show is that
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we are the one generation that in a sense had to learn about the world twice like earlier
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we learned about it you know in the pre-internet days through whatever we could get hold of
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it was a question of what was accessible to us you and I I think had fairly privileged
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childhoods access to books all of that was there but the world was you know remarkably
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close to us relative to how it is today and then in my own case there is another kind
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of learning about the world that happened when the internet came and you could you know
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you could read any book you wanted you could get a wide cross-section of opinions rather
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than have it come at you through specific gatekeepers and all that and that's another
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kind of broadening and we are the one generation that kind of went through this right the people
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before us the internet came too late for them and and those after us only know the world
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where all information is on your fingertips and you don't have to you know scrounge to
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somehow get that cassette mixtape recorded that you've been trying to for months so for
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that reason I always find it interesting to learn about the childhoods of my guess so
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what was your sort of childhood like where did you grow up and you know what did you
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do as a kid what was your conception of yourself it's a really interesting question and I think
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my childhood pretty mixed up which might explain why my adulthood is just as mixed up so I
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grew up in Delhi but also partly in New York so I had an atypical growing up for a middle
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class family very middle class family salaried employees as parents my father worked with
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Air India as in the commercial and tourism department and my mother was a journalist
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pretty big trailblazer for her time worked with the Hindustan Times till the age of five
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we lived in this neighborhood called Sujansingh Park which is you know next to Khan market
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on a rented flat and then my father's family which had come in as refugees from what is
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now Pakistan during partition they had been allotted a small little plot in Jungara extension
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which was really a refugee colony and my parents were able to build a house on that and then
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from the age of five to 40 I pretty much lived in that house where I just spoke about having
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Sunday lunch but in the interim my father got a pretty longish posting with Air India
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to New York and my mother because she worked with the Hindustan Times here and did not
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want to give her give up her job but then took a sabbatical worked with the United Nations
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in New York so we spent my sister and I spent our early years shuttling between these two
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cities and actually studying in two schools simultaneously so we studied in modern school
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in Delhi and we studied in public school 99 in Kew Gardens Queens in New York and therefore
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we had a pretty muddled not a typical childhood probably more global exposure than is possible
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for for middle-class Indians especially those of us you know as you said of this vintage
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but equally while in Delhi still have very distinct memories of you know the one rupee
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book from the colony library such as it was the the camel guy who would come around the
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guy who would come around with swings and you'd pay them and you know you do those rides in front
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of your house had a tire strung from a tree as as you know the swing that you could step out and
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and and play on so it was a strange mix of a very typical ordinary middle-class
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home in terms of economics but unconventional at least for what my mother did for her time
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and atypical for the global somewhat westernized early exposure we had because of my father's
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postage so i think there was a little bit of there was a kind of hodgepodge in the in the growing up
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and do you think but because of this kind of hodgeposhness and this almost metaphorical
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fact of you know being in two schools at the same time did you feel that that set you apart from the
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kids around you for example when you came back to India that they looked at the world in a certain
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way and you had another layer to your understanding not in a judgmental way that this is you know of a
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good or a bad thing but just that you see some things differently and you know and your observations
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of them would have been partly from the outside and and and therefore kind of more interesting
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than just you know one girl looking at another girl but you've also got that extra layer there
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so what did you feel when you looked around you at your friends at India did it in in any sense
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feel a constraint to be in Delhi after having lived in New York what was that like well i
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mean now that i think of it i think maybe i was always a little bit of a misfit like i think i do
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today feel very much like a misfit and when you ask me the question and i look back at my childhood
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i think i was a misfit not just because of this sort of bicultural upbringing but also because
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of the way my personality was and so before we come to what happened when i came back to Delhi
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i grew up you know if there's any other city i could even consider calling home after india
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it's new york but i grew up in a in a racist view i did not grow up in the new york that the world
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knows today is this all accepting you can be whoever you want to this was still the early 70s
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there was still a lot of you know a kind of white assertion my mother who used to wear saris and
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used to walk us to school and used to wear a bindi was taunted and very distinct memories of kids
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running behind us and taunting her for her bindi and her sari not being especially friendly with
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me at school there wasn't that complete fitting in there and i don't think that there was a complete
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fitting in here which doesn't mean that i didn't have an easygoing personality but i didn't always
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have a gregarious personality and in fact like my mother wrote a series of stories about a semi
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fictionalized character named after me in a children's magazine called target and one of
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the stories that she wrote in this barkha series was called barkha and the people tree and it was
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about this girl who on family holidays when the cousins were all playing amongst themselves would
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choose to sit under the people tree and have a conversation with the people tree instead of
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talking to the cousins so when i think about it and i piece all of this together maybe i was always
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a bit of a mystery there was an interesting book which came out in the 90s which was really
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controversial it's a book called the nurture assumption by judith rich harris where she kind
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of argued against a myth that parents really form their children she looked at different studies of
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twins who were separated at birth and so on and so forth and her kind of conclusion which was backed
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by the science and which was very sort of solid was that kids when they're growing up are shaped
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more by their peers and their parents like of course they get the genes from their parents and
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all of that i mean it is what it is but apart from that they're shaped more by their peers now in
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your case you say that one you were a bit of a misfit where you were people tree and all that
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and maybe you were shaped by the people tree also but at the same time just looking at the
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bare biographical details that your mother is a path-breaking journalist at a time where it was
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much harder for a woman to be a path-breaking journalist in india and both her daughters have
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also gotten into journalism which kind of seems to go against the normal kind of grain there so if
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i were to ask you what shaped you like one what was your conception of yourself as a teenager for
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example what did you want to become what did what did you see yourself as and two what kind of
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shaped you what were your big early influences in that sense if you can you know put your finger on
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on it so i think that the binary doesn't hold right like i can i can trace back distinct
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influences uh that belonged to my parents in different ways i think it took my father to die
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for me to realize what an overwhelming influence he had been in my life i had always identified
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with my with my mother she had the more dramatic story you know she had the story of being the
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first woman war correspondent of india she had the the story of being the rebel who walked into
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hindustan times and was told by the editor well if you want to be a woman journalist we can send
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you to cover the flower shows you know uh she had the story of the struggle the rebellion the fight
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the gumption the courage and and she died when i was really young which also amplified her
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influence and then it took my father to die for me to realize that actually he'd been my main
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parent just by the fact that he'd been around longer and for decades and and there were other
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values that i had drawn from him that maybe i hadn't even consciously realized but it's equally
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true that i believe that who i am was also very formed in the ages between 18 and 20
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where i went to college the kind of friends i made the kind of broad value system that took roots
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then and it was not in my case it's unusual because i did not come from a conservative
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typically conservative family in terms of value so there was my peer values were not at odds with
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my familial values and sometimes that happens but for me there was a sort of continuum that was
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possible and so i do feel that if i'd studied elsewhere my school shaped me in being this
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sort of tough nut and you know extracurriculars and playing basketball and doing theater and doing
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all of that but in terms of core values i was shaped very much for my college and my parents
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so i think for me it was both but in terms of the conservative self-image i don't know you know i
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don't remember my self-image before my mother died but i have this memory of being a nightmare
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daughter extremely rebellious extremely surly broody my mother used to call me grumps even when
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she was alive because i was this broody child thought too much and argued too much and i think
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image of myself growing up i was the ultimate rebel you know i thought of myself as very rebellious
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it's it's taken me to get into my 40s and almost 50 to kind of say that my life is actually pretty
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pedestrian and boring almost like i think now when i was 13 14 15 i thought of myself as this
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grand rebel that was my conception of myself wild child you know i wanted to imagine myself
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to be a wild child i'm horrified that you should describe your life as pedestrian what about the
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rest of us you know you you kind of you you kind of alter your own standards right i guess that's
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what happens you have a you have a conception of your life i would have loved to be and i don't
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know why i didn't go that route but i would have loved to be actually an international correspondent
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you know traveling to like crazy parts of the of the world and and reporting from the world but
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at some point and i'll always wonder if it was a fatal error at some point after my post-grad
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uh at columbia i was like i want to work in my country that's the only place where i care about
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the news and i came back but you know when i say my life is pedestrian like i'm saying at the end
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of it like what is so rebellious about what i do okay there are certain things like i'll get into
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a car and i'll just sit in the car and go and cover covid when many very few other people will
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i have that i have a capacity for risk taking but on a day-to-day basis i live a pretty mundane life
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i think you know one of the themes that i have been thinking of in recent years and that also
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relates to one's conception of oneself is that one can define oneself or one can form one's
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conception of oneself by thinking about the things that we want to do or one can form it by thinking
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about the person we want to be and i think just looking back when i was much younger the mistake
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i perhaps made was forming that in terms of the things i want to do that i want to do a b c this
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these are all my achievements which i want to be lauded for and blah blah blah and as you kind of
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grow older at least in my case the realization came that that is a mistake and and one of course
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it is easy to rationalize it as a mistake because one hasn't managed to do most of them but the other
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part of it is that that's not really a road to happiness i think it's much more thinking about
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the kind of person that you want to be focusing on the concrete details of everyday life rather
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than abstract goals and dreams but they're not abstract right they're not abstract oh sorry
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complete what you're saying and i'll respond so no i will just leading up to one has there been a sort
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of a evolution in that conception of yourself perhaps along these lines perhaps along different
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lines in your time and what i was also intrigued by is where you said that there was no difference
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between the influences from your peer group and your familial influences because what held them
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together was this bedrock of values so can you talk a little bit more about that because that
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seems to be to be more indicative of you know who you are rather than whether you were an
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international correspondent or a local reporter i do try and persuade myself that that work is
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not everything but like for me literally work is everything right and and and that is one of the
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things that makes me a misfit because i literally i i may know one or two other people who think
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like me and i've known them a long time so you know we were in a way shaped similarly but my
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identity is totally tied up to my work my sense of self is totally tied up to my work my sense
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of purpose is totally tied up to my work and my sense of happiness is totally tied tied into my
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work so when people say work-life balance to me i don't even begin to understand what it means
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because i carry my work everywhere and equally the reverse is true we sometimes carry our home
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into our work and we carry our work into our home so i never understood this millennial idea of
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work-life balance but i literally am quite i would say unusual also i've been told i don't
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i'm not trying to romanticize myself but this is what i'm told that i can work non-stop
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i can just keep working i you know get off on it i type on it it keeps me occupied it keeps me sane
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it keeps me happy it defines me so i i have i'm never tired i mean i might be tired and the damage
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shows in other ways but i've never consciously i'm too tired to do this so that's what i meant
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by saying that you know you keep trying to talk yourself into your life is elsewhere oh i wish
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i could also do this oh i wish i could also do that but actually if you took away my work and
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you gave me all those other things i'd be missed so that's the first thing then in terms of core
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values i mean i'm not saying that how my father and mother thought and how my friends at st steven's
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college thought is very similar i'm sure had my mother in particular remained alive she would have
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possibly despite being the trailblazer been a more conservative parent than my father
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turned out to be i think my father was also a little hapless being a single father to to
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completely you know uh an uncontainable daughters but what i mean is that there's this idea of
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integrity which has defined my closest friendships and which i think was a very was a big cornerstone
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of of what i saw happen with my parents i saw both uh paying professional prices for holding
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on to what they believed to be correct not hustling enough in their work spaces getting
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left behind sometimes in their work spaces because of their idea of you know integrity
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and the second thing was just the stubborn individualism right that the thing that you
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will not be defined by anybody else's idea of you and i think i remember watching my mother
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and learning this from her early on that if you do well sure you'll be popular and there'll be
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accolades and there'll be a lot of love there'll be a lot of great things said about you but there'll
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also be a lot of dislike and a lot of resentment and a lot of pushback and a lot of bitchiness
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and you're going to have to wear your skin so thick that you cannot alter yourself because of
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what is said about you as a child even i remember watching my mother go through this my father was
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a different sort of person my father was a very everybody loved my mother was much more like me
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where she triggered love or hate she just never triggered indifference and i think that those are
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the two i would say the cornerstone values your notion of integrity and stubborn individualism
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so you kind of mentioned about how you work all the time and you don't understand the concept of
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work-life balance and i also work all the time though i think we could make a good yin and yang
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team because you said that you can work every minute and i can actually not work every minute
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i shirk so much you your podcasts are three hours long obviously you love working well i work for
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at least three hours every week that much cannot be denied but yeah but it seems to me that one
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reason why both of us are like this that we can that you know the lines blur is that it's like
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is that it's like that when diagram right where there is a meeting point of what you love doing
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what you're good at doing and what people will pay you for doing and wherever all three meet
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that's what you should do and that's what you are doing and that's what i am kind of doing and that's
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also what i tell young creators that this when diagram becomes inevitable if you persevere at
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what you love because if you persevere at doing something that you love iteration makes for
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excellence eventually you'll be good at it and then eventually you'll get paid for it so it's just a
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kind of a question of sticking to it now speaking of conception of ourselves and all of that we've
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kind of you know gone here and gone there and all of that but the one thing that i'm interested in
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is when did you kind of decide to become a journalist because obviously having your
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mother as a role model at home must have been a really big deal and what part of you what part
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of it rather kind of excited you like i think when i think of what you're really doing one thing that
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you are doing at least for us for all the people who watch your work is you're making sense of the
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world that you're giving us more and more dots which we can connect and we can get a better
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picture of the world and that's what you're doing and that that would be as a fan that would be my
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one line definition of it and in a different way i try to do the same thing so is there a way that
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like when you are drawn to journalism are you drawn to let's say an aspect of it that i you
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know i want to uncover something about the world or are you also drawn to that sense of adventure
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that i will go out with my camera and i will you know uncover something and i will do investigation
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and all of that so what drew you about it back then and what do you love about it so much like
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when you went out in the covid trail last year right at the time the lockdown hit and what you've
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been doing for all these months that is out of obviously love and it's a labor of love it's not
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about the money it's not about how many people are watching you know you would do that anyway
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okay what is that what is that urge that urge is to not be able to sleep at night unless you're
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telling that story that is what it is i tell you know people ask me all the time in particular
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young girls you know what what is your advice what is what is what do we need and i always say
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if you don't love it to madness right and and i use the word you know without any sort of mental
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health dimensions attached there i'm just saying if you don't love it to that point of
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where it just makes you restless inside where you can't stop thinking about it then this profession
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there might be many other professions for you but this profession in its purest form
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is not is not free we'll talk a little bit later about the profession itself and i don't even know
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if people think like that anymore but that's how i think right so you know and i and i can bookend
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it to whatever 1999 when the kargil war erupts and i've never reported a war i don't come from
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a military family i've just come back from columbian journalism school and i'm like how
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can i tell this story sitting in delhi how how there's a war happening in the himalayas i'm
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sitting in delhi i don't understand what we're being told i don't know what's going through
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the minds i keep thinking what is that soldier thinking what is that soldier feeling and i know
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i have to go there and it is a it is an expedition to get first my organization then the army to
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agree to send me as a woman to the war front and when i fast forward it to 2020 it is exactly the
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same thing that happens to me i am sitting here where i'm sitting talking to you today in in my
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basement office and the lockdown gets announced and i say oh let's go out and see what's happening
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and i drive to the border of delhi and i see a long i see nobody on streets and i see a long
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line of men women and children walking and i see nobody there no police no bureaucrat it's like the
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state has gone missing and these people are walking then i go to a different border right now i'm
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still in delhi and i'm just just literally driving in my car to these borders to see and i see the
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same thing at all the borders of delhi this exodus and i come back and i cannot sleep and i know that
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the story cannot be reported by sitting in delhi and so begins my from within almost it is involuntary
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it is almost involuntary it is something that you feel so strongly that you know that you cannot
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tell this you know a particular you cannot uncover a particular truth you cannot tell a particular
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story without actually being part of a certain kind of journey i don't know if i want to call
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it something as lofty or self-important as uncovering the truth but i do see the job or
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the role of a journalist or sometimes i call myself a storyteller because not all stories i
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tell necessarily have news value that day but i do see myself as a bridge between situations and
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people and where i feel that my readers or my viewers cannot travel to cannot go to cannot
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comprehend i can be that conduit and i also see myself as this kind of reflection board of which
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people's stories problems passions emotions can bounce off and you know i can be that kind of
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white reflection board that they're bouncing off on and it's just if you had asked me in school do
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you want to be a journalist i would have said no because the rebellious part of me did not want to
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do what my mother right it seemed very boring it seemed very predictable it seemed like
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it didn't seem cool in my head as a young kid to do to end up where where you're where you're one
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of your parents is and i trained to make movies and and my first master's degree was in film and
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television production and i thought i'd make movies it's just that i did not enjoy those two
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years i found them too pretentious i found them too precious i found everybody thought that they
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were going to like you know maybe these poet philosophers were going to come in and and alter
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the universe and i just you know didn't i didn't see myself in that but i trained to be a film
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editor i trained to be a sound mixer my first job was as a television producer and not as a
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reporter i wandered into reporting by accident and then once i did it i just i just loved it i mean
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like it was just it was love i mean like you know it is the most intense emotion of all emotions
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that i have ever experienced in my adult life is the love i feel when i'm out of the field reporting
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a story there's nothing compares to it no human being no experience no other emotion and i guess
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that you know for all the corroded dimensions to indian media today it's still something i love
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i still love it in the way that i did when i was 22 wow so did you actually see yourself then as
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a filmmaker or did you hang out with all these people wanting to be the indian godah and say
#
that no no not for me and i mean if i if i'd had one more class on jump cuts and profundity
#
and oh god i just couldn't do that whole like i almost switched off watching movies because i
#
was so miserable with that sort of worthiness you know that worthiness that i don't have that
#
worthiness you know i i think one of the reasons i mean we know that the right wing doesn't
#
especially like me but one of the reasons that there are sections of the left i think that
#
that that despise me just as much is that i just am not able to feel i'm not able to feel an
#
ideological worthiness about i feel my i have my values i there are things that i feel strongly
#
about and i will fight to to the end about those right but i find it very difficult to be affiliated
#
to a thought to a ism to a you know and and one of the things that puts me off and i'm sure there
#
are people who think that i'm think of myself as worthy and we can't control other people's
#
perceptions of us but i am put off by worthiness you know the sense that we are we are so deep
#
we are so artistic we are so creative so you know like so to that extent like and i remember
#
when we were in jamuna people used to smoke in class and like imagine they used to think
#
that this was cool and and and the teacher used to smoke and the students used to smoke and i never
#
used to smoke and i used to i was made to feel like i was like this bored right and it was all
#
this sort of you know gold flick creativity if you will and i just was a misfit i was a total
#
misfit and i think that's when i knew that i just can't be i'm not artsy enough for this whatever
#
artsy means this isn't happening for me but i thought when i started it that is what i wanted
#
to do that i wanted to make movies and i enjoyed much more the technical part of it you know i
#
enjoyed learning you know even today it's it's painful for me sometimes to watch netflix because
#
i can tell where a shot ends and another shot begins because my eye is trained to see it
#
i can understand sound i've done sound mixing in the days when you carried a nagra whatever
#
thing around and separately picked up audio and who does any of that anymore but i dreamed to do
#
that right i used to make sound in the ndtv studio where i started so i like the technical stuff
#
i found that quite magical but i couldn't be this clubby creative we are the artists artists unite
#
person i just couldn't be that you know you spoke of worthiness and immediately i thought of modern
#
social media and in a sense that image you just painted of from jamia in the early 90s great
#
metaphor for social media today that there is a class and students are smoking and the professor
#
is smoking and they're all oblivious of the toxicity of the smoke completely and i remember
#
once you tweeted something about about how we you know we all contain contain multitudes and i think
#
that is what we have you know i mean if you want to be creative let's go back and read our world
#
with will because the point is that we are not any one thought or any one person or any one
#
ism and the pressure of dogma is the most suffocating it's the most suffocating thing
#
today so and that's why i pretty early on in this conversation identified myself as a misfit
#
because i do not fit there is not a single ism that i fully relate i identify as a feminist
#
let me hasten to say that there are two isms if you ask me you know i don't shrug off all isms
#
who are you are you a feminist yes i don't blink i i've answered yes to that question since i was
#
16 and i'll answer yes to it today but i might have a notion of feminism that is at loggerheads
#
with a 25 year old or a 55 year old or even someone my own age and that's what i mean by
#
not fully fitting into any ism i love the way you said 25 and 55 as if you are just in between
#
at 49 but yes yeah it no that happens to me also it takes time to adjust sometimes to
#
in my mind like with this like i can't even believe i'm 49 yeah yeah we're still young the
#
world is out ahead of us and all of that the whitman court of containing multitudes has almost
#
become a cliche on my show and i keep invoking it and i think it's necessary to invoke that
#
sentiment because a lot of the politics that we see especially in the polarized spaces online
#
are based on pigeonholing people and reducing people to one thing or the other that oh you are
#
a cis-het white male or oh you are a muslim and therefore anti-national or whatever and it comes
#
from both the right and the left which is why i react so viscerally to all kinds of identity
#
politics whether people are bhakts or vokes because i i just think that you know the world
#
is far more complex to to reduce people to just one aspect of their identity becomes a problem
#
let's go back to journalism in the sense that when i look back on those times and obviously
#
we've already discussed how the influences coming in are not so many today i can go online and all
#
the best journalism in the world is out there in front of me and some of it from india thanks to
#
people like you but back in the day you don't really have that so like you you've kind of formed
#
your values of who you are but how does one form values of what good journalism is what is your
#
conception of good journalism like in the little time that i spent in journalism in the autees
#
i found that most mainstream journalists around me this is in the context of sport because i was a
#
sports journalist when i was doing it as a profession were completely out of sync like that's
#
not the kind of stuff that you know you would teach or you would want people to do so when you
#
go there what is your conception of journalism how much of it comes from the people you are
#
working with who are your seniors who are guiding you and over time how does that conception evolve
#
so again i would not be typical because of growing up as the daughter of my mother
#
and because i actually you know had a reference point of her stories and her daredevilry
#
and her courage and her ferocity in a way like i think by osmosis a little bit of it i was able
#
to imbibe as as reference points that you know a story is a story is sacred like that's one of the
#
things i learned from her not your ideology and i'm seguing a bit because it it relates to what
#
we were discussing about polarizations but just to give you a recent example you know the farmers
#
protest when it was taking place i spotted one day online a video of a a Sikh man at a barricade
#
arguing very politely and effectively with the police and i had no idea who the man was so i
#
started talking to my small team and i was like hey do any of you know who this guy is he seems
#
like an interesting person to interview so they said oh his name is Deep Sidhu they found out his
#
name is Deep Sidhu and he's an actor from Punjab i had no idea who he was i was like oh he speaks
#
so interestingly in this video let's maybe he'd be a new voice to get on this farmers protest so
#
we track him down it's an online interview he's in the back of some car at the border and we're
#
doing this interview that particular day the sort of right-wing trolls have gone on saying that the
#
farmers protest you know farmers have been spotted with Hindran Valle's pictures in their pockets
#
this is a Khalistani movement so on so forth i haven't seen this myself i have been to report
#
by then a few times and i went a lot after that as well and i hadn't encountered this so but it
#
was very much a kind of online trope and it it i thought that i would ask him about it my expectation
#
was that he would simply dismiss it and he would and we would move on and it wasn't even the sort
#
of centrality of what i was asking and i asked him about uh Hindran Valle and i was absolutely
#
taken aback because he launched into this long defense of this guy and so he and i ended up
#
having an argument and you know usually i don't think that the views of my guests have to be my
#
views and i'm able to hear something that i find unpalatable but it was a very abrasive sort of
#
exchange unusual for me and i wasn't shouting or anything but i was saying look you're defending
#
a terrorist and i'm extremely uncomfortable with you defending a terrorist he assassinated an
#
indian prime minister etc and he was like he was giving his view and i and then i said let's agree
#
to disagree and we moved on and the interview finished my younger colleagues who were working
#
with me at that time said to me that i should not have asked him this question because they felt that
#
it would hurt the cause of the farmers and you know that had we played into in their minds a
#
right-wing trap right so i i said to them that look the story and when i use the word story i
#
mean it loosely for that issue that i'm reporting on the story is sacred whether the outcome on the
#
process of getting that story is a set of things you like don't like it ends up hurting the site
#
that you identify don't identify with has to be irrelevant to you right and we had a pretty
#
fraught argument and sure enough in the 24 hours after the interview i had a whole bunch of people
#
on the left on twitter attacking me for being a sellout to to the bjp for just saying asking
#
these questions it was only many months later that deep siddhu gets outed as the guy who actually
#
sabotages the farmers movement on 26 january and ends up being that extremist that he had clearly
#
shown himself to be and i remember telling you again the other of this in a subsequent interview
#
i said you remember that interview i did and all of you said to me oh you know you are playing
#
you're pandering to the bjp if you had just flushed out this guy then because he had indicated who he
#
was now i bring this up because there is such an ideological filter that we put on the process of
#
reporting today right i learned from my mother that you pursue the story not the outcome
#
the outcome is not relevant right it has to be the process you have to contribute with the process
#
so when i am walking with migrant workers i find it bizarre the number of people who ask me why
#
didn't you give them a ride in your car i mean i can explain to everybody that in my maruti urtega
#
four people fit along with my clothes at the back but that is not the point my role is not to
#
ferry one family then a second then a third i can't do it anyway if i could act at some humanitarian
#
personal level i did but that's not my professional role my professional role is to tell that story
#
and hope that that story will lead to the policy change by which they will no longer be working
#
right so for me the first value is that the story is sacred not yet and i know what you'll say it
#
i take that point that ways of looking editing who you interview what your camera angle is visual
#
grammar they're all subjective yes but over so many years i've done so many stories where the
#
outcome has not been one that i like but i still believe the story to be sacred right so for example
#
in 2019 i came back and i told every single person i knew that modi was going to sweep the election
#
and because everywhere i went i i found people who you know who said orcon here and i remember
#
writing a column saying it's the orcon here election and nobody none of my liberal friends
#
was willing to believe me not one of them was willing to believe me today i tell them that it's
#
my sense from doing travels across india that people are very sorrowful but they're not enraged
#
and therefore i don't think that there will be a political consequence for the mismanagement of
#
uh the pandemic and the mismanagement is acute and i've never minced my words in calling it out
#
but nobody wants to hear this so when we put these filters of our own preferred outcomes
#
on the process of telling a story it is very problematic so my value above all values is
#
the story is sacred and the second old-fashioned value that i have is that you do not force a
#
person to talk by which i mean you know yes it's easy to caricature you know even all of us as
#
mike you know mike you know chasers or whatever mike chasers chasers or whatever we call
#
i have chased a few cars in my uh younger age and you know mostly funny moments like you know
#
but mostly when there be police barricades around them and you're not being allowed to get
#
so it's more actually trying to break the barricade than to force the person to talk
#
but i believe that i'm not comfortable with sting operations i'm not comfortable with hidden cameras
#
i'm not comfortable i'm just not comfortable with covert covert ops reportage right i think that
#
your your reporting should be able to get a person to come on camera or find some other way to tell
#
that story the agency belongs to the person whose story you're telling yes it's complicated when
#
you're trying to do an expose but find a way to do it without doing stings and you know hidden camera
#
ops just uncomfortable with them i'm not saying i've never been associated with the story that's
#
used it i'm just saying that i'm deeply uncomfortable with it and that the story is sacred the outcome
#
can't decide what story yeah i i completely agree with you on both these points and some thoughts
#
emerge for example you know just thinking aloud on why stories matter so much and and why they
#
matter so much and and why stories can get the kind of responses that they do like back in back
#
in the good old years we sound like two such i know i know so yeah so back in the good old years
#
you know if i had thought about this i would have thought that stories matter because they explain
#
more about they show more of the world to us and therefore they matter for that reason but today
#
they you know invoke such harsh reactions because people have formed narratives for themselves
#
of how the world works and they want your story to either either confirm that simplistic narrative
#
or you are therefore an enemy which is why someone like you is always getting attacked
#
on twitter by one side or the other or both at the same time because nuance is not acceptable
#
either your story confirms a narrative or it doesn't and either you're kind of with them or
#
you're sort of not now what i hold and what i think to some extent i have discovered through
#
doing the podcast is that these are vocal minorities so you have vocal minorities who
#
are part of these echo chambers who are also signaling within their echo chambers to raise
#
their status who are smoking in the class in jamia as it were to go back to the metaphor
#
but there is a silent majority out there which gets what you do which which wants depth which
#
wants nuance which appreciates that good faith effort and i would imagine that someone like
#
you would probably get a greater sense of that silent majority because you are interacting with
#
many more people in the real world and in the road and not just in the screaming matches of twitter
#
so what would your reaction be that's such a great point because i always say that you know when a
#
lot of people ask me hey don't you get you know destabilized when you're attacked like this on
#
twitter and i'm like of course like sometimes it can be hurtful sometimes you'll be enraging
#
but it's not my experience of the world it genuinely isn't my experience of the world is
#
actually more positive than negative in terms of the reaction that i receive i you know i meet
#
students all the time i meet old people all the time for me the loveliest thing is people talk to
#
me like they know me you know like just complete strangers will have full conversation with me
#
about their lives like just completely intimate details and it's the loveliest thing and it was
#
reinforced for me actually through these covid travels you know i have seen so much kindness in
#
these times so much generosity from people and the people can be famous film stars and sports
#
people and they can be like just somebody i meet at a you know everyone even on twitter even on
#
twitter like like even people off twitter have sent me messages saying do you need a place to sleep
#
do you need food i mean i remember in the first wave so the second wave was logistically easier
#
and emotionally just ravaging and the first wave was a logistical nightmare because there was
#
no place to sleep no food to eat dhabas were not open you couldn't get a samosa or a glass of water
#
and you had to for me to find places to stay i had to keep calling up district magistrates getting
#
them getting permission for some hotels or some guest house or something and i was often staying
#
in someone knew someone someone someone in a house in a room in a in kota i remember we stayed in
#
some student hostel in some other place we stayed in some kheer one night we spent in a in the car
#
i mean they were just it was crazy but because people saw this they sent food they sent clothes
#
my shoes broke and the number of people who just wanted to give me shoes and there was somebody i
#
didn't know and she's become a friend today she lives in mumbai and she was like i can see that
#
you're out of clothes can i run a wash for you i mean she just randomly complete stranger ran a
#
laundry wash for me said how many days has it been since you've eaten a home cooked meal it was covid
#
first wave nobody was ready to invite anybody she said i don't care you come home i'll be socially
#
distant i need to feed you like i i actually think that if you stop paying attention to these
#
echo chambers right and left i still believe that most people are broadly common sensible
#
what these sides disparage is sitting on the fence i don't think it's sitting on the fence i think
#
people make up their own minds they agree with some of what you do they disagree with some of
#
what you do they like some things about you they may find some things irritating that's life i mean
#
which people do we know about whom we like everything right so i don't know anybody whom
#
i like all the time so i think if you are like 75 of the time that's a great score and my experience
#
of life is i am liked even loved 75 of the time in for among the people i meet and so i have trained
#
myself to not get distracted by these very vocal very voluble this sort of ideologues coming at me
#
from often both sides so you mentioned the phenomenon which i've also noticed and which
#
i also find very moving which is people talking to you as if they know you you know the space
#
for creators i think has led to a greater scope for this kind of intimacy like the metaphor that's
#
you know been used before for something like this is if you are consuming entertainment at a cinema
#
theater there's a certain distance between you and the screen and there's a similar distance
#
between the camera and the people and it's a little distant and television brings it closer
#
you know the tv is two three meters away and similarly the camera and are separated so you
#
have friends and seinfeld and all and youtube is intimate you know you're watching something on a
#
laptop screen or you're watching something on your mobile phone and the camera is also relatively
#
close to the person and that creates that kind of intimacy the other aspect of this besides the
#
intimacy of the medium itself is i've heard you speak about the importance of being authentic
#
to yourself especially in the context of leaving ndtv and we'll come to that a little later down
#
the line but the the notion of being authentic to yourself which is something that really means a
#
lot to me because i think no matter what you do you should not see yourself as a functional tool
#
that there is a story and i am just fulfilling a function of getting the story out there no it's
#
important to actually you know if you have the privilege of doing so to pursue the kind of
#
stories that mean something to you that keep you awake at night like you said and that authenticity
#
is important and when that authenticity comes out like podcasts are really the most intimate
#
medium in that sense which i didn't realize when i got into it because you're a voice in somebody's
#
head you know and that that sense of intimacy with the audience is incredible so do you have
#
some thoughts on this and do you also therefore just thinking aloud again feel that moving to
#
mojo moving to youtube maybe what has happened over the last four or five years made this happen
#
more because now you're working for yourself you decide what stories you want to do so on the one
#
hand you don't have to follow what a corporation may feel is the right thing to do and on the
#
other hand you're not somebody on a tv screen you're somebody on a mobile phone which they're
#
holding in front of their face so has this made a difference in one how you're received and two
#
then and how you view yourself and the kind of work that you do so i think there are two questions
#
there so let me answer both of them separately i mean they're linked but first on authenticity
#
this is something i really feel strongly about right and it comes down to even the clothes you
#
wear you know how you dress what you think you need to look like and it is perhaps even more
#
important to drive home this message today because you know because of my work i am forced to be on
#
certain platforms that i may have chosen to avoid otherwise so one of them would be instagram i
#
would not be on instagram if i didn't like i i believe that i want to reach all kinds of audiences
#
and i want to understand all kinds of platforms so i'm on instagram but when i look at instagram
#
i find it completely flattening out an idea of in particular how women should look like
#
and you know there's this sense of performing for your phone camera and pouting at the camera
#
putting the filter on making sure you're short you know you look you always take a selfie in the best
#
light and i'm not saying that all you know i'm free from all vanities but i'm saying that there is a
#
flattening there is a cookie cutter impact of the body size of the face of what you're supposed to
#
project and there's so much projection and there's such little grit and there's such little reality
#
that i feel like we're entering this sort of perilous universe where almost nothing and nobody
#
is real and yet paradoxically i feel that the people who make the deepest relationships with
#
their audience are the ones where the audience sees them as real right i think i think realness
#
realness and that realness can just be you being you whatever that you is whatever that you is
#
you know it it and i think that you know i have many other issues with what she does but the one
#
person who who was the queen of this was Oprah Winfrey and i remember thinking this when i was
#
interviewing her at the Jaipur Lit Fest that she defied the stereotype one of the reasons i did not
#
want to be a presenter on american television when i graduated from columbia was because what
#
the presenters i saw were all blondes in black that's what i called them there were white women
#
blondes dressed in new york black there was a stereotypical look if you wanted to be an on-air
#
person and oprah with not just the color of her skin not just for the size of her body but also
#
the informality the loud laughs the you know just she was authentic and i just think that i can't
#
think of too many people on camera who are able to be authentic but you will find that between
#
men and women both those who are authentic to themselves with whom you feel that even if i met
#
them at their home they'd be like this only like they are on camera they wouldn't be different
#
those are the people whom strangers want to give samosas to and say you become like some
#
everybody's child and and i just find that for me my ordinariness by which i mean that i
#
do not know how to be this gentrified glamorized cookie cutter female presence on camera i think
#
has helped me build relationships with people because there's a relatability with authenticity
#
so that's on authenticity oh on mojo yes i do not think that if i worked in an organization i would
#
have been allowed to sit in a car and leave and just do and at the height of covid first day i
#
would have been told we can't take responsibility for you we can't this thing you can't go whatever
#
secondly there would have been a resource issue thirdly there would have been a no is it really
#
necessary because who spends money on reporting anymore so there would have been so many issues
#
right you know i can't imagine that if i worked in an organization even in an organization like
#
ndtv that did encourage reporting at least in its earlier years you know there have been so many
#
other complications so at one level it's been very liberating and there's a there's much greater
#
space to build that intimate relationship between yourself and the audience but of course there are
#
you know there are other struggles with all of us who are now independent content creators that
#
you know you i i was sort of cosetted by an organization i was used to sort of let's say
#
small things like to produce a prime time show on television takes about 15 people we do it with
#
three now right one is it's the magic of technology but you also adapt to doing a lot more yourself
#
you know and you you learn new skills it's at one level very exciting but you it let's not
#
romanticize it you do fight for things you never had to fight for like mostly resources
#
mostly resources i mean not well you know and especially when you're a building stage right so
#
like for me it's ironic but like these toughest 16 months of my life it's it's probably been the
#
toughest story i've reported on more than war more than conflict because uh because if it's one length
#
how long it's lasted to not being able to identify where the danger will necessarily come from
#
and therefore having no mechanisms to really protect yourself three you know i have facing
#
some colossal personal loss in the middle of it all so in for many reasons it's been probably my
#
toughest toughest assignment and yet it's been so rewarding in terms of how quickly we were able to
#
reflect in our audience size you know we we started at uh about in october of 2019 at that time my
#
youtube channel which was just like this parking lot i did nothing with it had i think 80,000
#
subscribers and you know we're at 630,000 today and it's all been through perfect it's just been
#
for our work nothing else not one that i haven't spent a peso on digital marketing not one peso
#
not one peso nothing it's just pure organic things so at one level like all this sort of bs
#
that people aren't interested people don't want to watch this this is not true in fact our numbers
#
begin to fall when we aren't out there reporting that's when our numbers fall the moment we are
#
you know where it could be farmers it could be hantras it could be the delhi riots which is
#
when we kind of started uh it could be the citizenship protests and then of course covid
#
and we see a spike when we go out and we tell these stories and we bring them back it's in
#
peacetime that actually we find it very difficult to grow our numbers yeah so you know before we
#
get back to your personal journey and i keep making these digressions so apologies but before
#
we get back to that i'm also struck by a strand that came up when you were earlier giving your
#
two-part answer and the second part of that was where you spoke about your ethic in terms of
#
approaching the people that you do stories with that you know you don't like sting journalism
#
for example and neither do i because i think that you know the means are never justified by the end
#
that you know even your means should be above board and should respect consent and all that so
#
there i agree with you now my question is about how one approaches the people that one is doing
#
a story with especially if it is at a traumatic time for example on your instagram page i came
#
across this lovely poem by varsan shire i think i i hope that's how our name is pronounced and
#
it's called what happened yesterday afternoon and i'll just read out the first few lines because i
#
love them so much what happened yesterday afternoon varsan shire they set my aunt's house on fire
#
i cried the way women on tv do folding at the middle like a five pound note i called the boy
#
who used to love me tried to okay my voice i said hello he said varsan what's wrong what's happened
#
stop quote and the poem continues and it's just beautiful and and this is a dilemma right this
#
is a dilemma for anyone and this is not just a dilemma in terms of journalism it's a dilemma
#
just in terms of life that to what extent are you treating people as a means to an end instead of
#
relating to them as people itself how how do you approach that and i guess this is a sort of career
#
wide thing for you that you know and i know obviously that your consent will be paramount
#
for you that you're not thrusting mics in the face of people at a cremation ground it's only
#
people who are willing to speak to you and all of that but how do you approach this how hard is it
#
and sometimes at a fraught emotional time like reporting during covid on any given day must be
#
because it's it's just so hellish how do you approach it so you know my first encounter with
#
this debate around consent during tragedy oddly came during the 26 11 terror strikes
#
when a certain class of viewers and i emphasize the word class quite knowingly was extremely
#
angry with me for uh interviewing and i wasn't the only one doing it but uh as oftentimes happens
#
with me i become somehow emblematic of a media discussion why were we talking to people
#
outside those hotels when their families were inside and what was strange and i remember
#
writing about it later is that i i had reported on any number of terror strikes but mostly in
#
those terror strikes it was poor people who were were killed or injured or maimed and their
#
families would speak and the audience never complete but this was a plu audience of people
#
like us audience and for the audience it was too close to the bone and they were extremely
#
uncomfortable extremely angry and they're extremely argumentative about why is this necessary
#
you people are vultures you people are feasting of tragedy and all the rest but i would always
#
say and i continue to say that even today i remember interviewing a husband whose wife was
#
inside the taj and he said he wanted to do the interview because maybe she was watching tv
#
maybe she was watching tv there was somebody else who wanted something else you know what i
#
have found and the reason i'm bringing this up is it as uncomfortable as some parts of our audience
#
may get with the rawness of tragic moments of difficult moments especially of moments that you
#
think could also be your story one day i find that most people want to tell their story most
#
people i have ever met in life they guess there are some people who say please turn the camera
#
off go away please go away and you go away mostly my way is to gently ask would you like to talk
#
is to gently ask would you like to talk and i would say eight and a half times out of ten
#
the answer is yes and when there are grave tragedies great losses great churn in society
#
just at that precise moment when you think that the world is about to end or things are so
#
insurmountably difficult you would be surprised but everybody wants a personal history to be
#
recalled nobody wants to die or lose somebody as a mere statistic everybody wants to tell their
#
story it can come from different places it can come from a place of sorrow of anger of hope of
#
frustration but mostly people want to talk now what should be your emotional tone some 25 years
#
later one of the things is that i never watch anything i do because if you play back what you
#
do you'll just sound weird to yourself right on the odd occasion that sometimes it plays back to
#
you in the middle of a show or some clip plays there is something firstly very weird to watch
#
yourself so i just don't do it but of course you can never reach that that you know you're never so
#
good that you look back at everything you do and say you always think oh maybe i could have been
#
a little softer or i was being so loud or maybe i was too emotional or i shouldn't have done that
#
so you always have a little bit of doubt about the pitch of your tone about the questions you know
#
so i'll give you a small small example like i edited it out because it sounded so abrasive
#
but about the kind of mistakes one can make in a difficult moment this is not in the context of
#
covid i was interviewed i was interviewing an afghan parliamentarian who was deported from
#
india when she landed and she said i'd come to meet my doctor and i needed to go to hospital
#
and very naturally it came out from my mouth and it came out wrong you know what were you being
#
treated for right now what i meant was did you need a doctor in an emergency and did anyone at
#
the airport like were you in the middle of a medical emergency or were you kind of having some
#
long-term treatment for which you know yes you needed you had a doctor's appointment but there
#
wasn't an immediate medical crisis and because of shared experience i was able to recover and
#
see in the next sentence i'm so sorry what i meant by that was i wanted to understand
#
were you having an emergency that needed immediate medical attention but the sentence was so intrusive
#
that i edited it and my point is that the best or the most experienced of us make mistakes when
#
we are talking having difficult conversations and these are extremely difficult conversations
#
and you will never fully like yourself for how you behave in them because you will always feel
#
that you could have been a little better a little more sensitive etc it is a skill to draw people
#
out in these times without imposing on them right so there's always that slight amount of self-doubt
#
however i will keep insisting that people have a right to decide whether their stories need to be
#
told and history is written and recorded by the testimonies of individual stories and therefore
#
you know one way of reporting the Kargil war was to talk about the Bofors gun but another way to
#
report the Kargil war was to interview Vikram Batra and that is why Vikram Batra and to ask
#
Vikram Batra aren't you scared to which he said to which is the reason that 20 years later
#
he is still so iconic right you need the now you could see why are you interviewing a soldier the
#
soldier is in the middle of a war front is this the time to ask him aren't you scared in today's
#
age in today's age the same audience that celebrates Vikram Batra for that interview would
#
shit on me for asking that question right or sections of their audience and that's the hypocrisy
#
and the kind of short-sightedness that has entered our media discourse i think people must have the
#
right to decide whether they want to tell their stories and none none of us can judge that
#
people have the right to say yes or no and if they say yes they have the right to tell their stories
#
i mean obviously a war will come with its own compunction on how much a soldier can say and
#
how much you can ask i don't mean to simplify the example but just broadly speak yeah i mean
#
it's ultimately all about consent and if the person telling the story has consented then it's kind of
#
silly to blame you for asking the question the other thing that i feel is that as long as you're
#
not being inclusive it's necessary to just keep asking no matter how banal it feels because you
#
never know what might emerge like i was very moved by the story you know the story that you
#
did during covid of this nine-year-old in bhiwandi who was you know getting on a bus to go to azamgarh
#
and you asked him what does the covid virus mean to you and he said it means that i don't get
#
anything to eat yes and that's also such a great moment of show don't tell because you ask a question
#
about a virus but that one answer just reveals so much about society and about you know just so much
#
in that one sentence which just becomes a standout moment like that and you know people would
#
could otherwise criticize you for asking a banal question that why are you asking a nine-year-old
#
whether he knows what the virus is but you get that moment from that i think sometimes you have
#
to ask you know the most banal question of all and i recognize it because it's been caricatured in
#
memes is what's you know like now i've never actually asked someone but i have said to them
#
you know when you heard this what was the first thing you thought now it's a it's a non-complex
#
non-intellectual question but people need simple prompts to open up right people don't want to
#
write a phd thesis or whatever is a child getting onto a bus right i'm just asking him do you know
#
what the virus is it's completely organic whereas if i had asked him some other question it would
#
have seemed tutored he would may not have given this answer so i just find that my you know to
#
draw people out intimately sometimes you just keep it simple don't try and show off how profound you
#
are too many of us make that error of you know wanting it to be about how much we know so as
#
to not appear banal and i understand that i understand that there's a pressure that you
#
don't want to be an also ran we all feel that pressure you know you want to somehow be distinct
#
and if you're asking these simple questions you don't feel distinct because you feel like even a
#
even a intern would ask the same question like i'm sure like maybe there's a part of you that
#
thinks that right like it's a kid starting out would also be but the it's this is it's many
#
different skills it's a skill in do you bring your camera to the height of the child i mean i have
#
gone mad telling the camera people i work with don't shoot children from the top right do you
#
kneel down to the height of the child do you talk to the child playfully but yet as if he or she is
#
an adult it's not just the question there are multiple skills that you know it's i had a teacher
#
in columbia i mean sure don't tell is is one way of putting it and i had another professor who used
#
to say you know write like you speak only better and and in the same way you know you've got to
#
speak as if it's so casual and natural but there's a whole set of skills that are going into that
#
that are acquired that are intuitive it's a mix of a lot of things and when you do stories like this
#
how hard is it to sort of not get emotional yourself because just watching this stuff i
#
sometimes find myself tearing up right it's difficult not to if you're actually out there
#
reporting i don't know how i would manage frankly so do you then with practice train yourself to
#
have this extra layer where you kind of step outside of yourself a little bit and you realize
#
that you don't want that kind of reaction coming from you you've just got to be cool and calm and
#
kind of continue doing what you're doing is that something that you've had to do because in many
#
of these difficult moments you've been calm you haven't broken down but at the same time you're
#
engaged you're there you're not just a blank face what is that process like how does one you know
#
evolve what one's approaches towards that i don't want to use the word surgical because it's not
#
because if you become surgical then you're not feeling and if you're not feeling then you're
#
not drawing people out so it can't be surgical but i will tell you that in that way reporting
#
covid and reporting military conflict is similar in that you do have to keep one part of your mind
#
to the sheer i don't want to say craft but to logistics right there has to be so if in kargil
#
it was how do i get this tape to delhi how do i find a place to sleep how do i get something to
#
eat and some of those similar things in covid what it does is it one displaces you it displaces fear
#
which is very important in difficult situations because if you're scared yourself you know if
#
you're constantly if i'm going to go into dharavi which i you know i remember the first time i went
#
to dharavi are you crazy you're going to dharavi in the middle of this covid what are you doing
#
so you have to put these things that you have to take the precautions that you know how to take
#
and then you have to leave the fear so there's that the fear has to be displaced the second thing
#
is that you you have to allow yourself to be emotional but not to a degree where you lose craft
#
so it comes back to authenticity you have to be as you feel in that moment but this is where
#
experience counts because over the years i have been in these situations it's not my first time
#
right i remember i was doing a story on leela vati who's an old woman sitting outside the bandra
#
railway station in mumbai and she'd been abandoned by her family and she didn't know how to get back
#
home and she started sobbing and i just wouldn't help it i had to hold her i had to hold her at
#
that time people were we didn't know enough to know that it wasn't like by surface and whatever
#
and i had she was an old woman and we got her onto that train but i had a 19 year old producer
#
at that time she was just out of college and she just wouldn't stop crying you know she couldn't
#
film because she was just looking at this and she was sobbing whereas i because i have seen so much
#
tragedy and so much distress and so much violence and so many bodies and i my heart was breaking
#
and it was breaking enough to be engaged with this woman but it was able to have one filter that still
#
allowed me to function so functionality doesn't go though sometimes very rarely it does and in
#
covid i can remember two times when i have lost functionality one was in the first first wave when
#
i was interviewing somebody in a doctor in chennai and the doctor was describing how he had gone to
#
bury his best friend who was another doctor and at that time because there was so much phobia about
#
and so much ignorance and you know bad science around covid that the neighborhood had stoned the
#
ambulance that was carrying this doctor's body and they kind of went from burial ground to burial
#
ground and they were not able to do it and the ambulance was smashed and this doctor just broke
#
into tears while he was doing this interview and he broke into tears and i broke into tears and it
#
just happened and we plowed for the interview and the second time was i was doing this series
#
on how hundreds of government school teachers in uttar pradesh had had died because they were sent
#
into enforced election duty and actually of all the mistakes that have taken place by the government
#
and other bodies during covid i feel the strongest about this because in every other case whether
#
it's electioneering or kumbh mela or you know whatever other eid celebrations or funeral
#
processions there was a certain amount of choice that was exercised it could be ill-informed choice
#
but it was choice but these government employees who were forced not given any agency i feel very
#
strongly about it and i was interviewing this lady and her daughter who's 15 and my father had died
#
i think it had been 10 days i just recovered from covid so maybe it had been a little longer maybe
#
two weeks two weeks or three weeks gap and i was interviewing this mother and daughter and the
#
daughter says to me well you know how i feel because your father died and my father died
#
and i just couldn't like i broke down like i never have because because the pattern was false
#
because my father whatever my pain is my and i told her that that my father was not forced
#
into a situation where he couldn't say no he did not get covid because his choice was taken away
#
your father got covid and died because his choice was taken right so just that she even in that loss
#
you know saw it the same way without rancor was very painful but largely i would
#
largely i would see that it's a it's something internal it's a threshold you've got to
#
keep the emotions open because if you close them you'll come across as cold and many people do
#
and the thing is the camera catches you if you're cold it'll show but you can't be so distraught
#
that you can't tell the story and by the way this is why it's so difficult and this is why
#
it can sound jarring at times to our audience because it's not easy to get this balance right
#
and even now we make mistakes at least i do yeah i mean the important thing is if you're if you're
#
out there you're going to make mistakes the important thing is to be out there yes yeah
#
and say sorry when you make a mistake that you think was a mistake i never say sorry when i
#
don't think i've made a mistake but if i think i've made a mistake i have no pride in saying
#
no pride in saying i thought i could have done that better you know i'm sorry i shouldn't have
#
said that all right i i but i'm very stubborn about not saying sorry if i don't think i'm wrong
#
so that you know but yeah you learn every day you learn yeah so let's let's take a quick commercial
#
break and when we come back we'll continue with your personal journey and more talk about this and
#
that long before i was a podcaster i was a writer in fact chances are that many of you first heard
#
of me because of my blog india uncut which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat
#
popular at the time i loved the freedom the form gave me and i feel i was shaped by it in many ways
#
i exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because i wrote about many different things well that phase in my life ended for various reasons
#
and now it is time to revive it only now i'm doing it through a newsletter i have started the india
#
uncut newsletter at india uncut dot substract dot com where i will write regularly about whatever
#
catches my fancy i'll write about some of the themes i cover in this podcast and about much
#
else so please do head on over to india uncut dot substract dot com and subscribe it is free once
#
you sign up each new installment that i write will land up in your email inbox you don't need
#
to go anywhere so subscribe now for free the india uncut newsletter at india uncut dot substract dot
#
com thank you welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with barkha dutt about her
#
remarkable career and of course how journalism is today and where we kind of left off last time is
#
you had just hit nd tv and it's almost like you're on the ground floor of an india remaking itself
#
and of this new media coming up right when that happens and just as you know journalism changes
#
india changes so tell me a little bit about that kind of journey like you know what were your early
#
years at nd tv like you know where did you think it was all going what were the things that excited
#
you back then like of course you read cargill and that was a big story and that excited you
#
but apart from that what was the kind of work that you like to do if you were then to be asked
#
that you know when i'm 49 i will be this what would you have said
#
so firstly i think it's very important to understand that much as i disparage the state
#
of television today i see myself as a child of television and you know what i mean by that is
#
that when i joined nd tv most of my colleagues were converts from the print media and i was
#
a pretty rare entity who had like basically done college done mass communication and then come into
#
like this was my it was my first job and i never worked anywhere else and i very much saw myself as
#
a sort of child of the visual medium which i continue to do i do write today but i still
#
very much see myself as a visual storyteller so i was the first thing second was that as you said i
#
think the journey of the media in india has mirrored reflected and perhaps altered the story of india
#
as well like i think all all three are true right so i start nd tv at a time when there is no
#
the only private broadcast journalism that exists is a half an hour capsule made by nd tv for
#
durdarshan in english by nd tv in hindi by ajta this is so i'm literally there at that
#
journey of of private television news and it is obviously coinciding with
#
you know the media playing more of a role in how politics is shaped this thing that we now take for
#
granted called narrative you know narrative what is the narrative what is a politician's story
#
in those days it was reflected in very simple ways that you know you had these performing
#
politicians you had a lalu pusad yada vina farooq abdullah who would perform for camera and then you
#
automatically assumed that there were better politicians because they knew how to perform
#
because they knew how to perform for camera so you saw all of these sort of you know as i said media
#
reflecting india and india getting altered by media and vice versa and even today i sometimes
#
wonder does media reflect the polarization or did it contribute to creating it and i suspect both of
#
it is is accurate so i continue to want to keep one foot in uh in technical production so for a
#
long time at nd tv i wanted to continue to be in what we call the pcr which is the backend control
#
room i wanted to rotate roles in that i did sound mixing i learned how to edit i mean i've done how
#
to edit in jamia i could you know i continue to be able to edit my own stories i was somewhat
#
crazy in that way that i remember when i went to report the tsunami in those days there was no
#
digital editing and we used to do what was called cut to cut editing and it was on a machine and we
#
had a portable editor and my camera person jamie and i even into a tsunami we carried our own
#
editing machine so that we could have full control over what pictures we were sending and you know
#
so on so what excited me was always the same it was going out into the field and telling the story
#
and i know so many people ask me during covid oh is this barkha 2.0 and i was like no it's actually
#
barkha 1.0 i forgot that this is what i love this is what i love and yes of course i can't be out
#
every day so there are days in the middle when i'll be behind the desk but i don't like being
#
i don't like being behind the desk and i didn't sign up to be a journalist to be behind the desk
#
amongst my earliest and most well-established stories most significant stories kargil is well
#
established but one that is lesser known is i think in terms of how much it impacted me
#
and also as a story that really altered india was the gang rape of a woman called bhavri deva
#
and now i was this 20 something fresh out of this liberal cocoon of saint steven's college and the
#
worthiness of jamia milia if you had asked me about my feminism it was very borrowed from the west i
#
read all my germane greers and gloria steinins and all the rest of that right um if you asked me what
#
my caste politics were i would say like a typically privileged elite that i don't believe in caste i
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mean i still don't believe in caste but i recognize today that i can say it like for myself i don't
#
believe in it like if you ask me what is your caste i will say i don't know i don't have one i don't
#
know etc but today is that recognition that i can say that because i'm not oppressed on the basis of
#
my caste but as a 20 something i did recognize that i just had these very simple minded notions
#
and then i am sent in to to rajasthan to report on the gang rape of this woman who's raped for
#
trying to stop the child marriage of a one-year-old baby and among the rapist is the the father of the
#
child and she's still fighting her case it's been forever like 25 almost 25 years but from that case
#
is born the vishaka guidelines so we owe to this dalit woman in a village in rajasthan
#
the sexual harassment guidelines that govern all of india and she and her decision to go to court
#
deliver this to us and all these big words that we know today intersectionality and all of this
#
this is this was my education this was my education and this is when i discovered that
#
you know you'd ask me early is it the adventure is it telling you know being that bridge but what
#
about how much it teaches you to unlearn every day i abandoned something i used to believe
#
because being a journalist has taught me otherwise right the unlearning is the greatest gift of
#
journalism the way it challenges you to rethink your own positions so that story at nd tv really
#
did that for me what was nd tv like look we were very young all of us and nd tv was a very benevolent
#
encouraging almost parental environment it was very easy to be a beloved bright sometimes errant
#
child in that environment and that is what it was like and the tensions began as they do
#
even in families when the child grows up and develops a personality of their own that is no
#
longer necessarily the best fit for the way the family has been used to bringing up the child
#
right so of course those early years were very heavy and they were heavy for a number of reasons
#
i think there was genuinely a belief that we were all going to be storytellers it was the glory days
#
of television not just in not in the keyword but in the resources available to be able to go out
#
and tell a story you know travel budgets the emphasis on pictures not sort of the reductionist
#
talking heads driven sort of journalism very sort of starry-eyed about journalism will change the
#
world all of that right i mean they were just very very intense exciting educative years and
#
being a first generation television journalist i always believed in the medium i didn't disparage
#
the medium like so many people who were in it and disparaged it which i never understood i was like
#
if you hate it why are you here right i mean my disillusionment with it came much later like i
#
think in the beginning i just mostly just loved it and how much of the disillusionment has to do
#
with content and how much with form for example as the years go by as it as you know politics
#
intervenes more and more and the media landscape changes there are pressures on what kind of content
#
you can put out there and what kind of content you are you can't but at the same time in terms
#
of form also did you feel that you were evolving but beyond those cliched tropes like you mentioned
#
talking heads on television or there are even those you know talk shows like you used to host
#
we the people where i was a guest three or four times i remember that back in the aughties where
#
smithy irani got angry at me backstage because on your show i think you had asked me do you believe
#
in sacred cows in the context of it was a show on the national anthem and flag and all that you
#
asked me do you believe in sacred cows and my answer was the only kind of the sacred cow i
#
believe in is a divine steak on my plate and smithy didn't take nicely to that but you know
#
to kind of get back to the question was that also a factor that in terms of form you wanted to
#
expand a little bit that you found that these particular forms are constricting and in fact
#
some of them have become caricatures of themselves like talking heads on tv and you'll have like 15
#
windows on a republic tv screen so i have to say that the form was definitely a big part of the
#
anui for me but i have to acknowledge my own culpability in it as well right in the sense
#
that what i mean by that is that i feel i don't know that anyone even my worst critic would ever
#
call me lazy but i feel i grew lazy right i feel that i when i put a lens on myself and i do my own
#
appraisal you know for someone who has the energy to work all the time it is not clear to me how i
#
slipped into that space where i became an anchor i never wanted to be an anchor i only ever wanted
#
to be a reporter and i would keep telling all these young people who would come to nd tv and
#
you know that all want to be supposedly want to be me or be like me and i would be like but all i
#
want to be is a reporter and all of you want to be anchors but i now understand that organizations
#
had made anchors superior to reporters in what they were paid in the time slots they got in
#
the attention they got from the organization and the attention they got from the public and the
#
people that magazines chose to do profiles on and all of that so everybody wanted to be an anchor
#
and i think i the form definitely started to bore me but i started maybe in a phase in my life there
#
would still be breakout moments i would still something would happen and i would take off
#
and that never stopped for me as long as i was you know in tv and even today it's it never stopped
#
but the proportion of time i was spending reporting in the proportion of time i was spending in the
#
studio changed and i was spending way too much time in the studio and some of it was budget cuts
#
and you know channels not wanting to spend that kind of money anymore but some of it was i guess
#
me i mean i that's why i'm saying i grew i grew lazy like you know that's that's what anui is
#
right like you know it to be stale but you're kind of drifting along in that staleness i mean
#
in the end my parting with ndtv was not amicable but if i were to be today with the benefit of you
#
know i'm calm and it's all good and i look at it calmly i think the mistake i made was that i
#
should have left a lot earlier when things were still decent they were still friendly they were
#
still pretty good but i had clearly outgrown both the organization in not in a bad way i've just
#
outgrown it i was just that old familiar misfit and and the and the formats were boring for me
#
and i needed to go out there much quicker than i did and for someone who's quite adventurous the
#
fact that i remained in the same job for some 18 years 20 years i mean i don't i've now lost
#
count of how many years but that in itself is so counterintuitive and so i should have
#
done that a lot earlier that was that was a mistake and it soured things i think it
#
soured things at both ends and and that's the disaffection with the form and also growing out
#
of the organization but in terms of content do you feel that there was pressure there like
#
you've spoken about you know how you were censored at one point at NDTV and you didn't like that and
#
do you feel that the imperatives for journalists in terms of the kind of stories that they choose
#
to tell was changing in ways that were not palatable to you look i maybe i recognize today
#
because i'm calmer that there is no completely free news that if we think there is in today's
#
india i don't think that newsroom exists and therefore you you you look for the newsroom
#
that allows you relatively the the maximum freedom that you can enjoy or you break out
#
and you work for yourself right i don't think that there is this you know absolutely free space
#
for a variety of reasons but what happened with with NDTV and me i think was a lot of different
#
things so i've told you about the form i told you about the misfit like i think that like i think
#
growing up and becoming your own person suddenly it's not the same easy fit and you know you clash
#
on a number of things but certainly they were one or two stories that had been a sort of i
#
want to say censored but they were not fully blacked out initially they were argued against
#
parts of them were thrown out parts of them had to be argued through i mean i remember when
#
when there was this whole focus for example on naridra moody's in that suit when rahul gandhi
#
had said suit puthi sarkar till it made its way to parliament ndtv didn't think we should report
#
it because they were it was not their style to you know it's his clothes why are we commenting
#
on them and i felt that you know it was a legitimate story but till it actually entered
#
parliament we were not able to we were not given the go-ahead to report it there was another story
#
around robert vadra and that took a little bit of argument and jousting to to get through
#
and then finally the the surgical strikes happen after the uri terror attack and i am at the
#
international border doing what i love being in the field and i'm looking at the consequences of
#
what's happened at the border and i get a call from the from the news desk from a colleague in
#
delhi saying that uh hey listen this whole thing has become quite politicized because the congress
#
is now saying to the bgp we've also done these surgical strikes and chidambaram is giving these
#
interviews so can you get us an interview because he's not agreeing to our people in delhi have
#
tried they haven't managed so i called chidambaram who i obviously just by virtue of having been
#
around so long one knows most of these people now and by the way also in the bgp it's not only in
#
the congress and then i called him and he said where are you i said i'm at the border he said
#
i'm going to do an interview with you while you're at the border so when you get back to delhi
#
you give me a call so i came back to delhi i called him we did an absolutely anodyne in my
#
opinion boring unremarkable 10 minute or 15 minute i don't remember interview and and in which he
#
repeated the same thing that the bgp is politicizing the surgical strikes etc and you know this is this
#
is this is not on their posters of it in up and some something basically in parikar is the defense
#
minister if i remember correctly why are the posters of the defense minister why is he saying
#
this i actually thought it was a highly forgettable interview the news desk has wanted me to do it i
#
hand it over and it was supposed to air in full in my show that night i had done the interview in
#
the morning and i got a call basically telling me that you know you can't run this interview
#
sorry but you can't run this interview and i was like why can't i run this interview and they said
#
no because you know it's politicizing the surgical strikes and this is the moment for us to stand by
#
our army so i said that i mean i i said one that i don't think it's an anti-army interview at all
#
it's an anti-politics in fact it's a pro-army interview in that sense and i said to what extent
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will we apply this policy because the story has clearly entered the face of politics so if we
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don't run chidambaram tomorrow if the bjp says something we won't be able to run the bjp and
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how many people will we stop so this argument two and four went on and i said well i have to
#
inform chidambaram that his interview is not coming so what should i say let's say we have decided
#
to to withhold it for this reason so i texted mr chidambaram and i said i'm really sorry but
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the interview will not be running and it's a decision taken right at the top it's above my
#
pay grade and they believe that this is a politicization of the military strikes they
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don't want to report on i was flying to new york that night i just written a book and i was going
#
for some book event and i was and then i saw that amit shah was holding some press conference and
#
raul gangi was holding some press conference and so my colleague called me and said you know you're
#
going to have to sort this out with the royals because how are we going to cover the story if
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you're no longer covering politics or the what politician is saying i said how can i sort it out
#
like i'm just following instructions here the next morning the indian express had a front page
#
story on the fact that chidambaram's interview had been dropped given to them by chidambaram
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i think chidambaram had said that the anchor sent me this message saying that it was a decision
#
above her pay grade i was in a summit in new york where shashi tharoor was back on the panel and he
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asked me about it and i had to repeat it and say it's above my pay grade i don't he said do you
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agree with it i said of course i would agree with it no journalist agree with it but it's not a
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decision that was in my hands i mean what could i say that was what i thought was the appropriate
#
thing to say trying to be civil remain loyal to the organization but at the same time say as a
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journalist i'm uncomfortable with what happened and then the last sort of crazy development in
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this story was that there was an internal email that was sent out which basically said that we
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will not be reporting any political proclamations around this because we will not be taking a
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position against the military and somehow they felt that it was the same thing and that email
#
leaked and the wire published that that email and i don't know if they thought that i had leaked
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that email i don't know what they actually thought or that i was not organizationally loyal in
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defending that decision when i was asked about it externally but from then onwards it was a really
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steep downhill i just started feeling uncomfortable they seemed upset i was upset and you know my my
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i was a consultant by then because i always had it at the back of my mind that i want to do something
#
of my own and my contract was up for renewal in maybe a month or two months from that time and
#
basically when it came up for renewal they said to me that you know you have too many arguments
#
about about the news and so therefore we don't think that you should be in the daily news space
#
with us but we'd love for you to continue to do with the people and another weekend show and i
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said that i've not done anything wrong i have stood up for a story that i believe in and i'm
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being punished for an interview that i was asked to do by the organization and so if you feel that
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i'm not you know if if i'm too opinionated for the new space in this organization i don't want
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to be in it and so that is how that relationship basically came to a very very volatile end and
#
of course after that for me the real shock of was to discover that let's say you descriptively
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agreed that i was among india's top 10 journalists let's say hypothetically i found that every
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promoter of other channels met with me very nicely three of them offered me detailed contracts
#
and then withdrew them and it was hell of a journey to discover that you could have been
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more than decent journalist you know giving your life to journalism and basically
#
no you actually could not get an alternative opening and at first i thought it was something
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to do with the bjp because there was a suggestion that mr moody doesn't like our cast so maybe the
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promoters are scared it didn't fully add up because ndtv still existed and the bjp didn't
#
love ndtv there were other one or two people not too many and then i started thinking that maybe
#
it was just some peers in newsrooms who didn't you know who were like there was maybe there
#
was a moment of shadow friday i don't know and then there was a disastrous experiment with that
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the ranga mr couple cybill back channel and then finally i was like what am i even doing i just
#
need to be doing my own thing i need to give up this crazy uh it's my even my heart is not in it
#
i had outgrown tv even while i was in it and i just needed to have the courage to find my own
#
uh sort of path and then that's how well here i am and mojo was born and built and still being
#
built and there was a lot of learning i mean for me it was like at the height at the top of my
#
career i basically went back to the start line again and it's fine it's life but it teaches you
#
a lot about yourself about the profession about the fraternity about the medium about your country
#
so there's been a lot of learning in that so i have like one question coming from two different
#
directions but the same question and one direction is just looking at say you know after ndtv lets
#
you go and you've spoken about it eloquently elsewhere also how these all these different
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people approach to you and they've given you a time slot and they've spoken about the show and
#
everything's been agreed and then suddenly they just turn back right and you know it's
#
right and there the thought that strikes one is that the imperative so big media houses might make
#
it difficult to go against whatever the political dispensation of the day is the way things are and
#
even if it isn't the case that say modi or amit shah have said ki isko mat lo still as you know
#
was famously said during the emergency that the media when asked to bend instead chose to crawl
#
and it it's kind of a similar thing that preemptively these people just decide ki panga
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nahi lehne ka hai isko nahi lehne ka hai and they kind of do that and the like the first part of the
#
question that emerges from there is that therefore can there can there be an independent future for
#
big media because you know every media house will also have interests elsewhere you'll have
#
a newspaper but you'll have a chemical factory chemical factory pe it raid ho gaya to that's
#
kind of the end of that and that's the way the incentives go and it's very difficult to fight
#
against that and therefore all the people that you see kind of fighting against that today are the
#
brave independent establishments like the scrolls and wires and what you do where they just don't
#
have so much leverage of course they can pack you up and put you in jail on whatever charge but
#
you're presumably too small for that so that's one angle i'm coming from the other angle i'm
#
coming from is that big media just because of technology and the way people discover content
#
and filter content and consume content has become become redundant anyway you don't need those
#
particular gatekeepers you don't need those particular platforms as a way of bringing
#
creators and audiences together or of being the middleman through who the revenue comes
#
technology's changed all of that and i don't i don't think big media has figured that out yet
#
so the question that i'm coming at from these two directions is that is big media inevitably dying
#
then let me answer the second one first you know one one learning in covet uh it has been exactly this
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that technology has been so disruptive that actually if you have a reasonable understanding
#
of certain production barometers which i do because i did two masters in in establishing those
#
so what i mean by that is that if you if you see the programs on mojo they will not look like a
#
zoom call so there will be some effort put into lighting into sound into graphics you know they
#
may not be what we you know they may not be at the top scale of what i want and as i grow i hope to
#
keep improving that but there will be an effort to professionalize the look but as i told you what
#
used to take 15 people to to make an hour of live streaming can is now done by three people i have
#
even done shows where sometimes you know it's been a sunday like the one i'm talking to you on
#
suddenly i have to do something i'll come from a house into my basement office and i can toggle my
#
own show just because i know the software you know i can toggle it i can take the banners i can take
#
the graphics and i can anchor while doing all of this if you had asked me this like when i was in
#
any area i said it's not possible it's not possible and the other thing is that you know if
#
you know if what what has happened as we all get used to what and this is a very strange thing that
#
has happened during covid is because virtual became so normalized so if earlier there might be
#
somebody who chose to be mean about the fact that you weren't sending them an obi van or a live view
#
camera unit today would actually you would not be considered smaller or you know bootstrapped if
#
you said here's the link join us on this link nobody thinks like that anymore right i think
#
and the third thing is that the power of storytelling is now what sets you apart
#
so big media with all its resources and you know some of my some of my every time i say this i get
#
a pushback on twitter and i say i continue to repeat it because i believe it i believe big media
#
flunked the first covid they they flunked it right they just kept interviewing doctors the same
#
doctors the same doctors i'm not saying that they weren't some local city reporters who were
#
exceptions i'm saying largely the trend was big media was too terrified to step out into the
#
lockdown and report the story and therefore people like me you know another person who i think is
#
just a fabulous he's a photographer is praveen jen he works with the print you know three four
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people like this whom i can cite who just went out there the people who went out there it actually
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just after that did not matter whether they were in organizations of one or four they were making
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more impact than all of these big corporate organizations so technology plus passion plus
#
effective storytelling equalized that opportunity so yes i do think that if if independent media is
#
supported either directly by audiences or advertising learns to shift to it i do think that
#
big media is a slowly getting redundant almost there the only time it has an advantage over
#
independent media is when something colossal happens and you need 40 things you know let's say
#
god forbid the plates went into the twin towers uh you know you'd need scale to be able to tell
#
so we don't have scale yet i think i reported covid on a scale that no big media housed it
#
you know at the kilometers the states the you know so you have to find i think there are ways to do
#
it i think there are ways to compete and if you look at youtube numbers you'll find the small
#
media and big media are competitive in numbers and it actually just depends show to show interview
#
to interview story to story so that's the first part your first part of your question was the
#
political environment and i do want to talk a little bit about that right so i do think that
#
there is a court has been more loyal than the king environment and it is a bit like you know when
#
asked to bend they crawled etc so certainly yes i was i mean i i like they were time slots salaries
#
the number of people that i needed all of it with multiple people who then took it back some saying
#
you know it's a bit risky for us etc and frankly i mean i've never i actually used to know mr
#
arun jetly reasonably well in the course of because i said to him one day that you know your
#
party may not like me but for your party to to try and take away my right to work is absolutely
#
not acceptable and and he said why do you think it's my party you think that we have the time to
#
call individual organizations and say hire so and so and don't hire so and so and if that's the case
#
and he argued it out with me and i didn't have perfect answers he said how do you explain so
#
so still around and so so still around and you know the pjp doesn't like them either and you
#
know that and i had no good answers to it and then finally i told him i said no it's the environment
#
right so even if you're not making those calls there are people who feel that if i take this
#
person it's too much but if i would evaluate it honestly today i would say it's partly the
#
environment definitely and it's partly our fraternity unfortunately we are a divided
#
extremely competitive small-hearted fraternity and we enjoy when somebody whom we compete with
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we think is is is down and out or one less person to compete with why would i allow my competitor
#
into my newsroom she'll come take away my slot let's be honest i mean it's a combination i
#
believe of both and for myself i fault myself for chasing that television chimera when i knew that
#
it was done for me i knew it before i had that final parting with ndtv if i had just been more
#
authentic to myself i would have probably left on better terms i would have left at a more you know
#
earlier i would have had more years to build mojo all of that so of course it's you know all of it
#
is simultaneously true uh since you um you know we got back to talking about authenticity being
#
authentic to yourself there's another kind of aspect that comes to mind and and one aspect is
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of course you're moving from one form to the other and you are kind of doing the kind of stories you
#
want to do now earlier you spoke about performative politicians which was very much a thing that i
#
remember from the 90s and one of the things that you know you obviously encountered a lot is
#
politicians who were playing to a certain script on camera but were completely different
#
off camera and therefore everything that they are presenting on television and therefore everything
#
that you're showing off them on television is in a sense constructed it is a sort of a battle of
#
narratives that is playing out there and off screen everything is kind of completely different
#
so how does this affect the way that you look at the sort of storytelling that is going on because
#
at some level even when you're chasing a story you're constructing a narrative of it in your
#
head which is very much of course shaped and limited by what we ourselves are but then i mean
#
if you're authentic to ourselves that's perfectly fine we just put in the best faith effort that we
#
can but when our subjects are politicians when you see that you know they are one thing on screen
#
and another off screen then what is the value of telling that story which is on the screen
#
you know how do you kind of get past that i mean i i i have to confess that i i have had to i won't
#
say i've given up reporting on politics because you can't in this country it's a deeply political
#
country but you know that that conventional form of political journalism one i think i don't
#
understand data and caste in the in the way that so many other people do and i think without that
#
understanding and without that love you can't really get into the underbelly of the electoral
#
process and and and that leaves a sort of more cosmetic interview format with these politicians
#
right i do it i'm not saying i never do it but it's not interesting to me it's not especially
#
interesting it's not especially challenging and mostly for that reason that there's very little
#
discovery right so it's so you you you you almost do it because it's something in the news
#
sometimes there are characters that are interesting to people so for example if you know Tamil Nadu
#
has this new finance minister for a while he's interesting because he's he's interesting for
#
that context you know he's having some battle with Sadguru he's a believer in a Dravidian party so
#
so it's a very specific finite context right but there's very little discovery i also think i'm bad
#
at it like i consider myself a you know a very good storyteller but the one thing that i don't
#
tell interestingly is politics i don't know how to make it interesting and what happened was that
#
you know when i was in in NDTV in mainstream media the hierarchy was so tilted towards political
#
journalism that you kind of felt that you couldn't be very much if you weren't going to cover politics
#
and so there was always this pressure and it was also a male female thing because you know
#
men were reporting politics and you know there was that pressure that you felt for yourself and
#
i and i tried but i frankly find it i won't say boring but i would say unexciting so i agree with
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you i think there's very little discovery possible in political journalism especially in india where
#
unlike let's say the washington post where i'm a columnist you know you had spoken earlier about
#
and i didn't address that about the corporate ownership of of media either your institutions
#
have to be so free that jeff bezos has no say in what washington post writes and one of the
#
reasons for that is that jeff bezos's companies are not controlled by the government you know how
#
his business grows so here it's a very complicated thing one of the reasons that corporates are scared
#
i am not defending them is that governments can control the outcome of the future of that
#
chemical plant or you know that fertilizer plant or someone who needs a license etc right so
#
so they will then use the media either as prestige or vanity or influence and the moment they're
#
using it is that you're never going to be institutionally free and without institutional
#
freedom i don't know if there's an interesting way to report politics the only other interesting way
#
to report politics is one that i'm weak at which is to use data or or caste and i'm weak at both
#
of them so i personally if if you will see i don't do that much political journalism in the way that
#
i once used to because i've recognized it not to be my strong suit and you mentioned sadguru
#
a little while and i was i was kind of searching for the work that you've done online and i came
#
across this really old interview of yours with sadguru which i chose not to click on kindly do
#
not be offended by that it's not because of you it's because of him but the question here is that
#
in the course of your work you come across and i don't know if you'll consider him unsavoury but
#
i certainly do but in the course of your work you'll often have to interact with many unsavoury
#
people that you would otherwise not want to interact with and of course doing what i do as
#
a little labour of love i have the luxury of not inviting unsavoury people on my show but you
#
won't always have had that especially when you were at nd tv or especially if you have the
#
imperative that if something is newsworthy if it is in the news i have to do it i have to kind of
#
cover all of those even if i personally find the idea of talking to this person abhorrent so how
#
does one deal with that and is it easier now that you are on your own and you can pick and choose
#
who you talk to and so on it is much easier now it is much easier now because it's only my decision
#
and i and i'm not always consistent with this because one part of me feels that we can't just
#
be interviewing people we like right like and i like such few people i'll have no interviews
#
so i mean in a genuine in a genuine way i like such few people right so the point is
#
but more seriously like i don't think our subjective likes and dislikes should determine
#
who we talk to that said i do believe the interview format in particular is a is a format
#
that civilizes and mainstreams and i can tell you two interviews that i have refused to do
#
one is of Hafiz Saeed which was offered to me i said there's no way i'm going to interview him
#
i can imagine doing a narrative ground reportage driven this is the headquarters of Hafiz Saeed
#
and in that context where i can provide context maybe getting two short soundbites from him and
#
because there would be an opportunity to place him in a narrative but i find the interview format
#
extremely extremely civilized right and therefore i do not believe that at least i have it in me
#
to call somebody for an interview they keep shouting at them and think oh you're a disgusting
#
person like i don't think that i've been brought up like that however sort of south delhi elite
#
that sounds so i said no to him and i have stubbornly refused and i don't know how long
#
i can carry this on to interview anybody from the taliban and and i have been extremely
#
uncomfortable even before they took over kawal i saw their spokespeople on on you know on these
#
channels i find it extraordinary that these these hate-mongering anchors who you know will vilify
#
any indian muslim who has a slightly contrarian view to theirs will give this respect to the
#
taliban spokesperson and i don't know if this is a logical position for me to take because
#
you know they are now the government in afghanistan now am i going to say that this is a government
#
that i will never interview because these are areas i do report on so these are not easy
#
decisions i i certainly think that the interview format is a form of legitimacy mainstreaming
#
civility but equally i think that you can't just interview people you like you have to interview
#
people who are either newsy or more interesting or relevant and the taliban is relevant but how
#
do you shake off the fact that they're terrorists so you know i mean the honest answer is every
#
day i just take a subjective that's the freedom of being on your own right you just take the
#
decision that your country if your audience understands yeah yeah and it's kind of ironic
#
that you mentioned how all these hindu right-wing anchors you know will speak to them and you know
#
you know they actually secretly want to emulate or try to emulate everyone they claim to hate
#
like they'll say they hate pakistan but they want to make india hindu pakistan they'll say they hate
#
nehru but all of modi's top-down economic thinking is directly from there they'll say they hate indira
#
but that authoritarian streak and crush everything is directly from the ditto sanjay gandhi and ditto taliban
#
I mean Freud would have a great time with this because there's so much kind of it seems like
#
subconscious desire almost right to be be what you loathe or claim to loathe kind of because you felt
#
rejected by it or benchmarked against it or i mean you know the pushback against elites globally i
#
think it's partly explained by that sense of having once been excluded by it let's let's come
#
to mojo now i mean we can of course talk about tiranga but very briefly that is that unsavory
#
incident where you worked with kapil simbel and you stood up for some employees it was a mistake
#
yeah yeah everybody told me at that time that you know you need to stop fighting and you're
#
going to think you won't get along with anybody and i i said i said look it's not that i mean
#
i've had i worked in two places it's easy to caricature this i've explained in great length
#
my parting with ndtv and with simbel it was a kind of naivete you know they were a bunch of decent
#
people we all said we're not going to be these congress people our quarrel frankly we had no
#
quarrel over the congress we we criticized the congress pretty much every day that we were there
#
when we needed to and i had to speak because there were 200 kids who weren't being paid and
#
the result was that unsavory thing it was a mistake and like i told you i think it came from this
#
disbelief that as a child of television really i couldn't do television anymore in india like
#
i think i was so shocked initially by having it took me time to internalize that i am i barkha
#
that's a child of television i'm never going to be on tv again and i think that till i went through
#
that thiranga experience i had not internalized that having internalized that now and i'm calm
#
but i wasn't calm then and that made me make mistakes okay so that's thiranga that's thiranga
#
so tell me about mojo because you know when when i look back on the last 16 months since covid
#
really it's been a great learning experience for me in terms of new media and what creators can
#
really do where i've been watching tons of stuff on youtube by independent bloggers and whatever
#
and one of the things i've kind of realized is that just the way that in the autees blogs freed
#
you from the convention of written journalism that you know blogs if you were a blogger you
#
did not have to conform to the news cycle you could write something that was that didn't fit
#
within 800 words it could be 80 or 8 000 you had freedom of style you had all of that and different
#
people used it to find their voice and i find that much more in the audio visual medium and i
#
would imagine that carries through to anything creators do including creators slash journalists
#
like yourself so when you were forming mojo what was your conception of what mojo can be like did
#
you have any role models for mojo that hey look at the work these people are doing that they're
#
breaking past these forms and formulas and conventions and so on and from that initial
#
conception of mojo is your current conception of it different because of what you might have
#
gone through in these coveted months for example so i mean you know it was actually many years ago
#
that i first thought and that's when i first became a consultant with ndtv that i do something
#
like huffington post in my simple-minded way i didn't really understand huffington post but i
#
saw one ariana huffington being able to create this sort of you know content-driven thing and
#
i was like oh i could do something like that but i didn't really understand at that time that
#
huffington post didn't pay the people who contributed to it i hadn't examined it that carefully and all
#
of that when mojo was conceptualized first day everybody this is a really irritating thing
#
everybody thinks mojo means mobile journalism where mojo just means magic it's like the the
#
song right like i don't know it's like anyway uh but uh i had a few things i was clear on
#
and a lot of people argued that i was wrong and i actually think that my instinct from this was
#
right so if you see most digital platforms typically do text and then they do video
#
and video comes second and one of the reasons is video is more complicated it's more expensive it
#
takes more people etc i was very clear that i was going to be a video first platform
#
that was the first thing and the second thing i was very clear about is that i needed to find
#
something that would pay the bills right so how was i going to pay the bills and it came to me
#
that i need to do something somewhat in the field of journalism but not necessarily conventional
#
journalism that will help me create some kind of resource funding so even before mojo was born i
#
created this uh created and curated this gender festival called we the women it was the only way
#
you know approximate way of using we the people uh without getting copyrighted so i took we the
#
women and we started an annual festival at mehboob studio in in bombay and the idea was somewhat
#
influenced by tina brown whose sessions i had attended in new york as a speaker who used to run
#
something called women in the world and what i saw was some it's true she described it as
#
journalism on stage and i found that a very interesting concept where you had the skills
#
of the interview but you also had the editorial craft needed to create a set of conversations and
#
create that light and shadow but the energy of a live audience and i used to find it a very magical
#
thing and i thought oh maybe i can do something like this in india where the glamorous person and
#
the grassroots person is equal and if we could get them on stage together as equal people in the
#
speaker's lounge how interesting would that be and so that's how we the women was born
#
we found that you know i i'm a lousy sort of marketer so i like a lot of people who have made
#
you know done more with than i've been able to but i we found that there were sponsors willing
#
to back it we started with we the women and mojo was really almost like this parking
#
spot for we the women videos while i was still thinking i'll do tv one day so we the women was
#
born and then in the october of 2019 when i finally said okay now this is my life by this time
#
i was clear that i needed to go back to being a reporter and that is what mojo is going to
#
be about and it was going to be about putting people first and it was going to be about issues
#
that either mattered to people as i imagine that they matter to people or issues that people
#
didn't know about but would matter to them if they knew about them and about people who did not have
#
a voice to to amplify their stories so this was broadly it and you know it was a in my mind it
#
had two motives one it returning news to the people at two going to where the story is as often as you
#
can go to where the story is don't sit behind a table and do a story these were the two guiding
#
principles and we didn't know that covid was coming then so when mojo started we had the
#
citizenship legislation protests and the student unrest and you know we were deep into that then
#
came the deathly riots we were deep into that and then came covid and we were deep into that and
#
so we stuck to that conception of mojo but what's happened is that i've been so
#
busy reporting that i have not had time to pause and build and i would really like to build this
#
beyond myself i don't this is not a barka that channel this is hopefully will be a platform for
#
journalists who want to go to where the story is and pick up these kind of issues so
#
that's where i am so that so so i won't say the conception has changed but it's got solidified
#
it's got reinforced even the way our audience reacts they react better to when we go out to
#
tell a story and anyway that's what we love doing so it's a good fit right now between what the
#
audience wants and what we want to do yeah and just just thinking aloud there seems to be this
#
sort of trade-off that must be a complicated one the trade-off between scale and authenticity
#
that on the one hand every financer would tell you that hey why don't you scale this thing and
#
you can make a lot of money and obviously you do want the platform to be bigger and bigger and
#
keep embracing the values that it does but at the same time it gets diluted the more you scale it
#
because right now it's got a particular identity you know what you get that it's barka out on the
#
field doing stories in her distinctive style and everyone who watches it watches it for you
#
and if that gets diluted what might happen is that the numbers might go up but the engagement
#
might come down because the level of intimacy will therefore be lower so is this a trade-off
#
that you've thought about that you actually had to confront and say that I actually have a choice
#
between taking a route that helps me to stay true to myself without any compromises
#
but on the other hand I could make a lot of money you know it's a it's such a great question and
#
it's not even about money like see I'm a bit defensive you know we are not American in that
#
way the Americans never apologize for being individual centric organizations right so like
#
Tina Oprah, Tina Brown, even if the television anchors there's no apology for the culture
#
personality whereas in India thinking is not like that right we are also groomed to be somewhat
#
squeamish about oh no it's not just my channel it's not so there's one that I think our culture
#
our communication culture does allow for these solo centric entities the other thing is I genuinely
#
even if it did I genuinely do want to have something that I create that I mean it's too
#
grand to say that outlasts me so I want to say that is more that is me but more than me so I
#
want it to be me but it has to be more than me so just like I think my covid work or my cardinal
#
work is more than me it's me but it's more than me there has to be you know it I would love if I
#
could curate something effectively or or mentor something or intubate something effectively that
#
it has these values but it has a few other people too now I have I've been very I'm not a conservative
#
status quoish person at all but I have been extremely incremental with mojo I've been
#
extremely almost frugal with how I have approached it and sometimes I wonder if I've done the right
#
thing I look at all these you know massive media startups in the digital space well funded they
#
have 50 60 reporters and you know here it's me and I keep wondering sometimes there days when you
#
think you know did was the approach right but I I still think that the baby steps are okay
#
I don't know I think you have a point that do you dilute your authenticity by becoming something
#
all purpose so I think we're still looking for that formula where we're still very much the imprint
#
of the values that I think define me but are able to distribute them a little bit more I don't know
#
if that makes any sense also I have to recognize with with modesty that there are audiences that
#
my grammar doesn't speak you know so for example our youtube analytics tells us that our maximum
#
audience is between the ages of 25 to 45 right now they're used to a different grammar I don't
#
I don't have and that's why I find that in peacetime they don't watch so if there's a crisis
#
they want to see whatever they want to see me go and tell that story but in between the crisis
#
what do we tell them what do we do and we haven't you know we we're searching for the answer to that
#
question and I think your point is great I don't have a perfect answer to it no but you should not
#
let that get you down because we are lurching from crisis to crisis so what peacetime there will
#
always be a crisis don't worry about that my my other question is you know you mentioned that
#
you know you you did the story in Bandra with the 19 year old producer and you know obviously I'm
#
guessing young startup a lot of young people work with you what is the difference that you find in
#
the young people who are starting out in journalism today as opposed to say 20 years ago you know
#
because one they are much more exposed to different sets of values from the west and are have received
#
much more exposure to other kinds of journalism including best practices elsewhere and two they
#
would be much more hip with the technology the technology would be like an extension
#
of what they are doing and not something that they have to spend effort learning
#
you know so to say so is there something that you notice there that gives you hope
#
okay so I met all kinds of young people right so I don't want to give an answer that generalizes
#
because I've had two sets of experiences so one is that kind of hungry youngster who knows
#
the technology but they don't necessarily know the content so the struggle then is that they know
#
the technologies they know how to do an insta reel and they know how to do a story and they know how
#
to shoot with their phones and they like they have a visual grammar but they don't follow news
#
follow news they're not journalists and you're not sure why they're in in journalism because
#
journalism is not what excites
#
the challenge I think is that journalism is a gentrified profession
#
so you're not always getting sometimes you do and it's a hit and miss and you've got to go
#
through the attrition of people coming going you're misjudging them is judging you and till
#
you slowly build a team that that that you love and that loves you back but I will say that people
#
are entering this profession for the wrong reasons in my opinion the wrong reasons I'm not an oracle
#
but in my opinion the wrong and it goes back to where our conversation started they're not
#
necessarily passionate they're not necessarily this is not what they live and breathe this is
#
not what excites them this is almost glamorous or it's interesting for a bit or it's what they
#
want to do before they study a little more it's a rites of passage so it's it's not always easy
#
I thought that the younger a team I have the more they're going to teach me the technology and you
#
know but I was surprised to find and this is where I find this sort of the Instagramification
#
of our lives so frightening that while we know how to put on a camera and dance before it or
#
wear a sari before it or do whatever performance art before it it doesn't automatically translate
#
into using it to tell a story so it's it's there's no one truth so there's some very hungry very
#
bright very brilliant people and many of them are from the smaller towns of India there's a real
#
hunger in them there's an aspirational sort of this thing but there's also a whole bunch of them
#
who're just exploring it's a kind of let's see what this is about because it's no longer an
#
alternative profession right there was a time when this was an alternative profession it drew a
#
certain level of passion and eccentricity it's tougher to find that yeah and it's it's actually
#
the small town hungry people that I've had I'd have a lot more hope for especially a lot of time
#
and especially because the technology just makes it possible for them to kind of do the room.
#
I mean they're such fantastic even in covid like some of the best stories that like the
#
tip-offs rather not the stories was you know you just find some young person in some small town
#
who like these mass bodies I mean like the which became a singular obsession to go to villages in
#
UP at the banks of the Ganga the the first tip-off came to me from a young young boy who lived in
#
you know in now in Uttar Pradesh he just I know where he found my number from and he whatsapped
#
me and he's like this is what I saw do you want to come and see and I went and that you know so
#
in some of these smaller towns the hunger the the willingness to take a risk the complete absence
#
of privilege and yet the sheer passion to to do this it gives you a lot of hope it really does
#
give you a lot of hope I feel less hopeful for people who are just experimenting with this
#
you know who's just experimenting with it on their way to the next degree
#
that is a little bit frustrating and I know I sound like you know for the kids who are hearing
#
this and sound like oh you're a real auntie G boomer etc you know you get these days the backlash
#
comes quite swiftly but this is what I feel like there is this kind of self-indulgent experimental
#
there is that bunch also and then there's a really hungry passionate bunch and for a startup like
#
like mine with the emphasis is so much on the storytelling and going out there
#
it's tough we keep looking to find those kind of people you know and we have some definitely
#
we have some and that gives you a lot of hope so speaking of you know storytelling going out there
#
tell me a little bit about the kubit experience because we've spoken about how in the early days
#
after the lockdown the first day you take a drive to the up border you see what's happening there
#
then you go to the Punjab border then you start traveling and doing stories but every night you
#
come back to Delhi so you have to plan for that and then you decide that you want to go to Delhi
#
then you decide that screw it you know there's no point doing this we're just going to travel
#
and then you initially you decided Delhi to Bombay but then you ended up kind of going everywhere
#
tell me about the evolution of that because some of the stories during this time are absolutely
#
unforgettable and and even in the sort of questions that you ask like elsewhere you've
#
spoken about one of the questions that intrigued you was when people leave and migrants leave
#
when they're leaving from home to go to the village what do they carry and even a simple
#
question like that can you know the answers to that can just reveal so much just sort of tell
#
me about that experience and how you grew during it like what are the things that you learned about
#
the country during that time which is not to of course minimize your 20 plus years of experience
#
before that but no no but it's a great question no it's a great question because the one of the
#
things that i feel about covid is that it taught me not just about see i always understood india's
#
inequities as an academic understanding and not as a lived one right the other thing is that i never
#
did reporting on those inequities because it was considered in the hierarchy of news feature
#
reporting right so very coarsely put i was a conflict reporter i covered war and conflict
#
insurgency and foreign policy sometimes politics and and and i didn't see myself as someone who
#
covered poverty or education or health and unfortunately because we in the hierarchy of
#
newsrooms place those as social justice feature featurey reports people like me had no experience
#
maybe on the odd be the people episode but just no lived experience telling these stories and i
#
remember among in the early days i i went to this there were two two things that happened right near
#
delhi and i didn't even know those places existed and one was this village in the in delhi or i
#
forget now if it's delhi or it's up but i think it's delhi no it's delhi and you can get to it
#
only by boat and it's in delhi it's in it's in delhi and i was like i think you go on some
#
swanky flyover and you go under the flyover and you hit some you know you go left inside some
#
neighborhood and then there is literally a village where till this date the only way to get to it
#
is by boat right and and i was like what okay so that was an example and then there was another
#
village i think that was in haryana it's about an hour from the capital where of course there was no
#
civic water supply right now you had this yellow water so it was like i remember i did the story
#
called the village with the yellow water and everybody at that time was like water wash your
#
hands wash your hands but when these firstly it was wrong science but we didn't know it then and
#
we thought at that time that covid could be transmitted by surfaces but when these villages
#
would go and wash their hands with this contaminated water because there were some factories that had
#
come up in the neighborhood their skin would break into rashes so they were able to wash the hands
#
with their this yellow water so they would either have to whatever boil that water get rid of its
#
yellow or buy mineral water and so on and they didn't have the money to buy mineral water
#
right now i know i sound like one of those sort of orientalist sort of white people coming to
#
india for the first time i'm just saying i had never told these stories i personally had never
#
reported these stories i had never been exposed to the scale of poverty despair inequity on a
#
daily basis you know and i've been beaten and thrashed more times than i can count had near
#
life and death experiences but i remember once like i saw this viral video of these migrant workers
#
who were appealing someone get someone please get us home someone please get us home and i
#
i don't forget now how i traced them but i traced them down and it turned out again that they were
#
you know working for a factory based in delhi so i went to the factory and i found that there were
#
these sort of ceiling high corrugated tin sheets and lock a kind of lock on the compound i somehow
#
managed to make my way into this compound and i started talking to the people there and i
#
discovered that they were basically locked inside this compound so this in this some sort of
#
largesse of the owner way the owner decided the owner of this factory decided that the best way
#
to keep these workers safe was to keep them under lock and key for their own good for their own good
#
in course and so there was this board with these timings when they were allowed to step out with
#
this compound otherwise they were kept under lock and key and when we started filming the story the
#
security guards came they snatched our cameras they took away our you know equipment and they
#
were like get the hell out of there and i obviously created such a noise and i still had my phone and
#
i started you know tweeting kejriwal and all of that it was 45 minutes before we were able to
#
get out of there and of course after that you know they were allowed to go out and they were
#
given money and they were put on there were no trains so i don't know what happened and what
#
happened eventually i forget now because there were so many stories i did but i'm saying these
#
were the kind of experiences that you know i was like how was all this happening under my nose and
#
i never thought it important enough to report because obviously all of this was happening under
#
my nose right or all of our noses so one was the inequity living observing witnessing it every day
#
but the second was the invisibilization of the inequity right the invisibilization the lack of
#
interest in these stories and yet because i essentially see myself as a storyteller and
#
not as an activist and this is something important to me i knew that i can't stand at some pulpit and
#
tell everybody oh how wrong it is for you to not care about the poor of this country right i had
#
to tell the stories in such a way that people would care and that's why i really do believe
#
that it all comes back to effective storytelling so yeah you've already summarized that it started
#
with me going i would spend 16 hours in the car and i would come back to delhi just stop sleeping
#
i think the damage is a very slow growing damage it's it doesn't hit you instantly especially if
#
you've had reasonable exposure to violence and tragedy and and despair but to see tragedy day
#
after day to see death day after day to see people shut out hospitals the doors shut in their face
#
you know i i saw a new mother whose baby was one day old outside a hospital that couldn't take her
#
in i reported the story of a painter when i say a painter i mean a house painter who took his own
#
life after selling his phone for 2500 rupees to buy a table fan and ration one year later i went
#
to see what happened to his family they lived in the same slum completely invisible completely
#
forgotten you know jyoti the girl who cycled with her father back home to to to pihar i went back to
#
her village a year later and you know like i just i i found myself i don't know what the word is but
#
i found that it was like a slow growing depression a slow growing depression and a slow growing mental
#
damage and that is how i do react i react in the first flush by simply getting the story out there
#
and and it's only when i step back and i allow that internalization to take place of the enormity
#
of what one has just witnessed i just stopped sleeping i think i haven't slept like if you
#
ask me what's been the singular change in me i think i can't sleep anymore i just cannot sleep
#
anymore and you and i'm old enough to recognize that it's the damage of everything i've i have
#
i have witnessed it's you also come back with guilt you can't help it you know it's not rational but
#
there is guilt for your privilege you know that you can you know i i i think i was talking to
#
rega jha and i said to her that i come back to defense colony and i go and buy cadbury's nutties
#
and i see the dissonance and i put them in my car and i say okay i'm going to be on the road for
#
40 hours 15 hours 16 hours i like these nutties and you see the dissonance because you're meeting
#
that child the nine-year-old will tell you it means i don't have food to eat when i asked the
#
worker what is it that you carry when you leave he had a white plastic bucket and i said is it okay
#
if with you if i take the lid off and i took the lid off and in his bucket and i found this so moving
#
that i i think i cried all night that day it were his ozars they were just his workman's tools so
#
this migrant worker getting on by that time there were trucks getting paying five thousand rupees
#
to get a spot on that crowded truck to some town is leaving only with one thing a plastic bucket
#
which has his tools which means he wants to work right he wants to work he's willing he's not
#
asking for charity he wants to work and that's what he's leaving with i had a very very strange
#
experience with the ppe which i should talk a little bit about it was actually extraordinary so
#
the you know when we went into these hospitals we had to wear the same pp we would carry it
#
from delhi so that we didn't cut into doctors stocks and literally every time i would one i
#
would rush out of the hospital stripped to the skin and feel nauseous and that evening invariably
#
feel depressed and cry in whatever room i was staying and call up a friend and say oh it was
#
a ppe day and it made no scientific sense to me till i interviewed a nurse in mumbai at kama
#
hospital and she had an extraordinary story and she said that she was there the night kasab
#
broke into the hospital and she'd saved you know a lot of lives that day and she told me that she
#
feels sick every time she wears the ppe and in particular if she is menstruating and she's to
#
wear her ppe she says something about the plastic and the smell and it just and maybe it's the
#
thing absence of oxygen to your brain and you know and and and that she would just that it would have
#
this kind of psychosomatic impact of her and i said you know i i mean i wear it for half an
#
hour and i come out right i said i can't even imagine what you'll go through but i began to
#
realize that there was so much here that we didn't you know we didn't understand so or i used to
#
think maybe i think it's the ppe it's my depression transferring so the things i don't know but i
#
think i became a somewhat solitary and sad person in these 16 months and i continue to be that in
#
some ways like in except when i'm reporting a story i just suddenly feel energized but otherwise
#
there's a there's a sense of feeling deflated by so much despair you know so much and so much
#
happening around you that gives you no hope so i think that's that's how i one one feels and
#
and yet through it all because it's all contradictory just the opportunity to report
#
the biggest news assignment that the world will we will ever see as journalists in our lifetime and
#
that's what i told everybody in my team i said it is actually a privilege to be able to report
#
this story to be an exempt essential services media in this country this in my lifetime is
#
the biggest story i will ever report i recognize yeah sometimes sometimes it feels grandiose when
#
people come up with that old cliche about journalism being the first draft of history but i think
#
the import of that the import of that is something that really comes out here and you mentioned the
#
you know the workman carrying his ozar in a bucket and it reminded me of one of my favorite episodes
#
of the scene in the unseen that i did with Aanchal Malhotra who wrote that beautiful book on
#
you know what people carried with them through partition and you know specifically i remember
#
this you know this one family which didn't carry their what you would think their valuables and
#
their ornaments and this and that but they carried vessels for the practical reason that they might
#
have to cook food somewhere along the way if they are given food so poignant and you mentioned the
#
house painter Mukesh right and and the story you did from a Haryana village and this also stayed
#
with me is a migrant worker from Bihar he sells his mobile phone for 2000 bucks but you know buys
#
a fan for 500 bucks because it's really hot yeah gives 1500 to his wife and kills himself
#
and at this moment everything changes right that 2000 from being such a you know you get 2000 bucks
#
for like that's one Zomato order for us so and and 2000 bucks and there's a whole world in that
#
and the act of giving it to his wife and then going and whatever it's it's like unbelievable and
#
you know these stories contain so much that need to be told and you know more credit to you for
#
that we're coming to the end of our time so like a couple of final questions and for one i'm again
#
going to read out a poem that you posted on instagram and i especially love like the first
#
couple of lines of it and this is called little crazy love song by Mary Oliver i don't want
#
eventual i want soon it's five a.m it's noon it's dusk falling to dark i listen to music i eat up
#
a few while poems while time creeps along as though it's got all day this is what i have the dull
#
hangover of waiting the blush of my heart on the damp grass the flower face moon a girl broods on
#
the shore where a moment ago they were two softly my right hand fondles my left hand as though it
#
were you stop quote and i just love this poem and those first two lines i don't want eventual i want
#
soon and that has a resonance to me also beyond the notion of romantic love which this poem
#
seems to allude to you know because as i think as i have grown older i have come to realize that
#
the only way to be happy is to redefine my conception of happiness to taking joy in what is
#
current and what is present in the present moment rather than you know look ahead to other things
#
you've mentioned how everything about this pandemic kind of drove you to despair during your
#
reporting that the world can be such a harsh place sometimes so have your conceptions of
#
what you need to do to be happy or what you look forward to each day has that evolved over a period
#
of time like where is it now i could easily ask you oh career wise tell me where will barka be
#
in 10 years and whatever but i think what makes me more interested is what makes you happy you
#
know are there are there small pleasures what do you look forward to i mean i think that poem
#
really spoke to me because i don't think there's a lot of time i i don't actually understand people
#
who say there's time for this there's time for that be patient i don't think there's a lot of
#
time and if ever we needed any instruction in how little time there is i think this pandemic taught
#
us that right i am haunted by the fact that my father's last text message to me which i didn't
#
even respond to because i mean after that our exchange was only about hospitals and medicines
#
was about some music system in my house that he wanted to fix and set up to some speakers and i
#
thought irritating me about it and i'll you know discuss it with him later and why has he got so
#
obsessed with his music system and he used to love tinkering with equipment and a bit of an
#
engineer and mechano sort of hobbyist and i kept saying oh yeah there's time when i come back from
#
the set of travels i'll go and meet him and i'll do this and i'll do that there's never time there's
#
never time it's the here it's the now but at the same time that doesn't mean i believe only in the
#
ephemeral moment i simply believe that if you want something you know a new story an ambition
#
a person you've got to go for it with everything you have because you may not get that opportunity
#
ever again i really do believe that and i believe that even more today than i ever did what makes
#
you be happy very small things very very small things i don't have any meta i mean the meta
#
things are the same that there would be for everybody right like you know i obviously care
#
very much about my work i care very much what happens to mojo if mojo does well it would make
#
me very happy i work matters a lot to me but otherwise small things that make me happy
#
you know i mean i don't know i watch a murder mystery and it makes me happy i'm obsessed with
#
watching murder mysteries or espionage or thrillers i'm obsessed with eating off the street i'm i'm
#
obsessed with eating chaat i eat chaat from every ready every vendor like the smallest town i've been
#
to this i have had a plate of gol gappas from there these silly things and travel makes me
#
happy and i have survived these 16 months because despite the despair and the tragedy and the horror
#
i did not experience a lockdown i am one of those lucky people that i did not experience a lockdown
#
that is why i say that you know to be able to experience a reality outside of the reality i
#
was born into is the ultimate privilege of journalism and even in all its sadness it makes
#
me happy if that makes any sense it makes me happy then i'm able to unlearn learn sometimes make a
#
difference sometimes get somebody to contribute financially to their bank accounts sometimes
#
just the adventure of it there are many different you know buttons it taps but journalism for
#
everything makes me happy it makes me really happy well so a final question and and i think
#
you've kind of answered some of the next question and in the answer that you just gave but if there
#
are young people listening to this say young people of any gender who want to get into journalism or
#
who want to be journalists or if there are specifically young women who don't necessarily
#
want to be journalists but are just trying to navigate life as it is in this performative age
#
where you know voices can be so shrill and expectations can be so harsh what would be your
#
advice to them and one of them you've just given is embrace a present moment just you know have a
#
bias towards action as it were but you know what else would you like to share with them
#
you know i was once doing a talk for a group of women and i said no they were men too actually
#
in that meeting and i said that i want to do a kind of straw poll here and i said it's my sense
#
that if i asked the women here how many of you have had to suppress your dreams you know that
#
how i i think that more than 90 percent would say yes and we just did this experiment and it was 95
#
percent of the women in the audience said that they'd had to set aside their dream for something
#
or the other and i would like to say in particular to young women please be selfish and i know that
#
this is not a politically correct thing to say but the romance around selflessness and sacrifice
#
when it comes to women in particular indian women there's romance around being super women
#
who are all things to all people the self-created romance that women will these compliments that we
#
will give ourselves although we're great multitaskers these are chains of gold right they
#
sound like compliments all they do is to crush your original passion this life is not worth living
#
if you have not lived your original at least if you have not tried to pursue whatever that thing
#
is that keeps you up at night right it doesn't have to be journalistic it can be whatever
#
but please in this fragile time if anything that we have learned it is that you know you
#
that old cliche you live just once and there isn't a lot of time if you want to be a journalist i will
#
still say yes i know the tv channels present a different template but i will still say you
#
will be remembered only if you're authentic and you will be authentic only if you love this
#
if you do not love it no judgment but don't do it that's incredible advice thank you so much
#
you know for your inspiring words now and at other times as well so you know thanks for
#
your time and insights and thanks for all the work you do thank you amit i can't believe the
#
three hours have flown by so full compliments to you for that thank you for having cheers thank you
#
if you enjoyed listening to this episode do follow Barkha on twitter
#
at b dat that's one word you can follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past
#
episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
#
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