Great Women of India - Barkha Dutt

Barkha Dutt is one of India's best Journalist. She is extremely articulate, smart, very good looking and a daredevil. My first memories of Barkha are during 1999, the Kargil war. At that time, 'embedded journalist', a term made famous in the on-going Iraq war, was a non-existent term. Images of a war consisted of grainy, black and white footage of the previous two wars in India, 1963 and 1972. The government had labeled the Kargil incursion and occupation of the strategic "Tiger Hill" by the Pakistani soldiers as a mere conflict. The "hip" source of news in 1999 was NDTV, beaming their news on the Star News channel. During the inital days of the conflict, Barkha would show up during prime time news with pictures and scenes of the ongoing skirmish. There were bombs exploding around her and one could hear bullets in the background, Barkha would be reporting with her trusty star news mike in hand, wearing a helmet. The image was very movie-like for me and Barkha was an action-hero!!

Soon the skirmish extended to a month... May turned to June to July.... Soon Indians, Pakistanis and the world knew that this indeed was a war, though no one wanted to call it that. Barkha continued to be a star of the war.

She has since said that she broke laws of Journalism and projected the Indian side in far better light. She said it was a result of years of partiality built up in her since school and the social structure in India. She saw the Indian soldiers involved in some barbaric acts towards killed Pakistani soldiers and treating the dead with disrespect and not reporting it. All this while, the world saw atrocities committed by the Pakistani soldiers against captured Indians.

She now has a desk job at the NDTV news channel and has a prime time talk show 'We the People'.

Personal greats in the Area of Indian Journalism are:

1. Pranoy Roy. The man who made the news fun for me. I would stay up on Friday nights to watch "The world this week". This program was produced by NDTV and hosted by Pranoy during the late 80's, early 90's.

2. Vishnu Shom: Another classy NDTV news reporter.

3. Rajdeep Sardesai: This guy is a really good news reporter but ticked off the Hindutva brigade during the elections following the Gujarat Riots. Narendra Modi won in a huge landslide and that evening Rajdeep got a public dressing down from the chief-minister elect. He was unfortunate to be caught like that but he took it like a man.